David Reads Cinemacom Day 1 April
Toplines
- Sony Pictures revealed its full 2025 slate of 11 films at CinemaCon, including two new additions: Clara and the Son (Taika Waititi, October 23) and Archangel (director of Godzilla Minus One, November 6).
- Insidious: Out of the Further was given an official title and release date of August 21.
- Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot is set for September 18; the film reportedly features none of the original game characters.
- Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network sequel, The Social Reckoning, is coming in October, starring Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg and Mikey Madison as a whistleblower.
- Jumanji: Open World was confirmed as the official title, with Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Dwayne Johnson; the film moved from December 11 to Christmas Day.
- The Beatles biopic has been pushed to April 2028.
- Sony’s 2027 slate includes The Legend of Zelda, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, Project Hail Mary, and Helldivers (directed by Justin Lin).
- Universal has ended its 17-day VOD window policy, reverting to standard theatrical windows.
Dispatches from the Flamingo: CinemaCon Day One
I’m writing this from my hotel room at the Flamingo at nearly midnight on Monday. It’s been a long, weird day. The first room they put me in had an amazing view of a wall — genuinely spectacular masonry — and then a nice guy at the front desk took pity on me and moved me somewhere with an actual view: Caesar’s Palace, the Bellagio fountains, the whole Vegas panorama. Of course, the Wi-Fi doesn’t work because they apparently have me registered under some phantom first name, so I’ve jerry-rigged my iPad on top of an upside-down garbage can on a table to bring you this dispatch. This is CinemaCon, baby. Sometimes you improvise.
I keep calling it Comic-Con by accident, which tells you something about the state of my brain after traveling and running all day. CinemaCon. It used to be ShoWest. Names change, the desert remains. Nice to see the familiar faces, the people I’ve run into here over the years who I genuinely like. That part never gets old.
The Indie Event: Sony Classics, Studio Canal, and Angel
The first event of the day was the independent showcase, which was originally supposed to feature Roque alongside Studio Canal and one of the other indie labels. Somehow that became Sony Classics, Studio Canal, and Angel — and I’m wearing an Angel t-shirt right now, so let the record reflect my objectivity there.
This was the first time they’d done this particular combination of companies, and you could feel it. All three were enthusiastic, tried hard, and showed footage from a lot of things. But they’re not quite used to the specific rigors of a CinemaCon presentation. There’s a very particular energy to these events, a certain way the major studios have learned to cut their packages and calibrate their pitch for this specific audience. These companies haven’t fully cracked that code yet. In the old days, there were lunches and dinners with the studios, a whole different rhythm. That’s gone. What remains requires a specific skill set, and they’re still developing it.
I don’t begrudge any of them anything — but I do wish Sony Classics had sent Michael Barker and Tom Bernard. The sales rep they had here is relatively new, and I’m sure he’s great at his job, but Michael and Tom have been there thirty years. It’s their company. They’re more charming salesmen, shall we say, and there’s an institutional authority they bring that’s hard to replicate. The Sony Classics presentation was genuinely nice — a celebration of thirty years, a handful of commercial titles — though it’s not entirely clear yet what their Oscar movie is going to be this year, or even if there is one.
Angel gave a nice presentation. What’s interesting about Angel is they never once used the word “religion,” which is really the core of their business. What they talk about is positivity, reaffirmation, the feel-good experience. And they’ve had real successes. They must have a few flops they’re not dwelling on, but they are a positive-energy company, and the religious audience and the “I want something uplifting” audience is a genuinely significant part of the culture. God bless them. Non-God bless them also. Hope it does well.
Studio Canal was enthusiastic and upbeat, represented by a woman who was terrific. The one interesting wrinkle with their reel is that a lot of the movies in it were released domestically by Sony Classics and others at this very event — because Studio Canal doesn’t distribute in the US. So I’m not entirely sure who they’re talking to or what the goal is. They contribute enormously to the global film ecosystem, absolutely. But the domestic distributors they’d need to be connecting with aren’t really the ones in the room with them. It used to be that Monday was international day at this show. That’s no longer the case, and the international contingent is here but not quite in the numbers they used to be. It was pleasant and easy. I was hoping for something more. They have to figure out how to tell their story more clearly — what they’re actually trying to get across — and I’m not sure they quite knew yet.
