David Reads The Trades: April 10, 2026
Toplines
- You, Me, and Tuscany opened to less than $1 million in previews Thursday night, tracking for a single-digit weekend opening; Super Mario Galaxy expected to hold in the $60–80 million range, keeping the overall weekend above $100 million.
- Netflix has canceled Perfect, the Olympic-themed film that had been set up for Millie Bobby Brown.
- Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (Warner Bros.) opens next weekend; Lionsgate’s Michael opens the weekend after; The Devil Wears Prada sequel opens May 1, currently tracking $60–70 million with many expecting it to beat that number.
- WGA health plan negotiations with studios remain unresolved heading into the weekend.
- Pixar’s Bee Fry has been scrapped, per the Wall Street Journal; Hollywood Reporter has a lengthy piece on what it means for the studio’s future.
- Regal/Cineworld has launched a ChatGPT-powered ticketing app in the U.S.
- Mubi lost 200,000 subscribers following the 2025 controversy over Sequoia Capital’s investment and its ties to Israeli money.
- CinemaCon kicks off Monday in Las Vegas; Sony presents Monday night.
This Weekend: The Soft Spot Before the Heat
It’s a fairly light news Friday, and the box office reflects that. This weekend is, frankly, soft — which we knew was coming.
You, Me, and Tuscany opened to less than a million dollars in Thursday night previews. That’s a clear sign we’re looking at a single-digit opening weekend. High single digits, probably — I think it can crack $10 million — but nothing that’s going to set the world on fire. Meanwhile, Super Mario Galaxy is going to hold well, landing somewhere in the $60–$80 million range on its second weekend. So yes, we’ll still clear $100 million as a total marketplace, which is good. The month is just starting to heat up. There’s still Project Hail Mary in holdover doing real business, and there are other options. But this is unambiguously a soft weekend.
I was supposed to see The Christophers yesterday, and there was a ticketing issue at the theater I was going to. I’ll be seeing it this weekend. I encourage people to give it a shot — try the drama if that’s where you lean. And if Super Mario Galaxy is more your speed, there’s no shame in that either. But if you haven’t gone yet, this is the weekend to get out there.
The real question hovering over the weekend is what happens to Project Hail Mary as it moves deeper into its run without premium screens. The audience that would see it on a regular screen in week three — are they going to actually show up, or are they going to decide they’d rather wait for it on television? And how quickly is it going to show up on television? We’ll see.
Looking ahead: next weekend brings Lee Cronin’s The Mummy from Warner Brothers, which I’m genuinely looking forward to. This is a very different take on the material — incredibly creepy, very horror-forward, and that’s a promising sign. The weekend after that is Lionsgate finally opening Michael, which they’re hoping will be massive. We’ll find out what massive means in context. And then May 1 — The Devil Wears Prada sequel officially kicks off the summer, currently tracking $60–$70 million with a lot of industry people who think it’s going to beat those numbers. We’ll see.
You, Me, and Tuscany: On the Movie and the Conversation Around It
I have mixed feelings about You, Me, and Tuscany. I said what I said in my review, some people were mean to me about it yesterday, and I’ve gotten over it — because I’m not crazy or wrong. The New York Times review came out and pretty much said the same thing I said, just in a much gentler, much more subtle way.
Let me address what’s been swirling around this movie, because I think the conversation has gotten sloppy in a way that doesn’t serve anyone.
There are only two characters in the entire film with more than ten lines who are Black, and they find each other. That’s a real observation about the movie’s construction. I don’t say that as a criticism of the film’s existence or of its leads, who are wonderful, beautiful, and brilliant. I say it as a factual observation about what the movie is and isn’t.
And what it isn’t is a Black romantic comedy. The two leads are Black. The film is not. There is nothing specifically Black about this movie’s world, its concerns, its cultural texture. I actually said in my review that that’s fine — I’m more than happy to have Black leads in movies and in romantic comedies. I don’t need every film with Black leads to be “about” being Black. But let’s not misrepresent what the movie is.
