David Reads The Trades

David Reads The Trades: April 17, 2026

2026-04-17T17:50:07-05:00

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The Mummy (dir. Lee Cronin) opened with $1.5 million in Thursday previews, projecting a low-teens opening weekend against a reported $22 million budget.
Disney unveiled “Infinity Vision,” a new premium theater certification program, with 75 screens already certified domestically and 300 abroad, designed to rival IMAX and Dolby branding.
Dune 3 and Avengers: Doomsday remain set to open on the same December date; Sony’s Jumanji 3 moved from December 11 to Christmas Day.
Amazon MGM announced a live-action Ferngully with Marielle Heller directing — curiously omitted from their CinemaCon presentation days earlier.
Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters took pay cuts, dropping from the low-$60 million range annually; Netflix stock fell ~10% post-quarterly but remains near its pre-earnings baseline around $97.
Disney’s Hexed officially announced its voice cast — Hailee Steinfeld and Rashida Jones — though the casting reportedly happened roughly a year ago.
Law & Order: Organized Crime was canceled after four or five seasons.
Disney stock rose nearly 2% to $105.78 amid a broader market rally tied to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Back from CinemaCon

It’s Friday, April 17th, and I’m back in Los Angeles after being at CinemaCon all week. I’m going to do a separate CinemaCon wrap-up piece later today, because getting back to just doing David Reads the Trades seems like the right move. I’m still organizing my thoughts about CinemaCon — I haven’t really spoken at all about the Disney presentation, which went pretty well, and I have other things to say about other things. So let’s just get to the news.

The Mummy and the Weekend Box Office

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy unwrapped $1.5 million in Thursday previews. That generally means low teens is what the projection usually is. Whether that actually holds true is a real question — it’s not a sure bet anymore what happens with these preview-to-opening multipliers. But it gives you some sense of things. They’re saying the horror pick is eyeing an opening around $12 million on an alleged $22 million cost. So that’s about what a million and a half in previews looks like. Moving along.

Ferngully Lives Again, For Some Reason

A day or two after Amazon MGM was at CinemaCon, for some reason they’re announcing now that Ferngully is returning as a live-action film with Marielle Heller directing. How does that get lost in the process of going to CinemaCon and not mentioning it? They weren’t shy about mentioning future movies at all, and yet somehow Ferngully slipped through the cracks. It couldn’t be that the deal just got done last night. So I wonder what that’s all about.

I’m not a big fan of Ferngully. Some people love it. I was never a fan. But apparently it’s getting made into a movie. Finally, after all these years, another old thing being resurrected. A lot of old things being resurrected lately.

The Non-News Cycle

Scrolling through the trades today, the other thing about the news is there’s no news. For instance, here’s a classic non-news story: Catherine Newton returns to the MCU with Avengers: Doomsday as Cassie Lang following Quantumania. Apparently Catherine Newton said online that she’s in Doomsday. Not a news story. The movie’s long been shot. It’s old news, but I guess she wanted some attention, so she got some attention.

Apparently the people who do Hot Ones, the interview show where people eat hot wings, are now going to do Slice Joint with somebody named Speedy Morman — not spelled like Mormon the religion, M-O-R-M-A-N. I guess this guy is so great he needs to eat pizza with his celebrities. So there you go. He’s going to eat pizza with celebrities.

That’s pretty much all the news on the front pages today. Almost everything on the film side is about CinemaCon, so there’s not actually a lot of new information that isn’t old information. I didn’t mention I, Rocky in terms of Amazon when I talked about it the other day — that thing’s going to be not only a hit, but it could be an Oscar movie, almost certainly likely an Oscar movie. And oh, the irony that the lovely director who makes these very silly films is going to make his second drama as an Oscar nominee.

And here’s another weird one: “Disney Animation’s Hexed Finds Its Cast — Hailee Steinfeld and Rashida Jones.” I’m pretty sure they found this cast a year ago. They have animation with their voices coming out of it. But somehow the news is out now, so there’s that. I don’t think they “found” their cast — I think they’ve had their cast for quite a while.

