David Reads Cinemacom Day 2 April
Toplines
- Warner Bros. announced a slate of 12–13 films for 2026, with plans to expand to 16 in 2027 and 18 in 2028, making them the only studio at CinemaCon to explicitly advocate for increased theatrical volume.
- Tom Cruise appeared in person at CinemaCon to present footage from Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu; the film is reportedly more expensive than The Revenant.
- Warner Bros. officially launched Clockwork, a new specialty label, with Sean Baker’s next film as its inaugural acquisition.
- Mortal Kombat 2, Evil Dead Burn (targeting 2027), Clayface, and Supergirl (directed by Craig Gillespie, starring Millie Alcock and Jason Momoa as Lobo) were among the titles presented at the Warner Bros. CinemaCon showcase.
- Practical Magic 2, starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, was shown with footage indicating the original house set was rebuilt from scratch.
- J.J. Abrams presented footage from The Great Beyond, marking his return to the director’s chair.
- Paramount pulled its advertising from the Ankler trade publication amid the outlet’s opposition to the Skydance merger; “Block the Merger” pins were circulating at CinemaCon.
- Neon was cited as the top independent distributor in the country, with two Academy Awards in recent years.
CinemaCon Day 2: Warner Brothers Does the Thing, and I’m Watching Myself in a Mirror
It is Tuesday night, April 14th. I just got out of the Warner Brothers presentation here in Vegas, and I want to get this down before the evening’s parties swallow me whole — because the parties are endless here, as they always are, and there are no more movies tonight.
Let me start with something Warner Brothers got exactly right, something that every studio should take note of: they had Patton Oswalt host the show. Not executive after executive. Not the head of distribution awkwardly reading from a teleprompter. Patton Oswalt. A standup comedian who actually knows how to command a room. It was the right call, full stop, and I hope other studios are watching. We are well past the point where the exhibitor-executive relationship is what defines CinemaCon. That era is over. Having a genuinely funny person move us through the presentation made the whole afternoon work better, even through a few bumpy moments when others on stage tried to match his energy and couldn’t quite get there. The concept was correct regardless.
Then Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy got up and gave their remarks, and that’s where things got genuinely surreal for me.
The Mirror Problem
I have a weird, complicated relationship with Warner Brothers right now. That is what it is. But listening to Mike and Pam speak for five or ten minutes, I kept having this odd, almost out-of-body experience — because they were essentially delivering a Hot Button column. Almost word for word. Everything I have been saying for the past year and change, and then some. There was barely a single point they raised that I haven’t made repeatedly in this space. Which is simultaneously validating and a little strange, given the current state of things between me and that studio.
There are still journalists out there who push back on my analysis or simply ignore it, even when I’m stating things that are, at this point, fairly obvious to anyone paying close attention to how this business works. Some of what I say is speculative. But a lot of it is just a basic reading of the industry’s fundamentals. So to sit there and watch the head of one of the biggest studios in the world essentially recite those fundamentals back to a room full of exhibitors was something. I actually started applauding at one point and had to stop myself.
Mike and Pam talked about how many films they’re releasing — currently scheduled at 12 or 13 for this year, with plans to grow to 16 next year and 18 the year after. I am completely for this. They talked about the importance of theatrical windows. They talked about the need for studios to put more movies into theaters. They were the only ones at this entire festival so far — not Cinema United, not Tom Rothman — who made that point. Tom Rothman didn’t bring it up, probably because Sony is only releasing 11 movies this year, which is not enough and he knows it. Mike O’Leary from Cinema United made the fair point to me this morning that more movies need to be paired with adequate marketing support, and I agree with that completely — but that’s a separate conversation from whether the volume of movies matters, and it does.
The other thing they did not do: they didn’t mention Paramount once. They didn’t say David Ellison’s name. They weren’t positioning themselves against anyone or speculating about the future of the industry’s consolidation. They were talking about their own business, their own brands, their own slate. And they looked good doing it.