Here’s the bigger problem: I keep seeing people position You, Me, and Tuscany as proof-of-concept for the “Black romcom” as a genre. Firstly, there is no genre called the Black romcom. There is barely a rom-com at this point, period. Hollywood is not making enough comedies for theatrical release. They’re certainly not making enough romantic comedies. And they are absolutely, certainly, definitively not making enough romantic comedies with Black leads. All of that is true. But the solution to that problem is not to anoint every movie with Black leads in a vaguely romantic register as the savior of a genre that mostly doesn’t exist in the current marketplace.
The movie is what it is. I think there are interesting things about it. I’ve had more positive responses to my review than negative ones since the original blowback. The conversation’s worth having — I just want it to be an honest one.
Deadline: Millie Bobby Brown, WGA, and Weekend Openers
Deadline’s top story is the cancellation of Perfect, Netflix’s Olympic-themed movie that Millie Bobby Brown was going to headline. She’s out, the movie’s out. Not really a shock to anyone who’s been paying attention.
Elsewhere on Deadline, the WGA health plan situation is still unresolved going into the weekend. This was the known sticking point heading into negotiations, and they still haven’t gotten there. That’s worth watching.
In terms of this weekend’s releases: there’s Hamlet with Riz Ahmed — no significant tracking momentum. Exit 8, a thriller that doesn’t appear to have much steam behind it. The Christophers, which I mentioned. And then there’s something called Faces of Death, which apparently has a surprisingly high position on AMC’s ticketing app. I don’t know anything about it and, given the title, don’t particularly care to. But maybe that’s something.
Bravo Dispatch: Amanda, Summerhouse, and the End of a Cycle?
Since we’re apparently doing this: Amanda from Summerhouse, whose decade-long relationship with the guy she married has essentially been the spine of that show across ten seasons on Bravo, is apparently getting divorced and is now sleeping with another cast member from the same show. Controversy, controversy, controversy. She’s committed to appearing at the season reunion. Very important news.
My guess is she’s probably already stopped sleeping with him by the time the reunion tapes, but what do I know.
The deeper thing I keep circling is whether we’re at the end of a generational cycle with this kind of content. Vanderpump Rules brought in an entirely new cast and it was just… nothing. Not interesting. The new Housewives franchises haven’t found their footing, though Salt Lake City apparently remains popular, and Bravo just added two new spinoffs in the last few weeks. We’ll see.
But look at Beverly Hills Housewives — it’s basically become “Housewives Who Got Divorced of Beverly Hills.” Half of them don’t even live in Beverly Hills anymore. One of them just got engaged on the most recent episode. There’s a former Netflix marketing chief on that show now who is, one might say, marketing herself. The show has mutated into something different from what it was.
I don’t know if the audience is starting to feel it. People are still watching these shows with genuine enthusiasm. You’re watching this podcast, so who am I to say obsessive interest in other people’s lives is running out of steam. But it feels like we might be at the end of a cycle. Or maybe that’s just me having a moment.
Variety: Movie Theater Owners “Tell All” (They Don’t)
Variety’s lead story is Rebecca Rubin’s theater owner roundtable, grandly titled “Movie Theater Owners Tell All,” which tells you immediately that movie theater owners do not tell all. It’s a somewhat strange format — she interviewed four or five heads of mid-sized chains and then assembled their answers to different questions in a kind of weird melange, which means you never quite get the full picture from any one of them. But there are genuinely interesting things in here.
Bob Bagby of B&B Theatres notes that they cap their pre-show at 15 minutes. This is worth pausing on, because AMC is now running 30 minutes of pre-show. If you show up at the listed start time at an AMC, you get five minutes of ads continuing from before the pre-show officially began — and then you’re looking at 25 minutes of trailers and AMC-branded content, including eight to ten minutes of promotional material for AMC itself. That is too much. Everybody knows it’s too much. AMC knows it’s too much. And they haven’t changed it. People have adapted by arriving later and later, sometimes after the listed start time, which creates its own cascade of problems. It’s not a good situation.
Bagby also makes a solid point about recliners: the audience has spoken, they want recliners, but recliners are dramatically more expensive to maintain than traditional seats. Traditional seats could last decades. Recliners are constantly breaking down and needing repairs. He says he wishes they had the old seats back. What he has is what customers asked for. That’s the business.