Disney’s Infinity Vision

The one thing that happened outside of CinemaCon proper that I think is worth talking about here instead of just in the CinemaCon piece is Infinity Vision, which Disney has announced. Their idea is to offer the premium experience at theaters that are not IMAXs around the country. The question a lot of people are asking in a lot of different ways is: what the hell is this going to be, why are they doing it, and what are they really after?

Basically, they’re saying it’s a standard of projection and sound that they will start certifying at theaters around the country, giving a thumbs-up to screens that are Infinity Vision-approved at a certain quality level. They’ve already got 75 certified as premium screens domestically with 300 abroad, so they’ve gotten a head start before the CinemaCon announcement.

Generally, there’s a lot of suspicion out there about what they’re trying to do. I personally think they are getting around the problem they’ve had with IMAX, which is that IMAX makes commitments to other movies, and then Disney has to either fight for position or figure out a way to make up for the fact they don’t have certain screens.

For instance, this last year, the argument between Zootopia 2 and Wicked 2 — they were separated by a week, so they had an advantage there. But basically Zootopia 2 got some IMAX screens but not all the IMAX screens, and they kind of split with Wicked. The year before, it was a fight with the original Wicked. For next Thanksgiving, they’re going to get aced out of IMAX screens because Narnia is getting IMAX screens the weekend before and after Thanksgiving. So their animated movie Hexed is going to get squeezed.

And of course, right now the big conversation has been about Dune 3 and Avengers opening on the same date in December. Sony’s Jumanji 3 moved to Christmas Day from the 11th, so the 11th in theory has opened space for some IMAX screens, but Disney has basically said no, they’re going to stick with the same date and create this Infinity Vision branding to give people the impression that when they go to a screen with this imprimatur of quality from Disney, it will be as good as — or maybe even better than — the IMAX or Dolby screens.

IMAX is not exclusive to AMC but dominated by AMC in America. Dolby is exclusive to AMC in America, though apparently that won’t always be so. A lot of the major exhibitors have non-Dolby, non-IMAX, high-quality premium screens — some with their own branding, some without special branding. They’re in that business. They just don’t have those name brands that people look to.

I keep comparing Infinity Vision to THX. It sounds like it’s kind of THX. The question is, of course, THX charged for it, and the brand gave value to theaters. Will Disney be greedy? Will Disney try to turn this into money? Some people actually think Disney’s going to try to use this as leverage to get IMAX screens. All those things are possible. I don’t want to poo-poo everybody’s paranoid ideas about what Disney’s going to do with this. I think it’s kind of a basic marketing tool that theoretically could be good for exhibitors. So until I am told otherwise by an exhibitor, I’m going to stick with my position. But it’s possible I’m wrong. It could be something else.

Netflix Quarterlies and the Stock Market

Also in news that happened while we were away: Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters took a pay cut at Netflix. Oh, those poor souls — I don’t know how they’re going to survive. They were each making low sixties, millions of dollars a year. They were making over a million dollars a week, like a million and a quarter a week. Ted got a little bit more than Greg — sibling rivalry and all that. And now they’re just going to make just over a million dollars a week. How can they both survive this? It is shocking. Shocking, I tell you, that such pain is happening.

They had their quarterlies at Netflix yesterday, which were so uninteresting that I didn’t bother to really talk about them. And even today, not really much to discuss.

What is interesting is the stock market situation. Netflix is up today, so there is that. But if you look at the chart, Netflix has been operating in a range — they took a dip with their low point really down in February. Then it raised up to the high 90s, around 96, which was the previous high point. Just before the quarterly came out, the stock went from the mid-90s range to 100, topping out at about $107 a share. And then when the information came out and their projections weren’t quite what people were hoping — they missed a little bit on their estimates — it came crashing down.