The Lineup
Let me go through what they showed us, because there was a lot.
The first and biggest moment of the day was the premiere footage from Digger, the new Alejandro González Iñárritu film starring Tom Cruise. Tom was there in person, and a large portion of the room stood up and gave him a standing ovation — which he clearly wasn’t fully expecting. He thanked the audience two or three times. He was there with Alejandro, who is genuinely passionate and expressive when he gets going, though his remarks didn’t come through with total clarity for everyone in the room, and the audience was largely too busy ogling Cruise to parse the finer points anyway.
What’s fascinating about Digger is that it represents something I’m not sure Tom Cruise has ever done before in his career: he’s playing older than he actually is. Instead of the usual effort to look younger, he’s wearing age makeup, playing a character who’s probably meant to be somewhere between 65 and 70 — a legendary oil and natural gas man, an end-of-career genius type known as Digger. It is clearly a big, broad comedy, which is not territory we typically associate with Iñárritu. The movie has that intense visual style you expect from Alejandro — and yet it plays as comedy without question. The closest comparison that came to mind was the Coen Brothers. Tom looked like he was genuinely having fun in a way we don’t usually see from him outside of something like Magnolia — all that vim and vigor and aggression, channeled into something different. The trailer was convincing. It may get cut somewhat before theatrical release, but what we saw worked.
I should also note: Digger is apparently more expensive than The Revenant, which was already an infamously expensive production. The shoot was hard, and Alejandro kind of acknowledged that in a way that was slightly open to interpretation. But the movie looks worth it from where I’m sitting.
Next up was an extended sequence from Mortal Kombat 2, featuring Johnny Cage — the good-looking, perpetually smirking actor who finds himself in this world — having his first real fight in the Mortal Kombat ring. The premise of the sequence was that he’d already gotten his ass kicked earlier in the film, so this was his first genuine challenge from an opponent who might actually kill him. It was good. Nobody got their spine pulled out, but I’m confident that’s coming.
We got a peek at Evil Dead Burn, which was preceded by a clip of Sam Raimi on set — it’s apparently not entirely clear whether he’s directing or producing the next entry in the franchise, which is supposedly coming in 2027. The Evil Dead Burn trailer does its job. It is violent in the way that audience wants it to be violent, and the last one performed well enough to justify the expansion of the brand.
They also showed footage from The House at the End of the Street, which used to be called Flower Veil Street at some point. Pretty much the same as the trailer currently in theaters — a little more information, not a lot. I don’t recall seeing anything I hadn’t already seen.
Then came Clayface, which appeared just before Supergirl in the presentation. It’s a teaser, and the structure is: good-looking guy, something is wrong with him, he’s sick, he’s troubled, and eventually you get a blurry glimpse of the face you’ve been waiting for. That’s the problem. You spend the whole trailer waiting to see what Clayface actually looks like and you barely get it. They’re going to need to give audiences a little more Clayface in the Clayface marketing as we get closer to release. But there’s something there that could work.
Supergirl, with Craig Gillespie directing, was actually encouraging. Craig is one of those filmmakers who has given me some of my favorite movies and some of my bigger disappointments — the range is real. He was there with Jason Momoa, who is absolutely ecstatic to be playing Lobo and has his promotional shtick perfectly calibrated at this point. And then there’s Millie Alcock, who is playing Supergirl and is genuinely not media trained. At all. She said some things onstage that she probably wasn’t supposed to say — specifically about women being perceived as physical beings rather than serious actors or artists. I don’t disagree with her on the substance. But she said it in a way that was clearly unscripted, and I’m genuinely uncertain whether Warner Brothers is going to try to rein that in or lean into it as part of her persona. Maybe leaning into it makes sense, given that she’s playing an anti-hero type here.