There’s also the looming projector question. Theaters spent a lot of money over the last decade upgrading to digital projection — and now they’re facing another round of projector replacement. Brick-and-mortar maintenance is expensive, and it never stops being expensive.
Greg Marcus of Marcus Theatres gets a bit of a raw deal in this piece. Variety describes the chain as having 78 locations, which is technically accurate if you’re counting buildings — but Marcus has nearly 1,000 screens. That’s the number that matters. That’s what makes them the fourth-largest chain in the country. You can say “78 locations across 19 states” and make Marcus sound like a regional midsize player, or you can say “nearly 1,000 screens” and make them sound like what they actually are. The piece buries the lead, and it does Marcus a disservice.
Greg’s core argument — and it’s one I’ve heard from him directly, and agree with — is that the exhibition business was built on wide national releases with genuine marketing support, and the industry is failing to provide that consistently. The current proliferation of releases that open on 1,500+ screens without the marketing budget to support a 1,500-screen release is a real structural problem. The answer to slow months isn’t alternative content. Alternative content can help at the margins. But if you’re asking theaters to compensate for a 20% drop in box office through event screenings and live content, that is not a viable solution. It’s impossible.
Greg is also straightforwardly sensible on texting: if you see a teen-oriented movie on a Friday night at 7 PM, you’re going to see teenagers on their phones. If you see the same movie on a Wednesday night, you won’t. Go on Wednesday. This is not complicated. I went to see M3GAN with friends on a Friday night at 7, and yes, the high school kids in the back were on their phones. That’s what high school kids do at 7 on a Friday night. The solution is not to go at 7 on a Friday night if you don’t want to see that.
Mike Bowers of Harkins gets asked the bankable stars question and gives you Pitt, DiCaprio, Gosling, Zendaya, and Timothée Chalamet. He also names Austin Butler as a rising star, which I respectfully disagree with, but fine. On popcorn buckets, he’s appropriately diplomatic but not quite honest. The real answer — which he’s dancing around — is that the market became completely oversaturated. The first wave of specialty buckets worked because they were novel and tied to movies people were obsessed with. Now there’s so much bucket inventory sitting around unsold. The people who were ever going to buy a popcorn bucket have already bought one. They’re not going to maintain a collection of them. Unless a bucket is exceptional and tied to a movie someone is truly passionate about, it’s going to sit on the shelf.
His best answer, though, comes when asked what Hollywood gets wrong about running a movie theater. He says Hollywood underestimates how good the moviegoing experience actually is today. And he’s right. The industry has invested billions since the pandemic. Forty years ago, you sat in a cramped, unpadded seat staring at a small screen with mediocre sound. Now you have IMAX, Dolby, wide screens, genuine audio quality, food and beverage that’s actually worth eating. The gap between then and now is enormous, and it’s almost entirely in the consumer’s favor.
I agree with this completely. I went through the great digital projection wars — everyone complaining that film was being replaced by digital, that it was horrible, that everything was ruined. And you know what? You almost never see a projection problem anymore. The bulb’s not dim, the sound isn’t blown, the print isn’t scratched. The technical quality of the theatrical experience is, by almost every measurable standard, better than it’s ever been. We’re romanticizing the past because the past is ours, not because it was objectively superior.
Daniel Fastlicht of The Lot runs a four-location dine-in chain out of La Jolla, so he’s operating at a very different scale. On variable pricing for blockbusters: I’m 100% against it, and not just in the abstract. Studios would take the majority of any price increase, which means the theater owner doesn’t actually benefit, and higher ticket prices demonstrably reduce attendance. This is not a conversation worth having seriously.
What is worth noting is The Lot’s “Girl Dinner” programming — small Caesar salad, penne pasta, side of fries, and a rom-com targeted at women 21–36. Double carbs. Phenomenal, apparently. Sold out at all four locations. And now they’re thinking about what Girl Dinner looks like for Marvel fans, for documentary fans. That’s creative thinking. He’s only got four screens, but he’s pushing the envelope, and that’s the kind of thinking the exhibition business needs more of.
Behind the Mask: A Personal Note
There’s a story about a Behind the Mask sequel — twenty years on, reuniting the original cast, crowdfunding underway. And I have a very specific feeling about it that I need to get out.
