Up Next: Silvio Santos

UP NEXT: DISASTER? THE MESSY, UNAUTHORIZED, AND TOTALLY CHAOTIC DRAMA BEHIND “UP NEXT: SILVIO SANTOS”

When you make a movie about Brazil’s biggest TV legend, you expect applause, nostalgia and maybe a few tears. Instead, Up Next: Silvio Santos (aka Silvio Santos Vem Aí) delivered something far juicier: family snubs, dueling biopics, a humiliating box-office flop and critics calling it “cheap” and “rushed.” Grab your mic and your wig—this Silvio-verse is pure drama.

**Scandals & Controversies: The Family That Didn’t Say Amen**

Unauthorized… and everyone knows it

• The biggest bombshell: **Silvio’s own family did not authorize the film.** In interviews tied to the film’s release, coverage from Estadão and Threads highlights that the production “was carried out without the participation of the Abravanel family,” echoing that “it’s the family’s current choice not to be involved in anything” related to this movie .
• A Threads post from Estadão pushes it even harder: “Leandro Hassum talks about the production not having been authorized by the Abravanel family” ^[3]. That’s not subtle; that’s a red carpet side-eye in headline form.

The awkward ghost at the premiere

• Gshow’s coverage of the big São Paulo premiere gleefully lists the famous faces, the glam looks, and the nostalgic premise—but there’s one thing it does not describe: members of the Abravanel clan turning up to shower the film with love .
• For a movie about a man whose entire brand was “family on Sundays,” that glaring absence reads less like bad scheduling and more like: “We’ll watch it on Netflix… maybe… eventually… or not.”

Silvio vs. Silvio: The Biopic War

• This is actually the second recent Silvio biopic. The 2024 film Silvio starring Rodrigo Faro told another chapter of his life. By late 2025, Brazil had a full-on Silvio Santos Biopic Cinematic Universe no one really asked for.
• CinePop’s tweet dragging the 2025 film’s flop goes out of its way to note: “The movie with Rodrigo Faro had a much bigger opening…”—a deliciously shady reminder that in the Battle of the Patrão Portrayals, Hassum’s movie came in a distant second .

Box Office Bloodbath: When the King of TV Couldn’t Fill a Cinema

Numbers that would make even Silvio stop the show

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• Gossip account Aqui Tem Fofoca on Instagram dropped the receipts: by November 30, the film had only 7,469 spectators—and that’s with more than 200 screens showing it across Brazil ^[4].
• Translation: in a country of 200+ million people, the man who used to own Sunday nights couldn’t pull a medium-sized fan convention to the multiplex.

Couldn’t even crack the Top 10

• CinePop on X/Twitter went full tabloid all-caps: “FLOPOU!” They report that Silvio Santos Vem Aí “did not manage to appear even in the TOP 10 of the national box office” and “made less than 10,000 tickets in over 200 theaters” ^[2].
• For context, this is the kind of performance usually reserved for experimental documentaries about sad sea turtles and forgotten parking garages.

Pulled from theaters in record time

• Aqui Tem Fofoca also reports that, due to the “low demand,” cinemas would start pulling the film from screens by December 2 and that it would “hardly complete a month in theaters” ^[4].
• Silvio used to say “Who wants money?” Apparently the answer in 2025 was: “Not for this movie, thanks.”

Critical Slapdown: “Cheap,” “Rushed,” and “Emotionally Hollow”

A 1/5-star beatdown

• Review site Oxente Pipoca absolutely torched the film with a 1/5 rating .
• Choice insults from the review:
• The film has the “appearance of something cheap and amateur”, with a tone that feels “artificial” ^[6].
• There’s a “lack of texture, identity and life in the compositions of the scenes”, as if the “hurry to complete the project” steamrolled any visual care ^[6].
• Performances are described as “artificial, stuck in stiff gestures and predictable expressions,” with no real emotional spark ^[6].
• The narrative tone never settles—“real, imaginary, fictional, comedy, drama, romance, parody, reference”—all thrown together but never converging into anything coherent ^[6].
• Verdict: a biopic about a master showman that critics say “never captivates or even convinces” ^[6]. Somewhere, Silvio is clutching his microphone in disbelief.

Mixed to chilly elsewhere

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• Another critic quoted on Instagram calls the film “light, nostalgic and emotional,” but still notes a “lack of critical boldness” and that some moments feel idealized ^[9], suggesting the movie leans so hard into mythmaking it forgets to show the man.