The sequence they showed us was set in outer space — Supergirl on what I’d call a space bus, with a group of thieves who come to strip the vehicle and kill everyone on it. She’s being deliberately low-key, holding back, trying to find a fragment of yellow sun she can fly into to fully recharge her powers before she unleashes on the bad guys. Craig talked about the fact that the film involves five different languages and multiple planets, and that he’s going for genuine drama in addition to action. There was evidence of both in this footage. The image quality was a little rough — not final, clearly — but they were trying to show both her vulnerability and her strength, and it worked well enough to be encouraging.
The Cat in the Hat footage was odd in a specific way: Bill Hader, who is voicing the Cat, sounds uncannily like Patton Oswalt to me, which created this strange echo throughout the presentation since Oswalt had been hosting all day. It wasn’t Oswalt — the names are right there in the credits — but the resemblance kept throwing me. The audience got blue Thing 1 and Thing 2 wigs to put on, which made for an adorable group photo and a somewhat awkward souvenir. I’m bringing mine home. We’ll see who in my family is brave enough to wear it.
J.J. Abrams was there to talk about The Great Beyond, which he’s directing — it’s been a while since he’s sat in the director’s chair, and this is a return to that. He showed some footage. J.J. knows how to make a movie that looks like a Spielberg movie, and he did exactly that. What the movie actually is wasn’t entirely clear from his presentation, which was kind of charming and kind of frustrating in equal measure. He notably did not address his apparent move from Los Angeles to New York, which has everyone in Hollywood in a mild panic, as though the city itself is being abandoned. He was charming and lovely and, as I noted, considerably taller than Patton Oswalt, which appears to have been a personal goal.
The other genuinely significant news of the day — though it landed with a strange thud in the room — was the official launch of Clockwork, Warner Brothers’ new specialty label. The division has been in the works for a while; the marketing executive who came over from Neon a few months back is running it. Their first acquisition, and effectively the launch film for the entire Clockwork brand, is the new Sean Baker movie. Sean Baker. The guy who won Best Picture two years ago. The guy who is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most important filmmakers working today. Warner Brothers landing his next film is a genuine piece of news. It’s a big deal. And the room just… didn’t react. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it. The exhibitors in that theater were much more interested in Tom Cruise. I don’t know that Warner Brothers had the language to fully express what this acquisition means, or perhaps they knew the audience wouldn’t respond and decided not to oversell it. But it was the most interesting industry news of the day, even if it got the least applause.
Finally, Practical Magic 2, with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock. Nobody made a joke about Tom and Nicole, which I appreciated. Nobody made a joke about Sandy and Tom Hanks being the two biggest movie stars in the world at one point. Both stars came out, the footage was shown — apparently they rebuilt the original house essentially from scratch — and then there was the moment where Sandy asked why they come to this place and Nicole replied, “We come to this place for magic,” and the room lost its mind. Nicole said she didn’t think anyone would applaud. She was wrong. The AMC “we make movies for the big screen” line has become culturally embedded at this point, and this was its magical sequel.
My honest assessment of the Practical Magic 2 trailer: it is entirely a movie for people who already love Practical Magic. If you didn’t see the original, nothing in this footage is pulling you in. That’s a marketing problem they’ll need to solve as they get closer to release — how do you make this movie feel essential to someone who has no nostalgia for the first one? It’s the classic sequel trap, and they’ve got time to figure it out, but they’ll need to figure it out.
Adam Aron in the Food Court
Right before the Warner Brothers show, I spotted Adam Aron — head of AMC, America’s biggest exhibitor — sitting alone in the food court at Caesars Palace, eating. He’s recovering from what they’re characterizing as a minor stroke, and he was getting around on a scooter with an aide nearby. He looked like a man who wanted to eat his lunch in peace and didn’t want to be bothered.
I took a picture. I did not post it. What the hell business is it of anyone’s what this guy looks like eating a sandwich? I would not want that done to me. I should note that among some of the higher-profile journalists here at the event, this instinct toward basic privacy and decency is not universal.