That’s the story. I think everybody’s running this story about Netflix losing a fortune, but the truth is they’re at $97.08 today, still a couple more hours in the stock exchange, and $97.08 is actually higher than they’d been — except for this peak right before the quarterly — for a month or so. They’d been floating around the same number. Basically, there was a spike when they were about to announce their quarterly, which happens almost every quarter with them, and then instead of the spike continuing up or staying even, they dropped. However, it’s really nonsensical because where they’ve fallen to is pretty much where they’ve been, and actually a little bit higher, because they’ve been down in the 94 and 85 range. Now they’re at $97. It’s a non-event situation. The quarterly is a non-event. Not shocking at all.

The broader stock market has gone crazy today because the Strait of Hormuz is theoretically open. Iran announced they opened the Strait of Hormuz. Who’s in control of the Strait of Hormuz? Who let the dogs out? I don’t know. But apparently everybody’s happy. Dow Jones up 910 points, NASDAQ up $325, S&P 500 up $82. In the film business, the only one technically down is Netflix, which as I said is at about $97.11 a share — down almost 10%. However, it doesn’t take them below where they were before the little pre-hype of the quarterly. It was a bunch of people speculating on the quarterly, thinking it was going to go up, and it didn’t. But what it’s come down to is where it was before the hype moment started. So it’s kind of a bullshit story when people are saying “oh my God, Netflix is taking a big hit.” Netflix didn’t take a growth moment, but it did not really take a big hit. It just took a big hit versus speculation right before the quarterly, which happens every quarter.

Disney, by the way, is up almost 2%, at $105.78 at the moment, which is getting back to close to where they should be. The easing on the oil pressure — the cost of oil, the cost of gasoline — I think is significant in Disney’s numbers. Everybody else is just up pennies and dimes and nickels, maybe a quarter here and there. So even though the stock market is wildly up, Netflix is down, but it’s a false kind of down. The people who are turning it into a thing, which of course our media loves to do, are kind of full of crap today.

James Hibbert’s Winners and Losers: A Critique

There’s a James Hibbert piece at the Hollywood Reporter — “Hollywood Winners and Losers, CinemaCon Edition” — which means Vegas winners and losers. It’s a really weird piece because a lot of it has nothing to do with the event.

“Lost: DC Studios presentation.” Any news out of CinemaCon about The Batman Part Two? How about the Superman sequel? That’s called going to CinemaCon expecting something, not getting it, and then blaming the studio. Not smart.

“Won: Marvel’s presentation.” Marvel’s presentation was all “oh, you want your biggest characters back? Here’s every single one of them.” Yeah, that’s what the movie is. And the movie’s opening this year. Unlike the next Superman movie. Unlike the next Batman movie. They’re opening this year. They’re promoting for this year. That’s what you do at CinemaCon. It’s not that complicated. And yet somehow they’re the winners and DC is the loser. I think you kind of have to want to find a winner and loser to make that happen.

Then: “Star Wars.” “It’s weird that Disney presented the first 20 minutes of the first Star Wars movie in seven years, and yet Mandalorian and Grogu were almost forgotten once the Avengers trailer played.” By whom, James? Tell me, James. Who forgot The Mandalorian and Grogu? I don’t get it. It’s like — have two ideas in your head at once. I know it’s possible.

“Won: Epic prestige trailers. Attendees were stunned by the first seven minutes of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 3.” The media behaved as though they were stunned. There was nothing stunning. I mean, the Dune movies are beautiful. Denis is a great director. They’re great looking. They have great music. They have great everything. They’re terrific. I’m not saying anything bad about Dune 3 at all. But the media has this thing where it just talks to itself and then says “this is what everybody thinks.” The Dune footage was nice, but it wasn’t overwhelming or shocking or very different than what we’ve seen in the other two Dune movies. It was good.

Same thing with The Odyssey, by the way. Terrific, good to see it. It was actually less than some things we’d seen before — the package they put on IMAX four or five months ago had more footage of the sections they showed. This one had footage of the horse being taken into Troy and some other footage that was different. But it wasn’t even clear whether Christopher Nolan has cut the movie differently or whether it’s just how they cut the materials they show. It was great. It’s terrific. We’re all in love with Dune 3 and The Odyssey. But it wasn’t “oh my God, shocking.”