The Sony Pictures Main Event: Tom Rothman, Finger-Wagging, and Spider-Man
The evening was Sony Pictures proper, where Tom Rothman arrived in his infinite Tominus with a clear theme: open with a bang, close with a bang. They opened with Spider-Man and they closed with Jumanji. In between, a lot happened — some of it great, some of it frustrating, some of it both.
Tom couldn’t bring the actual Spider-Man — meaning Tom Holland, who apparently couldn’t be there — so they projected him. And I want to be specific: it didn’t look like a video wall. It looked like it was actually being projected from a booth upstairs. It was clearly a pre-tape, but they had scripted shtick going back and forth so it sounded like they were talking to each other in real time. It was clever. My one note: if you can do that with Holland, why not also do it with Zendaya? Or the kid who plays his buddy in the movie? But they didn’t. Still, the footage looks good. Destin Daniel Cretton is a really good director, which is encouraging. The pitch for the movie was that it’s a more emotional Spider-Man than we’ve seen before. That’s interesting. And obviously it’s a built-in massive hit. A gimme. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Before we get to the rest of the slate, though, I want to talk about what Tom Rothman said at the top of the event, because it encapsulates something that bothered me all night.
Tom Rothman’s Three Things, and Why He Was Finger-Wagging the Wrong Room
Tom opened with what I’d describe as a hard-talk speech. Something to the effect of: I’m going to tell you something you may not want to hear. And then he went into a rant about three things exhibitors need to do to help improve the film business.
The first was about pre-shows. They’re too long. People aren’t coming to movies at the stated start time because they know it’s just commercials for the first half hour. And yes — he is absolutely correct on the substance. But here’s my problem: the people most responsible for this are AMC and Regal, and AMC particularly has been egregious about it. I go to AMC constantly, not just for screenings but as a regular moviegoer, and what I see is this: the NCM pre-show runs five minutes past the listed start time. Then AMC runs its own ads. Then the trailers start, with one NCM spot usually inserted in the middle — which I actually don’t mind that much, it’s usually a quick thirty-second thing — and then more AMC material at the end. The Coke ad, which runs about a minute. The Nicole Kidman spot, which they’ve shaved down to about twenty seconds so it’s basically her walking in and saying one line. And then a separate branded format preview for every different auditorium format — IMAX, Dolby, whatever — each running anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute.
The whole thing is twenty-five to thirty minutes, sometimes more. They used to run investor-pitch content that could run ten minutes by itself. And the result is exactly what Tom says: people have stopped coming on time. They’re arriving right as the movie starts, which means they’re missing not just the first few trailers but sometimes the opening of the film. When I go to a sold-out IMAX show at the listed start time, there are maybe ten to twenty people in a 220-seat theater. Ten minutes later, forty or fifty. The rest trickle in — and some of them miss the actual beginning of the movie they paid to see.
The issue is: Tom Rothman was saying this to a room that did not include Adam Aron of AMC or whoever runs Regal. He was finger-wagging the wrong people. The mid-sized and smaller exhibitors in that room aren’t the ones driving this problem. AMC and Regal are. And they weren’t there.
His second point was about windows — exhibitors need to refuse to play movies that don’t give them an appropriate theatrical window. I agree with the principle, but again, you’re talking to exhibitors who don’t have 800-plus screens. There are maybe four chains in the US and one in Canada at that scale. The smaller operators don’t have the leverage to just not play a Warner Bros. movie or a Paramount movie. They simply don’t. And notably, Tom didn’t acknowledge that Universal — which has been on a seventeen-day VOD window for four or five years, the worst offender in the business — has finally given that up. That’s genuinely good news and deserved mention. He also didn’t bring up the thing I think actually matters more right now, which is that the window to paid streaming is too short. Some places are at two months. Universal, interestingly, is actually better on this metric than on VOD — they average close to three and a half to four months before their films hit paid streaming. But nobody’s going past four months. I think five or six should be the floor. Yes, I know the collusion conversation is real and complicated. But the paid streaming window is the current quiet crisis.
And then he had a third thing. I genuinely don’t remember what it was anymore.
