Pulp take the O2 and four decades to the big screen

Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, the documentary and concert film directed by Garth Jennings, entered cinemas across the United Kingdom and Ireland on 18 September 2026, following a one-night-only preview on MUBI; a wider streaming release is set for 25 September.

The film is built around the band's 2025 shows at London's O2 Arena, the arrival of More — their first album in 24 years — and an archive stretching across four decades. Television appearances sit alongside home movies. Members of the band supply narration, and the film includes behind-the-scenes footage from the recent run of shows rather than a conventional talking-heads retrospective.

Sheffield beginnings to More

Pulp formed in Sheffield in 1978. At their critical and commercial peak the line-up was Jarvis Cocker, Russell Senior, Candida Doyle on keyboards, Nick Banks, Steve Mackey on bass, and Mark Webber. The early catalogue ran from the 1983 album It through the EPs Little Girl (With Blue Eyes) and Dogs Are Everywhere, the compilation Masters of the Universe: Pulp on Fire 1985-1986, and the 1987 album Freaks, before the long climb that eventually placed them among the defining British acts of the 1990s.

More arrived in 2025, preceded by the single Got to Have Love and followed later that year by The Man Comes Around. In 2026 the band issued Begging for Change. The gap of nearly a quarter-century between full-length records is the frame Jennings works inside: not a simple comeback story, but a question about what a band does when the encore has already lasted decades.

Remasters and live documents from the early 2010s — among them the remastered It and Party Clowns: Live In London 1991 — kept the catalogue in circulation while new writing remained quiet. The 2025 album closed that silence.

For listeners who tracked the group from the independent years through the mainstream peak and the long pause that followed, the film's value lies in that continuity. The same voices and the same craft reappear beside footage shot when the band were still far from arenas. Jennings does not try to bottle the alchemy of a group that spent years on the margins before breaking through; he places the recent work next to the old material and lets the members speak for themselves.

The live chapter on screen

The concert spine of the film comes from those 2025 O2 Arena nights. The cinema run is already under way in the United Kingdom and Ireland. From 25 September the film moves on to wider streaming, taking the O2 performances, the archive and the narration beyond the theatrical window. No further theatrical schedule has been detailed beyond the opening already in progress. What remains is the record of a band that formed in 1978, waited a generation between albums, and has now put both the wait and the return on screen.