I saw Behind the Mask at South by Southwest. I went to SXSW for a few years, not many, and that premiere at the Alamo Drafthouse was one of the genuinely fun midnight screening experiences I remember from that period. The audience went completely crazy. It’s become a legitimate cult film, and it makes sense that people want a sequel.
But I knew Scott Wilson. Not well — he was more of an acquaintance, a friendly face I’d see around — but I knew him, and I respected him enormously, and he was a significant part of that cast and of why that film works. He’s gone now. And this announcement, this fundraising push, this reunion — there’s no mention of Scott Wilson. No acknowledgment that he won’t be there. No “we wish we had our full cast back, but Scott is no longer with us, and we’ll find a way to honor him.”
That bothers me. It actually offends me a little. He was part of why people love that movie. He deserves to be acknowledged.
A24 and The Drama: Headlines vs. Reality
Owen Gleiberman has a piece on Entertainment Weekly arguing that The Drama could redefine A24. The piece itself is actually reasonably smart — Owen knows his cinema, and he writes about the current moment in A24’s evolution with some genuine insight. But the headline is nonsense, and the framing around it is clickbait.
The drama is not redefining A24. The drama is part of what A24 has always done, which is operate across multiple modes: genre films (largely horror) that sell on genre mechanics, and more complex, high-art films that aren’t expected to do significant business. What’s new is the arrival of actual movie stars into the A24 ecosystem — Zendaya in The Drama, Timothée Chalamet as Marty Supreme. These are people who can open movies to $15–20 million. Zendaya is a genuine movie star. If you open a film with Zendaya, you’re going to do at least double digits, probably $15–20 million opening weekend, full stop. A24 is smartly budgeting their films to take advantage of this.
That’s an evolution, not a redefinition. A24 has been evolving for years — into television, into documentaries, into more commercially-oriented projects. The Drama is part of that evolution. It doesn’t change the fundamental identity of the company. The idea that everything is a dramatic turning point, that every new piece of evidence represents a total reimagining of something — that’s just clickbait framing. The Drama is a good movie starring a movie star. A24 made it. A24 will make more films that don’t star movie stars. This is how the company works.
The Regal ChatGPT App: File Under “Fine, I Guess”
Regal/Cineworld has launched a ChatGPT-powered ticketing app in the U.S. It’s positioned as a first-of-its-kind thing where AI helps you find and buy tickets. Is it going to change anything? I have no idea. I haven’t used it. The Regals near me in Los Angeles are not where I tend to go — I’m an AMC person, which means I’m on the AMC app, and what matters to me is whether the AMC app works.
I’ll say this: people are not going to start going to the movies because of a ticketing app. If the app works, that’s good. If it doesn’t, that’s bad. The technology backend is not the point. No one has ever said, “I would love to see a movie this weekend but I can’t figure out the app, so I’m staying home.” The idea that ChatGPT integration is going to drive attendance is just a little silly.
James Bond: Stop Pretending You Know Something
Variety has a piece asking how young Amazon will make the next James Bond. The framing itself is already wrong — the premise being that Amazon is going to decide who plays James Bond. Amazon has veto power. What they are not is the creative driver of this franchise.
Here’s what’s actually going to happen: Denis Villeneuve is going to decide who plays James Bond. He’s going to decide how young Bond is, what kind of actor he wants for that role, what the tone and texture of this new cycle of films will be. He’s going to build whatever the next three, four, five Bond films are going to look like, at least in terms of their foundational vision. He may only direct one. He may do two. But Denis is the most important creative voice in this decision — more important, in my view, even than the producers — and this piece barely acknowledges him except to note that he’s directing the movie.
Instead, the piece spends most of its energy on Louis Partridge, a 23-year-old actor whose name has been “circulating.” The piece acknowledges, in its own words, that this is “no more than speculation” and that “attempts to confirm have been predictably futile.” And then it proceeds to spend several paragraphs building a circumstantial case for Partridge anyway, citing “widespread chatter” and “many in the industry Variety has spoken to.”
This is gossip dressed up as reporting. We don’t know a goddamn thing. Neither does Variety. They’re running a Bond rumor story because Bond rumor stories get clicks, and they’re hedging it so aggressively that they can’t be wrong even though they’re 98% likely to be wrong. The agent called. The piece got written. That’s the industry.
