Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
The Planet Express crew return from cancellation, only to be robbed blind by hideous "sprunging" scam artists. Things go from bad to worse when the scammers hack Bender, start traveling through time, and take Earth over entirely! Will the crew be able to save the day, or will Bender's larcenous tendencies and their general incompetence doom them all?
Bender's Big Score is a feature-length comeback for Futurama that leans hard into its own mythology, delivering a surprisingly intricate time-travel plot with genuine emotional payoff—particularly the Lars/Fry arc, which lands with unexpected heart. The voice cast reprises their roles with characteristic charm and comedic timing, though the feature format occasionally exposes pacing issues not present in the tighter episodic structure. Visually it's competent but unremarkable TV animation scaled up slightly, with no particular cinematic ambition. The time-travel mechanics are cleverly constructed and fan-rewarding rather than truly novel—the show had done time-travel before—but the execution is above average. The ending earns a strong mark for emotionally resolving multiple threads in a way that feels both funny and genuinely affecting, a difficult balance the show always did well.