David Reads The Trades

David Reads CinemaCon, Day 3, April 15, 2026

Toplines

  • DreamWorks animated film Forgotten Island, described as stylistically influenced by Spider-Verse, is scheduled for release in September.
  • Universal announced a Snoop Dogg biopic to be directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Sing Sing); no release date or production timeline was given.
  • Universal has moved to a 45-day theatrical window before PVOD availability, up from a previous 17-day window.
  • The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, is the first major studio film shot entirely in IMAX; it is scheduled to open July 17, 2026.
  • Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, an alien-contact film described as going further than Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is scheduled for June 2026.
  • The Fockers franchise is returning with a new film starring Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro, with Ariana Grande joining the cast; no release date was specified.
  • Other Mommy, a horror film starring Jessica Chastain, is scheduled for an October 2026 release.
  • Violent Night 2 was previewed, with Kristen Bell joining the cast as Mrs. Claus; no release date was given.
  • Focus Features showed a clip from Sense and Sensibility (October) and a brief tease for Robert Eggers’s Werewolf (December).
  • A Jonah Hill/Kristen Wiig comedy previously on Universal’s summer slate has been quietly removed without announcement.

A Good Start and a Disappointing Day: Universal at CinemaCon

Universal Day at CinemaCon started early — nine, nine-thirty this morning — and it actually started well. Before the main event, we got a look at a DreamWorks animated film called Forgotten Island, coming out in September, and it was, genuinely, quite good. In the great tradition of these screenings, it was a pretty unfinished version of the movie — there were clearly entire characters still being developed, and even in the more polished sections you could sense gaps. But none of that mattered all that much, because the movie is entertaining. It’s clearly influenced by Spider-Verse and by K-pop Demon Hunters — not as an imitation, more that it carries a lot of the same energy, the same stylistic DNA those films have. At its heart it’s a story about two girls going on a journey together, growing up together, falling into a fantasy world and trying to survive it together. It’s a heavily girl-skewing movie, but that’s proven to be a commercially smart place to be lately, so God bless them. I’m genuinely curious to see where some of the unfinished pieces land when the film is complete. Forgotten Island was a positive thing. I was happy to see it. Hold that thought, because the rest of the day is a different story.

The Universal Presentation: Manipulation as Production Value

I was very disappointed by the Universal presentation. I want to be clear about what I mean: my disappointment doesn’t automatically mean these movies aren’t going to work. It doesn’t mean the films are going to be less successful than they might otherwise be. It just means that from start to finish, the whole thing felt manipulative in a way that was hard to ignore — and frankly surprising, coming from a studio that has been one of the top two or three studios in the business over the last five to ten years. They’ve had a genuinely great run. And they had two enormous movies on the schedule: the Spielberg film in June and the Nolan film in July. Those were always going to be the anchors. The question was how they built around them, and the answer, unfortunately, was: not well.

They opened with Snoop Dogg.

Now, why is Snoop Dogg opening the Universal event at CinemaCon? Because they’ve apparently signed a deal to make a biopic about him, to be directed by Craig Brewer, who made Sing Sing last year for Focus and did Hustle & Flow years ago. They brought out the young man who’s apparently going to play Snoop Dogg, who, it should be noted, appears to be six to eight inches shorter than Snoop Dogg — which is a little odd, because being tall and lanky is half the magic of Snoop Dogg. Anyway. There was a DJ. Snoop did a little bit of some of his songs, talked a lot of shit, and got a standing ovation. People rose to their feet. I was sitting there thinking, where am I? What is going on?

I like Snoop Dogg. I have nothing against Snoop Dogg. I genuinely look forward to a Snoop Dogg movie. But this movie doesn’t have a release date. It doesn’t have a year. They couldn’t even say 2027 or 2028. The film is apparently nowhere near shooting, much less locked down for a calendar slot. So what are we doing here? We’re opening a studio presentation with the world’s most famous rapper performing for a film that exists in some form of pre-pre-production limbo, and then using the goodwill of that moment to segue into Donna Langley’s entrance — accompanied by the most elaborate tuchus-kissing introduction you’ve ever heard. Oh, she’s the queen. Oh, she’s the greatest. Stop telling me how to feel about what’s about to happen. Just put on the show.