And then this thing with The Social Reckoning — a bunch of nerdy 50-somethings or 40-somethings talking about Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, basically playing him like he’s mentally ill. I’m sure it’s a lovely performance and a good piece of work. However, this obsession of these guys who are, I guess, too similar to Mark Zuckerberg, more interested in Zuckerberg than the real world is — it’s weird. The obsessions of the media at this event are not the obsessions of the exhibitors I’ve spoken to, the people who were just there for the trade show doing their thing. The things they were interested in were not necessarily the same things.

And of course, they’re not necessarily things I’m interested in either. There was a standing ovation for Snoop Dogg at the beginning of one of the events. There was a standing ovation for Jon Batiste at another. What does this have to do with movies? For me, that wasn’t the thing. But I understand people getting up on their feet and getting excited — that’s the hype machine.

Then there’s the complaining about Tom Holland showing up by hologram. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, Jason Momoa, Johnny Depp, and David Ellison all showed up in person, and that apparently made the Hollywood Reporter so much happier.

“Lost: Lionsgate” — because they weren’t doing a thing. By not being there, they lost, apparently. Likewise, and maybe the weirdest: “Lost: Alamo Drafthouse and AMC moviegoers,” because they’re talking about things happening at Alamo Drafthouse, which Sony technically owns at this point, or at least a chunk of it. But somehow the issue of whether people are now ordering by phone instead of by paper at the Drafthouse got brought up in a CinemaCon piece when it had nothing to do with CinemaCon. I don’t understand that.

And then the pièce de résistance: “In non-CinemaCon news,” he says — non-CinemaCon news — the LuxeMax influencer Cavicular managed to unite the internet in mocking his doe-eyed meltdown and interview walk-off. I still don’t know who Cavicular is. I don’t give a shit who Cavicular is. It is non-CinemaCon news. Why is it being brought up in the Hollywood Reporter as a winner or loser at CinemaCon? I don’t understand it. I mean, I do understand it, but it’s too dumb for me to understand. I’m not saying the writer is dumb. I’m just saying it’s kind of loosey-goosey. This reads more like an influencer piece than a journalistic piece. I guess that’s a nice way of saying it, isn’t it? Thank you, David, for being nice.

The Rest of the Trade News (Or Lack Thereof)

Looking at the TV section for anything that looks like news: they canceled Law & Order: Organized Crime — wasn’t a really good show anyway, in my opinion. Casting, casting, casting. Somebody’s trying to get a spinoff show for The Pit — a different shift, but the same idea, I guess.

Meanwhile, just after David Ellison showed up in Vegas for CinemaCon, he flew quickly to New York for the upfronts for Paramount+, where they talked a lot about foreign female drones, which is not really a surprise — that is a hot topic at the moment.

Over at Variety, their top story is goodbye Stabler — the end of Law & Order: Organized Crime going away after four or five seasons. Then there’s a story about D4VD being arrested for murder. No idea who any of them are, so I’m just not going to comment. More about CinemaCon, more about Ferngully — mostly there’s really no news.

The Hollywood Reporter’s lead story is D4VD being arrested for the murder of a teen in Los Angeles. There’s another analysis of Netflix stock. There’s a quotation from the CNBC Changemakers event in Manhattan on Thursday where Sandra Bullock and Pamela Adlon talked and didn’t say much of anything, even though they want to make it a story. And again, the CinemaCon piece about Robert Downey Jr. showing up and showing the trailer from Avengers: Doomsday, which they showed twice. Oh my God, they showed it twice. Not the first time that’s happened. But the media is mostly there for the first time — most of the media that’s there has not been there as long as five years, much less 32 years. I’ve been going to CinemaCon slash ShoWest for a very long time.

By the way, they use this thing a lot, repeatedly, about so-and-so showing up at CinemaCon “for the first time” because it used to be called ShoWest. So they’ve been there before, but not in eight years or ten years or whatever it’s been since it was ShoWest. Just one of those little PR things. Not really that interesting and not worth lying about, and yet somehow here we are.