But I did want to talk to him, because there are things I genuinely want to ask Adam Aron. AMC has enormous power in this industry — the largest exhibitor in the country, and other exhibitors, particularly smaller ones, frankly cannot move on certain issues without AMC moving first. Tom Rothman spent part of his Sony presentation yesterday effectively lecturing exhibitors about windows, and the whole room knows who he was really addressing.
The question I want answered — the question I always want answered when it comes to Adam Aron — is why. Why isn’t AMC taking a harder line on window lengths? Why isn’t he using the leverage he clearly has? I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think he’s trying to run a business. But I want someone to push him on the financials and the logic, and the interviews I’ve read — including a lengthy one with Matt Bellany — don’t get there. Not because Matt is bad at his job, but because the questions weren’t quite the right questions. When you’re trying to understand what Adam Aron is doing and not doing at AMC, “what” is the surface question. “Why” is where the conversation actually lives.
The advertising thing — the amount of pre-show ads AMC runs before movies — is also a legitimate issue that Rothman raised. When I mentioned Rothman’s presentation to an exhibitor sitting next to me today and asked whether he enjoyed being lectured, the guy just said, “I work for Regal.” End of conversation. Because Regal is equally guilty on the ad-length front.
The SVOD Window Nobody Is Talking About
Here is the thing that is frustrating me this week, and that I’m confident no one is going to bring up before CinemaCon ends: now that the PVOD window fight has been largely won, everyone has stopped talking about windows. Universal gave up the 17-day PVOD model, and Michael O’Leary said it accurately this morning — Universal didn’t do that out of the goodness of their heart. They did it because the 17-day model wasn’t working financially for Universal. That’s fine. It was the right call for the right reasons. But the exhibitors treated it as a victory and moved on.
What nobody is discussing is the next window. Not the premium VOD window — the paid streaming window. SVOD. Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, all of them. That window is too short. Movies are hitting paid streaming services in two months. Nobody is waiting longer than four months. The practical standard is four months, when it should be five or six. That’s not a dramatic ask. It’s a couple months. But nobody here has said a word about it, and I don’t expect they will.
This is the fight that needs to happen next, and the silence around it is genuinely baffling. The VOD fight is done. The streaming window fight hasn’t started. And until someone starts pulling on that thread, we’re leaving a significant amount of theatrical oxygen on the table.
The Paramount Merger, the Ankler, and the Block-the-Merger Pins
I should mention what else is circulating at this event, which is that there are “Block the Merger” pins floating around the Caesars Palace convention space. I picked one up. Most people seem to be pocketing them rather than wearing them. Make of that what you will.
More interesting is the latest development I caught just before sitting down to write this: Paramount has apparently pulled their advertising from the Ankler. Richard Rushfield has been in the Jane Fonda camp on this merger, actively trying to stop it, and Paramount has responded by yanking their ad spend. This is, I think, the most interesting thing I’ve heard about the merger situation in a while — because it tells you something about Paramount’s confidence level. If they were genuinely secure about the Skydance deal going through, the correct move is to ignore Richard Rushfield and the Ankler and let it pass. The fact that they’re complaining and pulling advertising suggests they’re nervous. Confident organizations don’t do this. They ignore criticism or address it with facts. Panicked organizations go scorched earth on their relationships.
The advertising thing matters beyond just optics. The reason studios advertise in publications like the Ankler or Puck is relational — it’s the back-scratching economy that has governed Hollywood press forever. You spend money there, they cover you favorably, nobody makes waves. When you break that arrangement, you’re not just withdrawing money, you’re declaring a rupture. And declaring ruptures when you’re the one who needs the deal to go through is a strange tactical choice.
I’ve written about this quite a bit going back to December and January — specifically about why I think the hand-wringing over Netflix’s theatrical ambitions was used, consciously or not, to make the Skydance deal look more palatable by comparison. Cinema United was among the groups that came out hard against Netflix, and the effect of that was to position Paramount as the lesser threat. I believe the opposite. Netflix is more deliberate, better funded, and not drawing a meaningful percentage of its capital from Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Abu Dhabi. They’re not the same situation. I wrote it. I didn’t get yelled at, probably because the trades never acknowledge I exist, even when I’m saying things they’ll be running as original reporting in six months.