The Window Question Nobody Wanted to Answer

Donna Langley deserves all the credit and love and respect in the world — and she got it, and she earned it. But her speech was nonspecific in a way that came to define the entire presentation. She made a gentle joke about Tom Rothman’s speech from the day before, where he more or less wagged his finger at exhibitors about advertising and windows and did himself no favors in this room. Langley’s version was softer: I’m not going to yell at you. Fair enough, and welcome.

What she didn’t do was directly address the theatrical window expansion. She sort of gestured in its direction — mentioned they’d gone to a longer window — but didn’t name specifics, didn’t discuss the reasoning, didn’t lean into it as the gesture toward the exhibition community that it was supposed to be. And this became the tell for the whole day. Universal has moved to a 45-day window. A lot of us feel it should be 60 days for PVOD — what I prefer to call paid streaming, because the acronym soup of PVOD and SVOD just confuses everyone, and what we’re really talking about is Netflix and Peacock and the rest. The paid streaming window, at its current maximum, runs about four months for most films. We need five months. We need six. Once a movie goes to paid streaming, it’s there forever. There’s no urgency built into those numbers; nothing changes. The theatrical window is the only lever that creates real pressure on audiences to go to the cinema.

The reason people skip the regular-screen theatrical run isn’t necessarily laziness. It’s that when a movie hits paid streaming quickly, audiences start doing the mental math: I missed it on IMAX, I missed the premium format, going to a regular screen starts to feel like an inferior version of watching it at home. That calculation is the enemy of theatrical exhibition. Expanding the window — even to 45 days — is a meaningful step. But Universal didn’t own it. They let it drift past in a sentence. The only person who addressed it directly, with any specificity, was Steven Spielberg, and his framing was charitable — he positioned it as evidence of how much the studio cares about movies. My framing is somewhat different. There’s an old Sinatra joke: Sinatra saved my life. How? He told the guy to stop trying to kill me. That’s basically what’s happened here. Universal isn’t a hero for going from 17 to 45 days. They’re a studio that finally told the guy to stop trying to kill exhibition. Give them credit for it, sure, but let’s not confuse damage control with generosity.

Chris Nolan and The Odyssey

After Donna Langley’s moment, we went to Chris Nolan, who was thoughtful and articulate and spoke without reading off a teleprompter. He talked about the love of movies, about the fact that The Odyssey is the first major studio movie shot entirely in IMAX — not partially in IMAX, entirely — and about how hard the technical teams worked to make that possible. Congratulations to him and to everyone who pulled that off. It’s a genuine achievement.

They showed what I’d call a three-minute clip — the Trojan horse sequence, beginning with the horse being dragged up from the beach and ending with the soldiers inside the horse waiting to pour out into Troy. Beautiful, as everything in a Nolan film is beautiful. Was it revelatory? Not exactly. The IMAX trailer they’d already shown publicly had more of this sequence, or at least a different configuration of it. This felt like a slightly extended and recontextualized version of material we’d seen pieces of. It was more than we’d seen, but not dramatically more. I will absolutely see this movie four times on an IMAX screen when it comes out. I have zero doubt it will be terrific. I’m not being remotely sarcastic. The clip was beautiful. It just wasn’t a revelatory new window into the film.

I do want to say one thing about the Twitter discourse I found myself in around all of this: someone saw a trailer and immediately declared the Oscar race wide open, and I just — calm down. Everybody calm down. The Nolan film is obviously in the conversation. There are other films that can compete with it. It is not going to be a one-horse race. But the idea that we watch a two-minute trailer in April and we now understand what December is going to look like is just stupid. That’s true in both directions — positive and negative. Sometimes something looks so bad you have to go negative. But mostly, at this stage, take a breath.

The Trailer Reel: Loud, Louder, Loudest

After Nolan, Universal presented trailers for most of the rest of their 2026 slate, and this is where things really fell apart for me. I don’t know who checked the sound system before this presentation started, but everything was aggressively, inappropriately loud. The music was way too hot relative to the dialogue. Three of the roughly seven presentations were just trailers with a loud voice and louder music, and it was like — what the hell is this?