Meanwhile, online personalities and comedians are taking over TV and newspapers as the primary news source. And what could make you more sick to your stomach than that? Speaking as an online personality, a poll conducted for the Jordan Center of Journalism, Innovation, and Advocacy at the University of Mississippi shows how the media landscape has fractured. Ooh, it’s fractured. Yeah — people are getting dumber by listening to dumber people.

There’s a movie called Ricky that was at Sundance that is self-distributing. They’re going to explain why in the story, but the answer is nobody bought the movie. That’s why they’re self-distributing. Not really a complicated one.

Over at IndieWire, the top story is about The Pit finale being open to interpretation. I’m not going to look at that at all because I don’t want to ruin it — I haven’t seen it yet. A couple more interviews, and no news. No news is no news.

CinemaCon: The Quick Take

This was relatively brief today. I guess the world just stopped and was busy trying to be excited by Tom Cruise as Digger. That was one of the highlights of the event for me. There were a lot of highlights. In terms of the big movies, CinemaCon went rather well. In terms of the issues, everybody kind of went into a coma and gave up a little bit. I will talk about that when I do the CinemaCon wrap-up piece, which I assume will be later today or tomorrow — I’m a little exhausted, trying to get myself paced.

It was a positive CinemaCon for the most part, though it leaves me continually worried because we still have two issues on the table. The first is the merger, which I still believe is going to happen, most likely. I don’t think there’s much chance of it actually stopping, but there are people who really, really want it to stop.

The second is the issue of windows, which continues even though it wasn’t much of a conversation. It was brought up by each of the studios because they were so proud of themselves for having a 45-day window. But the window that actually matters — now that the particular horror show of the 17-day PVOD window is over, we hope — is the SVOD window. Even David Ellison was up there proclaiming a 45-day window and also proclaiming the 90-day SVOD window, which is the paid streamers — in his case Paramount+ — which is way too short. Still too short. If your SVOD window is only 90 days, the fact that you gave up to 45 days on the PVOD window ain’t doing the heavy lifting. The SVOD window is much more important than the PVOD window. But pretty much everybody except a couple of people gave up on really talking about it because they’re happy with the status quo. For a lot of places, it’s four months. Three months is not unusual at all. There are people doing it at two months, which really has to stop immediately. It really needs to be at least four months and probably should be five months. But I will discuss that at some other time.

What to Watch This Weekend

You should go to the movies this weekend. I’m going to the movies this weekend. Why don’t you go to the movies this weekend? For one thing, if you haven’t seen Project Hail Mary on an IMAX screen, it’s back this weekend — or maybe the next week, so check that out. I have friends who were out of the country when the movie came out. Even though we bought tickets together to go see it opening weekend — actually the weekend before opening — they were out of town, so we’re hoping to go see it with them this weekend. I’m also planning on seeing The Mummy, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. Haven’t seen it yet. And maybe I’ll go see a third movie this weekend. Who knows? I love movies.

I have TV to catch up on also. I haven’t seen the finale of The Pit. But I am heavily recommending, if you’re in your house, get your Apple TV+ and watch Margot Has Money Troubles. It’s apparently only the first three episodes so far, but it’s still a good watch. It’s weird — when I watched it, I liked it a lot, and it’s actually grown in my esteem over time. I can’t say exactly why. I think it’s because each of the actors in it are at the height of their game. It’s a really interesting, complex, weird show, which ultimately comes back to normal, deep family love and emotions and feelings and fear and the looking for love and trying to survive in this crazy world. In some ways, it is a strange classic already in the making. It’s been over a month since I watched it, and it still sticks with me. It’s one of my favorite things this year. Check it out on Apple TV+.

I also want to watch Beef, which is now on Netflix. There are a bunch of things around. When you go away for four days, the world keeps on going, whether you like it or not.

