Karol G’s Beautiful Tomorrows

I love big pop stars, in part, because of the spectacle. I’ll go to shows in dank warehouses or dusty basements until the day is long, but given the opportunity (read: a ticket that is cheap or free), I will even see massive pop tours by artists whose music I don’t particularly like. I’m like a baby or a bird, simply enamored with big-ass productions and flashing lights. I also love watching the fans—the way they dress to see their favorite artist, the way a group of friends screams along in the aisles, the way a person weeps upon hearing their favorite song. Pop musicians serve as critical-mass vessels for emotions people might articulate, and even the most average, reasonable fans can imprint their feelings upon the sheer bigness of a pop production—big songs, big iconography, just big. 

In Latin pop right now, there is no bigger woman artist than Karol G, the sweet-faced Colombian whose terrific 2023 album Mañana Será Bonito drew on the Bichota’s transformation out of a shitty relationship. Mañana incorporated styles like reggaetón, Norteño, and dembow to break all sorts of records: It became the first all-Spanish album by a woman to debut atop the Billboard chart and led to the highest-grossing Latin tour by a woman ever.  

A new Netflix documentary, Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful, follows Mañana’s trajectory from creation to stadium tour. Directed by Cristina Constantini, who helmed 2020’s Mucho Mucho Amor, about the Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado, the film turns on Karol’s decision that she simply has to be the first Latina to do a global stadium tour—against the advice of her management team. Her decision could have gone extremely south—we’ve all heard of the big tours canceled for “health issues,” where the illness is poor ticket sales—but instead it catapulted Karol even further to fame and record-setting audiences, including a nearly 100,000-person, sold-out gig at the Rose Bowl.

Tomorrow Was Beautiful hits some of the same notes as Beyoncé’s 2023 Renaissance tour film: the choreo practice, the make-up dustings, the moment in which the perfectionist star expresses dissatisfaction with the way a lighting rig or camera angle is set up. Constantini even borrows one of Renaissance’s most potent tricks—clips spliced together of Karol G performing the same routine in different costumes across various cities to drive home the breadth (and monotony) of tour life. Performing for hours to exhaustion, with intricate choreography and costume changes, is unbelievably punishing work, especially for women solo artists.

Being a woman, Karol tells us, was at first a huge obstacle in her music career—back in Medellín, reggaetón was considered a genre for men, and when she was just 15, she says in the doc, her first manager became predatory, leading her to consider quitting music altogether. Her confessional moments are where Tomorrow Was Beautiful distinguishes itself—Karol says that she is prone to crying, and we’re privy to that vulnerability, whether pressing her team on how a video got leaked (angry tears) or discussing her past with that manager (pain tears). The latter is clearly something she’s still grappling with; she reveals just enough for the audience to surmise what happened before stopping herself to break down, struggling to put her mask of strength back on. The Bichota is forged in pain; Karol says multiple times that she wants to show that any average woman can achieve her dreams if she works towards them and believes in herself—which would seem like celebrity pablum, but she really seems to believe it. It happened to her.

Karol makes a point to thank all her Latine fans and recognize that many of the tens of thousands of people attending her shows are immigrants, making Latines from across the diaspora feel seen in places — the U.S., Europe—that they often are not. This is one of the reasons she is so beloved. But also because she genuinely still seems to think of herself as one of us, humble in a way that doesn’t seem like a put-on for the cameras. This is especially apparent when it’s clear her self-esteem is in the gutter; she’s unafraid to puncture the pop-star-as-superwoman trope. And Karol is a fan of the pioneers that came before her, too—like Selena. When Suzette Quintanilla, Selena’s sister, attends Karol’s show in San Antonio, Karol cries again; and when Karol covers “Como La Flor” and dedicates it to the Tejana icon, cut to Suzette singing along, choked up.