Here’s the larger problem I had with Tom’s speech: he’s saying “we’ll do our part if you do your part” — and then Sony is putting out eleven movies this year. Eleven movies. With five major studios, if they’re all doing eleven, that’s fifty-five movies a year across the entire studio system. That is well short of what the major studios were releasing before COVID, before streaming ate the world. And he knows this. He knows it. The exhibitors in that room have been eating shit for five years. Universal created the seventeen-day window and neither Adam Aron nor Regal would go up against it. Nobody would. If the two biggest chains in the country won’t draw a line, nobody’s drawing a line. That’s not on the exhibitors. That’s on the studios.
I didn’t disagree with anything Tom Rothman said tonight. But I think he was pointing his finger at the wrong people. The people he needs to talk to are the bosses at the major studios, himself included. And that feels like it might be a theme this week — people acknowledging a certain amount but not the whole picture.
The Sony Slate: What’s Coming and When
Beyond all that, the Sony presentation covered a lot of ground. For this year, they’re now up to eleven titles total, having added two I hadn’t seen on the schedule: Clara and the Son, a Taika Waititi film due October 23rd that’s a kind of family comedy about a robot girl who comes to live with a family — it stars the little brunette from Wednesday — and Archangel, due November 6th from the director of Godzilla Minus One, which showed a brief sequence of a monster fighting a mechanical monster. Nicely done, not particularly revelatory, but the concept has potential.
The Breadwinner — and I should clarify, this is apparently the Nate Bargatze movie, not the animated film — was the second title out of the gate. I don’t personally get Nate Bargatze. Nothing against him. The audience laughed. People applauded. He’s doing a version of Mr. Mom and he made a pretty compelling case on stage for why audiences want to feel good, why they want the family experience, and this movie seems designed to be exactly that. The footage didn’t look particularly well-directed — a lot of singles, cut, cut, cut, which is usually the tell of an early-career director — but it could easily be a feel-good hit.
Insidious: Out of the Further finally has an official title. It’s set for August 21st. They’re pitching it as the darkest and nastiest Insidious we’ve seen. Maybe. We’ll see.
The Zach Cregger Resident Evil was genuinely interesting. Cregger did Barbarian, then Weapons last summer, and now he’s here with a major studio franchise reboot opening September 18th. What struck me — and I’ve been told by someone on Twitter whose instincts I generally trust that none of the original game characters appear in this version — is how quickly a film like this apparently came together. More importantly, the footage made me want to see the movie, which I did not expect to say. I was on the set of a couple of the Milla Jovovich Resident Evil films and genuinely didn’t care about those movies — I watched the first one in preparation for a set visit and it was stunts, attitude, leather, and tight clothes. This felt different. Cregger is passionate about it and I believe him.
The Social Reckoning — and I’m not sure it was officially titled until tonight — is the Aaron Sorkin sequel to The Social Network, coming in October with Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Sorkin is one of the greatest writers working in film, full stop. He is not a great director. There’s a long, steep hill between David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin as a filmmaker. Maybe he’s improving. But a good story well told is ultimately what matters, and the question here is audience. Does this appeal to people in their fifties and sixties who want to be furious about social media? Or do people under thirty actually engage with this? I have no idea. The footage was fine. Strong is playing Zuckerberg as something close to an incel — terrible haircut, uncomfortable energy, kind of perfect in that description — and Strong is a great actor, so I’m willing to go there. The movie is apparently structured around a whistleblower, played by Mikey Madison, who won the Oscar for Nora. She was great in that film, but that role was almost tailor-made for her. Playing a sweet thirty-year-old woman navigating a giant corporation doesn’t feel like her obvious strong suit, but maybe it is. I genuinely don’t know.
The closing act was Jumanji: Open World — it’s official now, that’s the title — with Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and the Rock coming out to do shtick, say the word fuck a lot, and claim they were all drunk. The footage itself was a trailer that I assume will be attached to Spider-Man. The new hook: instead of people going into the game, the game is coming out into the real world. Which is, of course, the flip on the original Robin Williams Jumanji, where the stuff came out of the board game into a small town, and then these movies reversed that by sending people into a video game. Now we’re reversing back. It looks fine.
