Melissa McCarthy posted her own decade-old film-set photos to her verified Instagram account this year with a caption that name-drops one very specific piece of 2016 technology: “The year was 2016. Life of the Party & The Boss were happening and through it all I remained very devoted to my beloved HIPSTAMATIC!! For the VIBES!!!!”

The exact wording, first reported by Newsweek, puts McCarthy squarely inside a wider “2026 is the new 2016” throwback wave that also pulled in John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Billie Eilish, Charlie Puth, Miranda Kerr and Reese Witherspoon, all posting their own decade-old photos within the same stretch of weeks.

Why Hipstamatic, specifically

Hipstamatic was the app that made an iPhone photo look like it came out of a scratched-up plastic toy camera, complete with fake light leaks and vignetting, and it was genuinely everywhere in the early-2010s app store before Instagram’s own built-in filters made a dedicated third-party app feel redundant. McCarthy’s caption isn’t a vague gesture at “the old days.” It’s naming the exact tool she used to document her own life on two specific film sets in 2016, which is a much more specific and checkable claim than a typical misty-eyed throwback post.

Key Points

• McCarthy’s own Instagram caption references shooting on Life of the Party and The Boss while “very devoted” to Hipstamatic.
• The post surfaced as part of a broader 2016 nostalgia trend also joined by John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Billie Eilish and others.
• Hipstamatic was one of the defining photo-filter apps of the early 2010s, predating Instagram’s native filter suite in mainstream popularity.

An app with its own comeback arc

Hipstamatic wasn’t a random punchline choice. It was one of Apple’s first-ever “App of the Year” winners, according to TechCrunch’s reporting on the brand, and it built its early reputation entirely on the same plastic-toy-camera aesthetic McCarthy’s photos are clearly steeped in. The app itself relaunched in March 2023 as a small, deliberately anti-algorithmic social network, capping users at 99 follows and dropping video entirely, chasing exactly the kind of unhurried, chronological photo sharing that made the original app feel novel back when McCarthy says she was using it on set.

The bigger throwback wave around it

What makes this round of 2016 nostalgia notable is how quickly it’s arrived. A decade is barely enough time for a specific piece of software to feel extinct, let alone beloved, and McCarthy’s caption treats “beloved HIPSTAMATIC” as a punchline that needs zero explanation to land with her followers. That’s the actual marker of genuine nostalgia rather than manufactured content: an audience that immediately gets the joke without a caption explaining what the joke is.