God, I love show business.
Hollywood Reporter: Pixar’s History, Honestly Told
The Hollywood Reporter’s lead story is a review of Outcome, Jonah Hill’s directorial debut for Apple TV+, which stars Keanu Reeves and has gotten pretty crappy reviews. That’s genuinely the most important thing they could find this Friday. Okay.
More interesting is their reported piece on the scrapping of Pixar’s Bee Fry and the “devastating aftermath.” I want to engage with this seriously, because the story matters, even if the framing — “devastating aftermath” — is a little much.
First: the idea that Pixar has never killed a project in development is preposterous on its face. Pixar has many dead projects buried in the yard. Projects get restructured, reimagined, shelved, killed. That’s how a creative studio works. The notion that this represents some unique and shocking event in Pixar history is false.
The real story of what happened to Pixar is one I’ve been telling for over a year, and I’ll say it again. There are three things that happened to Disney/Pixar that conspired to create the current moment.
One: the end of the Skywalker Saga with Star Wars. Not just the end of the saga itself, but the agonizing question of what Star Wars is without Skywalker as the spine. Is it really Star Wars? Disney/Lucasfilm has been trying to answer that question and largely failing.
Two: the conclusion of the original Avengers cycle. They built something extraordinary over nearly a decade — brilliantly cast, brilliantly executed — and then they ended it with the two biggest movies they’d ever made. And then there were no more. What audiences were attached to wasn’t the suit. It was the specific people in those roles. That generation of Avengers is over, and Marvel has not yet figured out how to build the next one.
Three — and this is the Pixar-specific piece — the studio drifted away from what made it singular. Pixar’s bread and butter, the thing that genuinely set it apart from everything else, was the anthropomorphization of things that humans have never experienced from the inside: toys, fish, monsters, cars, rats. We don’t know what a fish thinks. We don’t know what a monster feels. We don’t know what a car wants. Pixar gave us those inner lives, and because they were genuinely unknown, genuinely unfamiliar, audiences were transported in a way that’s almost impossible to replicate with human subjects.
When Pixar started making films about human experiences — what it’s like to be a teenage girl, what it’s like to feel unwanted, what it’s like to go through adolescence — they were making films that are inherently more Disney than Pixar. The whole emotional territory of human aspiration and coming-of-age is Disney’s domain, going back forever. Pixar was at its greatest when it was somewhere else entirely.
And yes, Up is a human film that’s a masterpiece. The Incredibles are technically human. Ratatouille is a rat, but the rat is in a deeply human world. I’ll grant all of that. But the core of the Pixar identity — the thing that was irreplaceable — was that complete defamiliarization. And they moved away from it.
Now for the part of this reporting that’s genuinely unfair: the chart of Pixar’s box office performance since COVID that the piece uses to make its case is misleading in ways that matter. Onward came out two weeks before theaters shut down in March 2020 and got obliterated. It didn’t fail — the world shut down. Soul went directly to streaming with no theatrical window. Luca had a hybrid streaming and theatrical release. Turning Red had essentially no meaningful theatrical release, and the $22 million attributed to it in any theatrical total comes from a re-release years later, which shouldn’t count in any honest accounting of the film’s original run.
Lightyear is in there too, and the piece suggests its failure had something to do with the gay kiss in the film, with conservatives objecting. I’m sorry, but no. Lightyear failed because audiences weren’t interested in it. Period. If Lightyear had done modest business, you could argue that controversy shaved a few percentage points off. But people just didn’t go. That’s not a boycott. That’s indifference.
Elemental almost did $500 million. That’s not a failure by any honest standard — except that under Bob Chapek at Disney, Pixar’s brand had been so systematically undermined that Elemental entered the marketplace carrying damage that wasn’t its own. Chapek’s handling of animation, including the decision to dump Encanto to streaming way too fast when it should have been a massive worldwide theatrical event, did lasting harm to audience trust in Disney/Pixar animation as a theatrical proposition. Elemental paid that price. It probably would have done six or seven hundred million in a healthier environment.