One Night Only is a Will Gluck romantic comedy, and I generally like Will Gluck’s work. He’s had real success in this genre and does it with some intelligence. This one is high-concept: single people are only allowed to have sex one day a year. Monica Barbero — who was in the Bob Dylan movie — is the lead. The guy is Callum Turner, the tall British actor a lot of people seem to be very excited about; I don’t entirely get him yet, though maybe this movie will change my mind. The concept is complicated, and the trailer did not explain it clearly enough to actually sell it. More damning: it’s a comedy, and there were no laughs in the trailer. It was loud. It was poppy. It was a lot of fast cutting and people running and smiling at each other. Not a single moment that made me laugh out loud, and not particularly the audience either. That’s the problem with a trailer for a romantic comedy — the trailers are supposed to be funny. They need a better trailer. Also: with Warner Brothers having dropped their summer comedy, there’s now basically one summer comedy in 2026. Universal didn’t even bring out Will Gluck. They didn’t bring out the cast. They just threw a trailer up and moved on. For the only summer comedy on the slate, that’s a strange way to handle it.

Other Mommy is a horror film coming in October with Jessica Chastain, where she apparently plays a mother who has some kind of evil version of herself creeping into her family’s life. Jess was very creepy in the trailer — she’s genuinely frightening when she wants to be. But the trailer itself was a lot of jump cuts and shock moments and not a lot of story. It was okay. It didn’t hurt my feelings. I’m not writing the movie off. It just kind of washed over me.

Violent Night 2 gave us a look at the sequel to the violent-Santa movie, and the premise here is apparently that Santa has somehow ended up on the naughty list, and now people are being sent to kill him. Which is a weird premise on the face of it, but fine — I enjoyed the first Violent Night, which is stupid and fun in exactly the right way. The punchline of the trailer is that Mrs. Claus, now played by Kristen Bell, is going to kick some ass alongside him. Could be fun. Not from what I saw today, though.

Meet the Fockers, Finally

The one bright spot in the live presentation portion of this section was the Fockers reunion — Meet the Fockers plus Ariana Grande, apparently, though Grande was not there. Ben Stiller came out and was charming and funny, and then Robert De Niro came out and they did a two-man comedy act live, which was genuinely more entertaining than the trailer they ended up showing. De Niro kept insisting, “I didn’t write this shit,” which was the bit — they were riffing on his legacy, on the audacity of Ben Stiller comparing himself to De Niro, and then Ben Stiller comparing himself to Ariana Grande, what a schmuck. De Niro was also very funny about the fact that they’d taken fifteen years between movies: this was all part of the plan, he said. That landed.

The actual trailer, though, was a little underwhelming. The concept is apparently that Grande plays a professional manipulator — all the things De Niro accused Ben Stiller of being in the first movie, now embodied in her character, and De Niro has to go after her. I laughed a couple times. It wasn’t bad. The live shtick between the two of them was better. I hope the movie is great. I assume the trailer will be attached to something in the next month or two — maybe Disclosure Day — and by then they’ll have sharpened it.

Minions and Monsters: A Beautiful Idea Looking for Its Heart

Pierre Coffin came out for Minions and Monsters, and they showed a couple of clips. The concept here is an homage to old Hollywood: the Minions arrive in 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles during the silent film era, and one of them desperately wants to be a filmmaker. You catch a glimpse of Harold Lloyd. The whole thing is framed as Coffin’s most personal project, rooted in his love of cinema and movie history.

And I wanted to be won over. I really did. Because Coffin has done genuinely beautiful work finding heart inside these essentially Laurel-and-Hardy, Keystone-Cops characters — the Minions are silent-comedy figures in the tradition of the greats, and he’s made them into something that works across the entire globe. That’s a serious achievement. We all have a weakness for movies-about-movies. But after watching the clips, I’m still not entirely sure what the heart of this story is going to be. They showed us the origin story — Hollywood, silent films, the aspiration to make movies — but I was waiting for the Harold Lloyd hanging-from-a-clock moment, the Buster Keaton house-falling-on-him moment. What is the movie? I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I just wasn’t overwhelmed today, and I wanted to be.

One other thing worth noting: the movie is called Minions and Monsters, and there were no monsters in the clips. Not a single one. What’s that about?

The Spielberg Section: Lovely, Bewildering, and Way Too Long

The end of the presentation was given over entirely to Steven Spielberg and Disclosure Day, and it became a kind of master class in how to take something wonderful and make it feel strange.