Cast Feuds & Subtle Shade

Hassum vs. The World of Silvio Imitators

• In a long-form piece by Estadão, Leandro Hassum admits that “everyone knows how to imitate Silvio Santos,” but insists that wasn’t his goal ^[1].
• His line: “I didn’t want to imitate him. I wanted to capture his energy.” ^[1] That sounds classy… but also just sharp enough to be read as: I’m not doing another cheap TV skit, I’m making art, unlike, say, some other portrayals people might be thinking of.

A shadow over Rodrigo Faro

• Between CinePop’s reminder that the Rodrigo Faro film opened bigger ^[2] and critics pointing to the “cheap” look of the new movie ^[6], fans on social media have effectively turned this into an unofficial scorecard:
• Faro’s film: critically mocked but at least people showed up.
• Hassum’s film: better lead performance according to some critics, but abandoned by audiences ^[4][9].
• No public feud has exploded, but the comparison narrative is everywhere—every report about the new movie seems contractually obligated to mention Rodrigo Faro’s earlier Silvio ^[2][7]. It’s the biopic version of an ex that your new partner keeps hearing about.

On-Set & Industry Tea

A rushed production

• Oxente Pipoca hints at serious behind-the-scenes pressure: the film looks like something made in a hurry, with “dialogue, set design and pacing following the same rushed logic” and “minimal aesthetic care” ^[6].
• The critique explicitly mentions the “pressa em concluir o projeto”—a rush to finish—that left no time for the level of visual polish a period piece normally demands ^[6].

Strategic timing after Silvio’s death

• While not framed as gossip, the context is… suggestive. Silvio Santos died in August 2024; this film about his 1989 presidential run was in theaters by November 2025 ^[6][7]. Critics and industry chatter point out the film feels like it was fast-tracked to ride the wave of national mourning, rather than slowly crafted into a prestige biopic.

Premiere with celebs… but not those celebs

• Gshow’s coverage of the São Paulo premiere leans hard into the glamour—red carpet, famous guests, the emotional weight of telling Silvio’s story again ^[7].
• But the optics are unmistakable: lots of TV stars, no visibly hyped Abravanel clan. For a movie trading on a family brand that still runs his show on TV, that’s a very loud silence ^[1][3][7].

Wild Trivia & Fan Speculation

The “Biopic Industrial Complex” theory

• On Reddit, fans discussing the poster and rollout of Silvio Santos Vem Aí joke that Brazil has entered a “Silvio Santos Cinematic Universe” era and openly question why so many projects about the man are dropping in such a short window ^[7].
• One fan theory: studios are scrambling to cash in on Silvio’s image before the family locks things down harder, turning the success (or failure) of these unauthorized projects into a high-stakes gamble ^[8]. This is speculation, but it’s popular enough among movie nerds to have become part of the chatter around the film.

Deleted-scene whispers from the rival film

• A heavily commented Reddit thread discusses a “scene removed from the movie Silvio released in September”, referring to the Rodrigo Faro film ^[8]. Fans there speculate that more controversial political or security-related material may have been cut for legal or image reasons, fueling the idea that **there’s a lot about Silvio’s life that producers want to dramatize but lawyers (and possibly the family) won’t let through** ^[8].
• While this is about the other biopic, the timing and themes bleed into the way people view Up Next: Silvio Santos: as another sanitized slice of a much messier story.

**So… What’s the Real Tea on Up Next: Silvio Santos?**

Putting it all together, the off-screen gossip around Up Next: Silvio Santos is juicier than anything in the script:

• It’s an unauthorized biopic made without the blessing—or even presence—of the Abravanel family ^[1][3].
• It got eviscerated by at least one major critic as rushed, cheap-looking and dramatically hollow ^[6].
• It bombed at the box office, selling under 10,000 tickets in over 200 theaters, never touching the Top 10, and being yanked from cinemas in under a month ^[2][4].
• It exists in direct (and constant) comparison with Rodrigo Faro’s 2024 Silvio film, turning both movies into a weird, unofficial duel over who gets to own Silvio’s image in popular memory ^[2][7][8].
• The cast keeps the tone polite in public, but Hassum’s “I wanted to capture his energy, not imitate him” sounds suspiciously like a classy subtweet to every other Silvio impersonator out there ^[1].
• Critics, fans and gossip accounts all circle the same idea: this movie feels like a rushed attempt to capitalize on grief and nostalgia, rather than the definitive, family-backed portrait everyone secretly wanted ^[4][6][7].

For fans of Up Next: Silvio Santos, the true pleasure might be this: watching the movie on Netflix, then diving into the meta-drama of how it was made, who didn’t approve it, and how spectacularly it face-planted at the box office. Silvio always loved a risky game show; this time, the prize was his own legacy—and the studio definitely didn’t take the top suitcase.