What I wanted to ask — and didn’t — was exactly how much Disney paid Sony to move Jumanji from December 11th to Christmas Day. My theory is that Disney approached Sony and said, we’re going to take your date because we need to separate from Dune 3, and in exchange there were party favors involved. I don’t know that cash changed hands. But something happened. The December calendar right now is a bit of a clusterfuck — Avengers presumably on the 11th, Dune 3 around the same period, and now Jumanji on Christmas Day. The logic for Jumanji specifically: they’re hoping to run into January, build on holdover, while Dune plays out through the holiday and Avengers gets its three-week run. Three films can absolutely all do great business in that window. But the date movement didn’t happen organically.
Looking Toward 2027 (and the Beatles Film, Now 2028)
The most striking thing about the Sony presentation was how much of it was 2027. They have an ambitious slate building: The Nightingale, the Fanning sisters in a World War II film that looks genuinely interesting; The Legend of Zelda, which they’ve apparently wrapped but from which no footage exists yet; Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, still gorgeous from what they showed, delays and all; Project Hail Mary, with Phil Lord and Chris Miller taking their bows and likely to appear again at whatever Amazon does this week; Helldivers, another game adaptation from Justin Lin of Fast & Furious, because Justin Lin is a man who enjoys blowing things up; and an animated comedy called Buds about plants who talk to people, due around Christmas 2027, which sounds exactly like a Pixar movie that should have happened and never did — and that’s probably part of why Pixar hasn’t performed the way it once did, though that may be about to change.
And then there’s the Beatles biopic, which is now April 2028. I think they’d wrapped or were close to wrapping. You don’t push to April 2028 on a film that’s done. Something is still happening with that production. I have no idea what, but they’re doing something that’s keeping it from opening until April of 2028.
The Real Problem: Eleven Movies Isn’t Enough
I want to come back to where I started with all of this: Sony is a company I want to embrace. They’ve been pro-theatrical. They’ve kept longer windows. They’ve done the right things. Tom Rothman is smart and gets it. Michael O’Leary, who I’ll be seeing tomorrow morning before the Neon event, is making noise about the right issues in his trade interviews, but not quite with enough edge. He’s being aggressive but not really being aggressive. He needs to get some fucking edge. And so does Tom.
Because none of that matters if you’re putting out eleven movies a year. Five major studios releasing eleven movies each is fifty-five films. Warner Bros. used to release twenty-six to twenty-eight movies a year routinely. Paramount has to get to fifteen. The infrastructure can absolutely handle it — people said the same thing about twenty movies being too many, and Warner Bros. ran twenty-six-plus for years. Warner Bros. in particular has the sub-studio structure to do it: DC in one lane, New Line in another. And New Line should be making three or four horror movies and low-budget action films — the $20-to-$30-million genre pictures that used to be New Line’s bread and butter — on top of whatever the main slate is. Sony has TriStar, which apparently is leaning into women’s films with some renewed intention. The infrastructure is there.
The exhibitors in that room have been holding on for five years. They’re doing their part. The studios need to do theirs.
One More Thing: The Future of the Lobby Wall
I’ll close with something from the trade floor that caught my attention and that I want to return to more when I have time. Samsung had a display of in-theater video screens — different shapes, different sizes, designed to replace the standard one-sheet poster in theater lobbies and eventually inside auditoriums. Some of them are remarkable. There’s an interactive Michael display out on the floor right now. But the thing that genuinely stopped me was a poster-size screen designed to look like paper. I mean it looks like paper. It has the texture, the feel, the warmth of paper when you’re standing in front of it. But it’s video. They can change it out instantly. Lobby advertising that looks like a real one-sheet.
There were also bigger lobby screens, and an in-auditorium screen concept that honestly scares me a little. There’s something about advertising on the screen inside the auditorium, before the lights go down, that feels like a line. But I understand why it exists. A mall near me in LA is also getting updated versions of these screens, flatter than the Grove’s older installations, meant to be programmed more aggressively. This is all heading somewhere Blade Runner, Minority Report — the full immersive commercial environment. We’re watching the transition happen.
It’s almost midnight. I have a breakfast at 7:45 in the morning because apparently CinemaCon has decided that’s a normal thing to do to people for the second year running. I don’t understand the logic. I’ll be up at 6:30. I love cinema. I really do love cinema. And I love you. Good night.