First, Spielberg received the MPA 250 Award — a prize that was apparently invented specifically for this occasion because it’s the 250th anniversary of America and Spielberg is somehow the emblem of that. He’s the only person who’s ever received it, and since it’s tied to the 250th anniversary, presumably the only person who ever will. The guy from the MPA gave a speech, which — I didn’t mention this yesterday, but he gave the most tone-deaf speech I’ve ever heard in my life to this group at the previous night’s event. Just embarrassed himself. Same guy, same result. And the MPA itself is increasingly a ghost at these gatherings. It used to be that when you came to what was Show West — which became CinemaCon — you’d sit down with the head of the MPAA and the head of NATO, which is now Cinema United, for an hour or so of actual conversation: how is the business working, what needs to change, what are the pressure points. Now it’s Michael O’Leary buying coffee for journalists at 7:45 in the morning and fielding questions that are either unanswerable or unnecessarily specific. After a meeting with Netflix over the weekend, all anyone wanted to ask about was Netflix. Nobody had a sophisticated question. The institution has faded from the conversation, and that’s a genuine loss.

Anyway. The MPA speech landed with a thud. No applause breaks. Dead silence from the room.

Then Spielberg came up, gave a very warm speech — essentially his bar mitzvah speech, as I found myself thinking — about movies and love and the history of cinema. And I give the man all his roses, in every form. He’s a brilliant filmmaker. He’s been an extraordinary producer. He’s been an engine of this industry and an encouragement to everyone in it. He is the embodiment of movie love, full stop. I can’t think of three people who have been more important to the film business over the last thirty years, and I’m not sure I can think of two.

But what was this doing in the middle of a sales presentation? Why are we treating Steven Spielberg like he’s at the Santa Barbara Film Festival receiving a lifetime achievement tribute? This award has never existed and will never exist again. They invented it so he could give a speech about how great he is. And he is great. But I’m here to see movies. And then they compounded it by staging a Q&A between Spielberg and Coleman Domingo, which — I love Coleman Domingo, I think the world of him, his enthusiasm for all of this is completely genuine and always palpable — but what is he doing conducting a sit-down interview with Steven Spielberg in the middle of a studio showcase? Spielberg talked about how, when he was a kid, he rented 16-millimeter movies and showed them in his house, charged 13 cents and broke even, then made money on the popcorn. So I’m an exhibitor too. Lovely story. Genuinely charming. But what am I doing here?

And they kept insisting, over and over, that Spielberg had never been to CinemaCon before. Which is technically true — the name changed about ten years ago. He was at Show West. He’d been here before, under the old name. So that framing was both awkward and a little manipulative.

Also: Spielberg got three standing ovations. Snoop Dogg got a standing ovation. Nolan got a standing ovation. I adore all of these people, but their egos are not that fragile. You don’t need to give everyone a standing ovation. Save it.

Disclosure Day: The Movie, and the Questions Around It

After all of the above, they showed what is apparently going to be the final trailer for Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s film opening in June. It’s about two and a half minutes. It clarifies that there’s a connection between two of the main characters, and that there are people on Earth who believe aliens are present and that a disclosure is coming. Spielberg mentioned several times during his remarks that this movie goes much further than Close Encounters of the Third Kind — which he made almost fifty years ago — in asserting that there really are extraterrestrials here and that we now know this much more clearly than we did then.

The trailer was fine. But I genuinely don’t know if this is a giant hit. I don’t think it’ll fail. It’s an interesting subject, and Spielberg’s name means something. But I don’t know what the audience is being asked to experience, and I don’t know what shocking place the movie takes us. Do we spend real time with aliens? Last year at this same convention they showed us material from Project Hail Mary — which everyone now just calls Hail Mary, including Spielberg himself, which I found funny — and they actually acknowledged the alien character up front, which made everyone nervous about spoilers. In Disclosure Day, I still don’t know what the revelation is, which might be by design, but it also means I don’t know what I’m buying.

There’s a demographic question I keep coming back to: who is this movie for? There doesn’t appear to be anyone in it under forty, outside of some kids in brief appearances. The lead is a well-regarded independent actor who a lot of people admire and who has not driven box office yet. Some people think he might be the next Bond; I don’t see that happening. They have Emily Blunt, whom I adore and who is one of the great working actors, and she’ll be coming off The Devil Wears Prada sequel — but she’s not necessarily an opener by herself. Coleman Domingo is in it, and Spielberg joked that essentially every actor in Hollywood is in it, which got a laugh. Ben Stiller came out specifically to note that he is the one actor in Hollywood who is not in Disclosure Day, which was also funny. The movie has to catch a wave. It’s not going to open to a hundred million dollars on Spielberg’s name alone — he’s had one hundred million dollar opening, and it was barely over the threshold, and that was years ago. We’ll see.