Then Inside Out 2 was massive, obviously. And then came Elio, which was a mess — they knew it was a mess going into release, it had been substantially restructured, and it centered a human character in a way that again put it in that difficult territory. I rooted for Elio hard. The structure just didn’t work, and when an original idea doesn’t play, audiences can smell it before you can explain it.
And Hoppers — I don’t understand the critical enthusiasm for it, honestly. I thought it was okay. It’s not a great Pixar movie by any measure that I’d use to evaluate great Pixar movies. But it did okay.
The future of Pixar is not actually mysterious. Get back to doing the thing that was irreplaceable, that nobody else does and nobody else can do. And do it soon. Toy Story 5 is going to be huge regardless, because it’s Toy Story. But the original film pipeline is what matters. That’s where Pixar’s identity lives.
CinemaCon Preview: What to Expect Next Week in Vegas
I’m heading to Las Vegas on Monday for CinemaCon. My flight’s in the morning, so I’ll probably check in with you in the early afternoon before the evening events begin. Sony kicks things off Monday night. Before that, there’s an independents presentation that includes Sony Classics, which should be interesting. Roque, sadly, has effectively exited the landscape — a very quick, very painful exit — so they won’t be part of the conversation.
I want to address a piece by Pam McClintock in the Hollywood Reporter that runs as a CinemaCon preview, because I think she — and frankly a lot of journalists who cover this event — fundamentally misunderstand what CinemaCon is for and what makes it work.
Pam is nostalgic for 2018, when 11 companies including six major studios teased their upcoming slates. What she’s looking for is talent showing up, people saying exciting things, trailers dropping. And yes, that happens. But CinemaCon is not primarily a press event or a promotional spectacle. It’s a business event for theater owners and studio executives to meet, talk, and build the relationships that actually drive the theatrical business. The presentations are one piece of it. The conversations in the hallways and the suites are the real thing.
The magic of CinemaCon — the actual magic — is unpredictable. I remember the Forrest Gump presentation. Before that screening, nobody was sure that movie was going to be a hit. There was genuine uncertainty. And then they showed the extended footage to the room, and you could feel it — the audience knew, the exhibitors knew, everybody in that room knew they were watching something that was going to be enormous. Those moments happen. They can’t be engineered. They can’t be generated by bringing the right talent to the stage.
CinemaCon has also changed structurally over the years. It used to be a dinner event — Warner Brothers was famous for their giant dais of stars, a literal table of famous people that exhibitors would walk past while eating — and then trailers and presentations at the podium. Now it’s theater presentations, no food, Celine Dion singing from the stage two years ago (seriously). The world has gotten smaller, which means exhibitors can see many of these movies before they get to Vegas. The “wow” moments in the room are genuinely harder to engineer.
A few specific notes on what I expect to see:
Sony is kicking things off Monday night. The Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer dropped a couple weeks ago, so expect them to show an extended seven minutes or so to get the room going.
Warner Brothers is in an interesting position. Last year’s CinemaCon was infamous for the media piling on Mike De Luca and Pam Abdi — Pam McClintock, to her credit, includes herself in that group — with the narrative that they were about to be fired before their first movie even came out. All of that was ridiculous bullshit, and I said so at the time. Most of the noise started at Puck, as it usually does when there’s bullshit in the air. The movies they were presenting last year, including Sinners, were all question marks — nobody knew how much they’d make, nobody knew what the real costs were — but the idea that De Luca and Abdi were being fired before they’d made a single movie was idiotic.
Now they’ve had a very good year, Sinners picked up a record-setting 60 nominations, and this year the same people who were dumping on them will be falling over themselves to write positive pieces. That’s the cycle. Nobody has 100% hits. They do their work. That’s the job.
For their specific presentations: expect a tease for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s October film with Tom Cruise — I think it’ll be modest, because there are still effects being finished and because I don’t think anyone wants to give too much away about what the movie is. Dune Part 3 is a long way from being done with post, so expect a trailer attached to a summer film, not a robust presentation. Supergirl is opening in about two months, so they’ll have real stuff to show there.