Which brings me to a general point I’ll make without apology: if you want to know what’s going to happen in this industry, the track record speaks for itself. I get things wrong. I’ll say that clearly. But on the macro picture — the structural stuff, the financial logic, the way the business is actually moving — I have a better record than most of what you’re reading in the trades, and that’s not self-flattery, it’s a pattern. I chew on the numbers. I chew on the facts. I don’t stake out positions I don’t believe. If I don’t have a position, I don’t pretend to have one.
The deal is still coming. That’s my read.
The Mike-and-Pam-Were-Getting-Fired Legend
Before I sign off on today, I want to address something that came up organically in conversation today: the persistent legend that Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy were on the verge of being fired at Warner Brothers before their run of success last year supposedly saved them.
No. They weren’t. That story started because one gossip columnist wrote it and the rest of the industry picked it up as fact. But think about the underlying logic for half a second. Their first movies hadn’t even come out yet. You would have to believe that David Zaslav — whatever your opinion of him — was the kind of executive who would hire a studio leadership team, install them, and then fire them before a single one of their movies had hit theaters. That’s not a risk calculation. That’s not a pivot. That’s just stupid, and Zaslav is not stupid.
Were people nervous? Sure. Were there questions about whether they’d find their footing? Of course — there always are when a new team takes over a major studio. But the narrative that they were “pulled from the fire” by their successful year is a retroactive mythology built on a foundation that didn’t exist. One gossip item became the received history of an entire leadership regime. There was smoke. There was never fire.
The lesson — and it applies to whatever is coming with Paramount’s new situation too — is that you have to give people time. You have to give a team a chance to develop their slate and put it out into the world. Nobody knows in year one. I don’t expect Mike and Pam to replicate last year’s performance every single year. I don’t think any studio leadership does. But what they showed was the right model: original swings that mostly worked, combined with sequels and reboots and remakes that outperformed expectations. You build from all directions. That’s the game.
Neon, and What’s Ahead
The morning started with a Cinema United breakfast — a 7:45 a.m. start that was, I will say, a lot — and folded in the Neon presentation as kind of a coda to a very long session of other business. Neon spent a fair amount of their time talking about how much money they’ve made and how they’ve become the top independent distributor in the country. I can’t really argue with the point. Two Academy Awards in recent years. They’ve done an exceptional job. Bless them. Their presentation was measured — nothing overwhelming — but with Neon, the game is about proximity to release. You wait until you’re close to the movie, more of it gets out, and people decide. It’s an independent sensibility and it works for them.
As for the rest of this week: tomorrow is DreamWorks Animation in the morning, with a look at a film coming out in September, which I’m genuinely looking forward to. Then the trade floor, which I typically separate from fairly quickly. Then Universal in the afternoon, and Amazon MGM in the evening. Lord and Miller will probably appear in some form — they’ve been a presence at this event, whether in person or on video, and they’ve earned it. Coming out of animation and becoming what they’ve become as filmmakers is a real achievement, and I don’t think they get quite the respect they deserve for it. We’ll see what Amazon’s tone is on their theatrical commitment and what they’re looking toward in 2028, which is still the horizon that matters.
On the party front: tonight closes with the tail end of the Fandango pool party and then the Lionsgate event. Adam Fogelson has quietly done good work at Lionsgate. They are no longer the joke they were for a period. Yes, they’ve had staff reductions, but that’s everywhere right now. The progress is real, and they have genuine reasons to crow about this past year. I expect they will.
The Bellagio fountain, by the way, is not working tonight. I have a view of it from where I’m sitting, but it’s dark and inoperative, which feels slightly metaphorical in a way I don’t feel like fully working out right now. One of these days I’ll do an episode from the fountain itself.
More tomorrow. Viva the revolution.