Focus Features: Come to the Party Like You Mean It

And then, almost as an afterthought, Focus Features got a brief slot. They showed a clip from Sense and Sensibility, coming in October, and a very brief tease — less than a full trailer — for Werewolf, Robert Eggers’s new film, coming in December, which I’m enormously looking forward to. Those are genuinely interesting films. But Focus has four movies coming out before those. Not mentioned. Not even acknowledged. Gone, apparently. It was just weird. Come to the party like you’re seriously there. You have an Eggers film. You have something to sell. Show up with your whole hand.

The Beer Cozy: A Perfect Metaphor in Blue Polyurethane

As we were leaving the presentation, you know how these things go — they usually hand you something on the way out. A t-shirt, a hat, a piece of merchandise. A little token of the experience. For The Odyssey, arguably the most anticipated film of the year outside of the Avengers at year’s end, for what might be Chris Nolan’s greatest achievement — entirely shot in IMAX, the culmination of his career, the movie the whole industry is counting on to do six or seven hundred million dollars — they handed us a beer cozy.

A blue beer cozy with the date “7-17-26” printed on it.

We actually had two other beer cozies already in the gift bag from the beginning of the event, so now we were walking out with three beer cozies and a Fandango card good for one free drink at a bar at Caesar’s Palace, which I’m sure a lot of people used happily. But three beer cozies. For The Odyssey. For a movie about ancient Greece. Before anything on that cozy was invented. Before polyurethane, before color printing, before dates were written in that format. Maybe there’s some string on there somewhere that Homer might have recognized. But this blue foam sleeve — not a cool color, not an interesting shape, not an image that means anything — this was the physical manifestation of how Universal felt about their own presentation.

That was the cherry on the sundae. Or the beer cozy on the sundae, as it were.

Comparing Notes: Warner Bros., Sony, and What Universal Left on the Table

After what was a very strong Warner Bros. presentation yesterday — probably a bit too long, but substantive — and a solid if smaller Sony presentation that leaned into the future despite not having a huge number of movies coming up this year, Universal felt like a studio that decided it could get away with celebrity and volume instead of content and intention. They blasted us with Snoop Dogg. They asked us to stand multiple times for people who deserve standing ovations in the right context. They didn’t talk about the future — not in any real way. The only forward-looking item was the Snoop Dogg biopic, which doesn’t have a year, much less a date. And unlike Warner Bros., which is operating under the very real threat of a Paramount acquisition before this year is out and still talked about expanding its slate over the next few years, Universal didn’t deign to discuss what comes next.

They have eleven movies this year — the Justin Peel film, which was never given a title and was quietly absent from the presentation, has apparently slipped from its October slot, so now it’s eleven. They also still had the quiet disappearance of the Jonah Hill-Kristen Wiig comedy, “Cut Off” or whatever it was called, which vanished from the summer without announcement. Nobody mentioned it. It’s just gone.

I want to be clear about something: I know the people at Universal. I’ve known a lot of them for a long time. I believe in the studio. I believe their intentions are good. And I believe some of these movies are going to be significantly better than they seem to me today. I’m rooting for all of them. I’ve said this throughout the week: all hands on deck, root for everyone. As a community, as a business, as an industry that needs theatrical to thrive, we need these movies to work. Every single one of them.

But it was a frustrating day. At its best, a studio presentation is a declaration: here are our films, here is why we believe in them, here is what we’re doing to support the business we’re all in together. Universal’s version of that today was: here is our biggest celebrity, here are our two biggest films shown briefly, here is a lot of very loud music, and here is a beer cozy. I hope it doesn’t reflect the movies. I really do. Disney is tomorrow, and there’s still Amazon MGM tonight — and I genuinely can’t wait for that. But today belonged to Universal, and they didn’t take it.

(And yes, last night you may have noticed my head got cut off at the top of the frame. My phone wasn’t connecting to the Wi-Fi in the room, so I switched to the iPad and held it sideways instead of vertical, and apparently it just sliced my head in half. Plus I was somewhat in the dark. So I have production problems too. The difference is I’m not going to ask you to give me a standing ovation about it.)