Universal is the anchor of reliability, though they’re inconsistent year to year. Two years ago was the legendary Wicked presentation — flowers laid out individually in every seat, special effects, an event that they essentially had to rehearse twice in the venue, once in off-hours and once for real. Last year was comparatively low-key; the Wicked 2 cast was there but didn’t even sing. This year’s big card is Christopher Nolan, whose The Odyssey is close enough that we’ll probably get 15–20 minutes of footage. And then Steven Spielberg, who is expected to be there for his film — the Reporter calls this his “CinemaCon stage debut,” which doesn’t track with my memory, but maybe they’re distinguishing between the current CinemaCon branding and the old ShowWest format. He’ll be there regardless.
Paramount is in a tricky spot. They don’t have a lot of movies to talk about, and the footage they do have is limited. That presentation will be interesting more for what it reveals about where Paramount is as a company than for any specific content.
Disney has more this summer than it might seem at first glance: The Devil Wears Prada is a Disney release (through what was 20th Century Fox, now just 20th Century). Toy Story 5 is obviously a massive event. Avengers: Doomsday is the big question — I’m guessing they’ll have a summer trailer ready for this event, probably attached to Devil Wears Prada, but the effects aren’t finished and they’re not going to show footage that isn’t ready. Mandalorian & Grogu is a complicated movie, so we don’t know what the presentation is going to look like. And then there’s Lucasfilm’s Starfighter — the Ryan Gosling Star Wars project — which is its own category. If they bring Gosling out, the room is going to explode, because Project Hail Mary alone makes him a crowd favorite right now, and then you add Star Wars on top of that. He’s a win for everybody. Whether they have a teaser or any real footage is the actual question, and the answer to that question will probably tell us something about where the production actually is.
IndieWire and the Alamo Drafthouse: Please, For the Love of Movies, Stop Whining
IndieWire’s lead story today is titled “The Absolute Hell of Watching a Movie at the Alamo Drafthouse in 2026.” It’s an excerpt from David Ehrlich’s newsletter, In Review, in which he mounts a full-throated indictment of how the chain has declined and suggests that going to AMC is now “worse than a trip to the airport.”
I read David Ehrlich. I read him regularly, which is something I don’t do with everyone. He’s a smart critic. But this genre of writing — the complaint piece about how going to the movies is now a form of suffering — makes me want to put my head through a wall.
Going to the AMC is not torture. Going to the Alamo Drafthouse is not absolute hell. Going to the Regal is not hell. There are theaters I prefer to other theaters. There are things about certain chains I would change. I have been very clear, in this piece and previously, about the AMC pre-show problem. But there is a kind of rarefied, theatrical-only, conditions-must-be-perfect moviegoing posture that, the moment it surfaces in a piece of criticism, makes me completely disengage from whatever argument is being made.
The moment I read “worse than a trip to the airport,” I’m done. I don’t care what comes next. The grandiosity of the complaint is itself disqualifying. Do you need someone to rub your feet during the movie? Come on. Just go to the movies. If you love movies, the movie is the thing. The room is secondary. The room has to be really bad — actually bad, smelling bad, technically broken — before it meaningfully interferes with the experience of watching something great.
The mythology of the perfect moviegoing experience as it existed in some imagined past is just that — mythology. I’ve already talked at length in this column about the theaters I loved as a kid: the Varsity in Evanston, with its repertory double features and prints that weren’t always in great shape; the State and Lake in Chicago, a grand old house that was too big for anybody to ever fill; the Paramount Theater on what is now Columbus Circle in New York — essentially in the basement of what’s now a Trump building, which means I can never go back and miss it even more — where I saw The Big Chill, Amadeus, Fatal Attraction for the first time. The Ziegfeld. The UA in Times Square, long since gone.
I remember walking out of Amadeus into a snowy night in New York and just… walking. Quietly. Wanting to keep the movie inside me for as long as possible before I had to talk about it with anyone. That experience is real. That experience is still available to you. The lights come down, the sound fills the room, the image takes up your entire field of vision, and for two hours nothing exists except what’s on the screen. That is still what going to the movies is. It happens at AMC. It happens at Regal. It happens at the Chinese IMAX, which is different from what the Chinese was when Star Wars premiered there but is still, in its own way, extraordinary.
Love the one you’re with. The experience of cinema — the actual experience, the lights and the sound and the complete surrender to the image — that hasn’t gone anywhere. If you’re so focused on whether the popcorn came in a metal salad bowl that you can’t actually watch the movie, the problem isn’t the theater.