Thanks for your attention. I’ll be back on Monday with David Reads the Trades, and I’ll have the CinemaCon wrap-up piece — I did almost say “Comic-Con,” didn’t I? — up either today or tomorrow, where I’ll try to bring together everything that happened at the show. That’ll be up this weekend. I’ll see you soon. Sooner than you want, damn it. Have yourself a good one.

David Reads Cinemacon Day 4 Morning

2026-04-16T11:40:44-05:00

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CinemaCon Day 4 features Paramount presenting in the morning and Disney in the afternoon, marking the final day of the annual exhibition conference.
Amazon MGM held a presentation earlier in the week, described as concise and focused on a “more movies” message consistent with messaging from multiple studios at the event.
David Ellison’s attendance at the Paramount presentation was uncertain heading into the morning session.
Amazon MGM distributed physical prop swords as promotional swag for a He-Man project, raising logistical concerns about the items clearing TSA checkpoints as attendees depart Las Vegas.

David Reads CinemaCon, Day 4: The Shortest One Ever

Good morning from CinemaCon, Day Four. I’m writing this from the second row, waiting for the Paramount presentation to begin. It’s the final day of the show — Paramount in the morning, Disney in the afternoon. I would have shown my face on camera, but I glanced at the lens and realized my hair was a complete disaster. Vanity won. So instead you get a dispatch from the mania of a theater filling up before a major studio presentation.

I should note that I’m not really supposed to be broadcasting from in here — or videotaping, or doing much of anything — but it’s pre-show, so it’s not that big a deal.

Amazon MGM: Good Show, Real Substance

I haven’t reported yet on Amazon MGM’s presentation, which I thought was very, very good. Lean — not as thick as I would have liked — but they stayed on point and did what they needed to do. I came away pretty pleased with how it went.

Like several other studios this week, they leaned heavily into the “more movies” message. At this point, roughly half the studios at CinemaCon have made that their central theme, which is encouraging in the abstract. What nobody is talking about, though — and this genuinely frustrates me — is the SVOD window. The pay streaming window. It is extremely important right now, and it’s way too short. The problem is that Cinema United didn’t bring it up, and the MPA speeches — both of them, frankly kind of ridiculous — didn’t bring it up either. So naturally no studio is going to put themselves in harm’s way by raising it on their own. They’re busy celebrating themselves. Fine.

What to Expect This Morning

The big question going into the Paramount presentation is whether David Ellison shows up. Word is he won’t be here, but we’ll find out shortly. Looking at the stage, there are no musical instruments set up anywhere, which suggests we’re going to get our first show without an opening live musical number in several days. No Billie Eilish playing live today, apparently. Maybe she’ll appear with a backing track. Who knows.

The He-Man Sword Problem

I can’t close without mentioning the most delightful logistical catastrophe to emerge from this week. At the Amazon MGM event last night, they gave out swords. As in, physical prop swords, for He-Man. Adorable promotional item. Great bit of swag. Except that now everybody in town is quietly panicking about the thousands of swords that are about to hit TSA checkpoints as the entire film industry tries to fly home tonight and tomorrow morning.

My read: those swords are not making it through. TSA agents are going to have a field day. After months of the Trump administration starving the agency of funding, they are about to inherit a massive haul of He-Man merchandise to take home to their kids. Confiscation as compensation. There are worse outcomes.

What’s Coming

I’ll be back later today with a proper breakdown of both Amazon MGM and Paramount — probably before the Disney presentation this afternoon — and then a full Disney piece tonight or tomorrow morning. My regular David Reads the Trades drops Friday, usually somewhere between 11:30 and 12:30 Pacific.

This is almost certainly the shortest entry in the history of this column. But I’m sitting here with nothing to do while people find their seats and the third floor balcony slowly fills in, so here we are. Have a great Thursday. I’ll see you at the movies.

David Reads CinemaCon, Day 3, April 15, 2026

2026-04-15T21:52:30-05:00

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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.)

David Reads Cinemacom Day 2 April

2026-04-14T22:51:22-05:00

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.

