You're Not Alone: 2025 Has Been a Terrible Year For The Muppets
Let’s be honest, 2025 has been a pretty crappy year. But at least we can all take solace in the knowledge that it sucked even harder for the felt animals who made our childhoods magical.
Yeah, the past 11 months have been rough for Kermit the Frog and the rest of the Muppet gang. Most recently, their longtime dream of performing on Broadway totally crashed and burned. Which sure isn’t what 1984's The Muppets Take Manhattan promised.
The Muppets made their Broadway debut as part of Rob Lake Magic With Special Guests The Muppets. While Lake’s illusions were obviously the focal point of the show, clearly the Muppets were a huge selling point.
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“The idea of bringing The Muppets to Broadway has been around for 50 years,” producer Joe Quenqua told Entertainment Weekly. “That we are the ones who finally have the honor of making that dream come true is truly humbling.”
Unfortunately, the Muppets only appeared “in about 9 or 10 minutes” of the 90 minute show, which starred some non-Muppet guy most of us have never heard of. “Why were the Muppets making their Broadway debut in someone else’s show?” The Daily Beast asked.
Just days before Rob Lake Magic With Special Guests The Muppets opened on November 11, the show's producers announced that the run would end “months earlier than anticipated.” Instead of lasting until January 18, 2026, it wrapped up on Sunday November 16, playing just “20 previews and four regular performances.”
And somehow that wasn’t even the most disappointing Muppet closure of the year.
As we’ve already mentioned, Disney World shut down the beloved Muppet*Vision 3D attraction for good this past June. While the park has plans to build a new Muppet-themed roller coaster, Muppet*Vision 3D arguably deserved some degree of preservation, seeing as it was the final project Jim Henson worked on before his death.
If all of that wasn’t bad enough, back in May, Kermit the Frog’s commencement speech at the University of Maryland (Henson’s alma mater) became an unlikely lightning rod for controversy, after Fox News randomly attacked him.
“Imagine being a 22-year-old student, who's graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering, and a frog from The Muppets is telling you to stay connected with your people,” Riley Gaines somehow said with a straight face.
Meanwhile Sesame Street was forced to make the move to Netflix after President Trump pulled PBS’ funding. And we haven’t even mentioned the fact that Elmo’s X account was hacked, making it seem as though the 3 ½-year-old monster had suddenly become a raging bigot with a sudden interest in the Epstein files.
But there are a number of reasons to be optimistic about the future. For one thing, Disney is rebooting The Muppet Show in 2026. Sure they seemingly made the announcement purely to distract the country from the fact that their company just buckled to an authoritarian threat, but still.
Even more promisingly, it sounds as though the Muppet franchise will return to the big screen thanks to a new Miss Piggy-focused feature film, with Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone producing and Cole Escola scripting.