Mubi, Sequoia, and a Personal Confession
IndieWire also has a piece on Mubi losing 200,000 subscribers following its 2025 PR crisis — the controversy over Sequoia Capital’s $100 million investment and Sequoia’s ties to Israeli interests. The story — reported originally by the Wall Street Journal — is that this controversy derailed what would have been a period of significant growth for the art-house streamer.
I want to say something about this, because I have a personal relationship with it in a small and slightly embarrassing way.
I discovered recently that I have apparently been paying for a Mubi subscription for months without knowing it. I thought I’d canceled it. I had not canceled it. It was billed through Apple, it was buried in my subscriptions, and it just kept going. Fifteen, eighteen dollars a month, whatever it was. A few months’ worth. Now I’ve found out, and rather than try to get a refund — Mubi has enough problems without me asking for my money back — I’ve decided to actually watch the thing I’ve been paying for. And honestly? I’ve been having a great time. I’m going through films I wouldn’t have found otherwise: documentaries, international filmmakers, earlier work by directors I know only from their recent films. It’s a genuinely valuable catalog. I’m a Criterion Channel person first and always, and the Criterion Channel comes first. But Mubi goes deeper into obscurity in certain ways, and that’s worth something.
Here’s where I’ve landed on the controversy itself: I hate what is happening in Gaza. I am not a fan of Netanyahu. What the Israeli government is doing militarily is something I find genuinely disgusting. None of that is complicated for me to say.
But I’m also Jewish. My father — who was born in 1917, who adopted me late in his life — was one of those men from that generation for whom the creation of Israel was a profound, personal, almost spiritual event. He was literally one of the people who got off a plane in Jerusalem in the 1960s when Jews first had access to the city, and he kicked the ground. He raised money for Israel. He worked for Israel bonds. He was connected to people in the Israeli government across the 25 years of his life that intersected with the state’s existence. He cared about Israel in a way that was total and generational and different from how I care about it.
I care about Israel. I care about the idea of Israel and what it was supposed to represent. I don’t support the extreme right wing of Israel and what Netanyahu has done to that country politically. I am not a self-hating Jew. I’m not an anti-Semite. I think it’s wrong — morally wrong — to invade sovereign nations and kill tens of thousands of people because you’ve decided it’s strategically necessary. That applies to Israel in Gaza. It applies to America in its relationship to Iran. None of that is simple, and I’m not pretending it is.
But requiring a venture capital firm to divest from Israel before you’ll keep your Mubi subscription — that is, as I said, too many steps of unreality for me. It’s not where my line is. And I’ll note, separately, that I’m also uncomfortable with the Middle Eastern sovereign investment in Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. These things cut in multiple directions, and the answer is not always to collapse everything into a single political position.
My father was of a generation. I am of a generation. The world my father’s father lived in — sharing a Model A between four friends, cranking the engine by hand while someone chased the moving car to jump in, ice boxes, one phone per building — is almost science fiction to me, and the world I live in will probably seem the same way to whoever’s reading this in fifty years. We adapt. We stay on the swivel. That’s the job of being alive.
Go to the Movies This Weekend
CinemaCon is next week, which means Monday I’ll be coming to you from Las Vegas. My flight’s early, so the morning show won’t happen on schedule, but I’ll check in sometime before the Sony presentation kicks things off Monday night.
In the meantime: go to the movies this weekend. See The Christophers if you want a drama. Super Mario Galaxy if that’s where your heart is. There are holdovers worth catching. There are still choices. The theatrical marketplace is alive, and it needs you in the seats.
It’s also a great time for television. Hacks just landed on HBO. Shrinking has wrapped its run on Apple TV+. Your Friends & Neighbors is continuing on Apple TV+. There’s a show with Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nick Offerman that I believe starts this week on Apple as well — I keep blanking on the title, but it’s worth finding. I can’t tell you about some of the things coming, but they’re good. There’s a lot out there.
And if you’re in New York — go to the theater. I miss it desperately every time I’m in Los Angeles too long. I’m always jonesing for a show. Go for both of us.
See you Monday from Vegas.