David Reads Cinemacom Day 1 April

2026-04-14T02:12:38-05:00

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.

David Reads The Trades: April 10, 2026

2026-04-10T15:44:07-05:00

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.

David Reads The Trades: April 8, 2026

2026-04-08T14:14:29-05:00

Toplines

The Academy Awards confirmed they will stick with their late February/early March date for the foreseeable future; PGA announced two years of dates slotted two weeks prior, and SAG-AFTRA followed suit.
Jeff Schell is out as Paramount president, per Deadline’s exclusive, though he has effectively been on eggshells since the Skydance deal closed.
The $24 billion in Middle Eastern funding for approximately a quarter of the Paramount Skydance acquisition was reconfirmed, despite having been known since last fall.
Cinema United announced the formation of a Filmmaker Leadership Council featuring Jerry Bruckheimer, Emma Thomas, Ryan Coogler, Brad Bird, Jason Reitman, and Celine Song, with Greg Foster serving as executive director. The council will present at CinemaCon in Las Vegas next week.
Euphoria Season 3 reviews are largely negative, with critical pieces from Daniel Feinberg at The Hollywood Reporter, Alison Herman at Variety, and Ben Travers at IndieWire all expressing reservations about the series’ continued relevance.
Steven Soderbergh revealed he burned 44 years’ worth of notebooks in a fire pit in the Hudson Valley; his new film The Christophers is nearing release.
The Michael Jackson biopic underwent 22 days of reshoots costing $15 million, completely changing the film’s ending ahead of its release in a few weeks.
Markets rallied following de-escalation of Iran tensions, with the Dow up nearly 1,200 points, though indices remain roughly 5% below pre-crisis levels. Disney rose 3.3% to nearly $99/share.

The Academy’s Commitment to Stagnation

The news has already disappeared from the front pages of the trades, barely 24 hours later, and we’ve already established that the Academy Awards have decided to give up on making anything better and just keep riding out that late February, early March date they’ve beaten into the ground while watching audiences get smaller and smaller.

I was going to write a piece yesterday, frankly, and I just had a hard time getting excited or even thoughtful about something I’ve been talking about for 20 years. It’s just stupid. It’s just dumb. But it is what it is. You can’t fight city hall. The Academy will do what it wants. The Academy has every right to do what it wants. I am not the king of the Academy. I’m not even a member of the Academy. I will never be a member of the Academy, because I’m not allowed. But even if I was allowed, I don’t know if I’d be a member in any case.

The decision to stick to March was followed immediately by all the monkeys — as I call them, unkindly — with PGA and SAG-AFTRA falling right in line, grabbing their slots two weeks before the Oscars. The PGA actually announced two years’ worth of dates. SAG only went for one year, but they’ll certainly be in the same place. And now we’ll get to hear from the fake Golden Globes. I say “fake” the way Trump would say it — bad for me, bad, bad. But they are a fake organization now, owned by two very wealthy men, one of whom was very nice to me recently. Still fake.

This past awards season was bad in a lot of ways for a lot of people. Obviously it was good for Warner Brothers, though even for Warner Brothers, I think they didn’t really control the season so much as they had the good fortune of having the two movies that were most obvious to be in position. They managed to screw up one battle after another just enough to not be able to avoid the inevitable winner winning — because it was such an inevitable winner from the day it opened.

Unlike, interestingly, The Departed, which opened in a similar time slot, also without the film festivals. I think it opened a couple weeks later, but it also went around all of that and was up against a variety of films that people really loved. It was kind of the movie where we didn’t know it would win because other things won along the way. There were distractions. There are always distractions. There’s always this idea that we need to create a race out of the Academy, which is what the media is there for, I guess.

The Academy just seems perfectly happy getting to the next deal. They don’t seem interested in change of any kind.

Influencing the Influencers: On Critics, Trades, and Relevance

I was reading a Rick Ellis piece today on Substack, which is worth taking a look at, about the role of critics versus the role of influencers, and where he tries to suss out a place in all of that over the many years he’s been in the business. He and I have kind of parallel lives — me leaning much more toward the movie side, him leaning much more toward television. I’ve worked in both and written about both, and I actually started my career in television. Well, I started in theater, but that’s a whole different conversation.

Reading his piece, I realized something about my own role in all of this over the years: I have really been an influencer for the influencers. My audience has never been as big as whomever. I’ve had success and I’ve had position. I was, many years ago in the late ’90s, really the person — with the help of Rough Cut, which was part of Time Warner at the time, and TNT Cable — to break through to the studios and make the internet safe and available and accessible as part of the process of movie marketing and publicity.

Initially, Ain’t It Cool News had a very different position and scared the shit out of people, generally speaking, because they were reckless. Don’t tell them that, because one of them will scream at you. But my role was not to make it palatable — I was always a hard-ass in my way, sometimes too much when I was younger and trying to get more attention. As things moved along, Movie City News had its place in the history of all of this. But ultimately, my role as a writer has been to influence the influencers. That’s my audience. Smaller, but significant in a way, and it continues to be.

However, the people I’m influencing have gotten older, not younger. I do have some young people who pay attention, but I’ve never been one to chase a younger audience, which I probably should be. There is a group of people under 40 who truly have no idea who I am or why I’m asking them for access to anything. That’s something I just have to live with, even though I have access to all the people they want access to.

This connects to something bigger about relevance itself. The Hollywood Reporter’s lead story is Daniel Feinberg’s review of Euphoria Season 3, framed around the question: has Sam Levinson’s HBO drama aged out of relevance? I have a great deal of respect for Feinberg, and I would say this probably for myself as well — being my age, how would I know? What is relevance? Do I know what’s relevant? Does Daniel still know what’s relevant? Do any of us who are over a certain age?

The thing is: is it relevant to a 25-year-old? Is it relevant to a 35-year-old? Is it relevant to a 55-year-old? How we connect to movies and television has a lot to do with how old we are and what generation of viewing experiences we’ve had. Your mileage may vary. The idea of relevance is actually somewhat irrelevant at this point.

This is the problem with having brands reviewing movies instead of people. Variety has another Euphoria review from Alison Herman, and it doesn’t seem very happy either. I’m not connected enough to Herman’s work as a TV critic to really know what to take from it. There’s nothing wrong with her, but I don’t really know her work enough to care. Unless I have some sense of what a critic thinks and why they think it and how they think — not a personal relationship, but some intellectual familiarity — I couldn’t care less. It’s just another person talking. Everybody has a fucking opinion.

IndieWire’s Ben Travers says Sam Levinson’s HBO drama grows old and boring. People are easily bored, as we’ve learned. I haven’t watched the season yet, so I don’t have a strong opinion, and I don’t need to fight about it. But the reviews seem not so positive. I love the series and I’m very curious. I’ll have an opinion about the show itself. I don’t think I’ll have an opinion about its “relevance.”

We’ve got to keep the forest and the trees in view at the same time. You need to be able to see both. That’s a recurring theme on this show.

The Trades and Their Discontents

The funny thing is, trades always had their place. I make fun of them on a regular basis, every day. But the truth is that trades had a certain position when I came into this business, and my engagement with the trades was actually one of the reasons I got into entertainment journalism, which I had no intention of doing.

When I came back to Los Angeles and was looking for something to do, I did a story for the Chicago Tribune that turned out to be much more complicated than expected. It was around the movie The Flintstones, and I uncovered this conspiracy — huge is relative, of course — about the writers and who got credit and who got paid. The point is, I found out then that the trades had no interest in investigative journalism of any kind. Nor did a lot of other outlets, including the Tribune. There was this story about 32 writers on the movie, and the more in-depth story I was pursuing got poo-pooed by a bunch of people, including The New Yorker and other places, because supposedly it had already been done — even though my story had nothing to do with what had been done. The Last Action Hero had also happened, which turned out to have some bad reporting in it, so there was a big drama over that. People were gun-shy and uninterested in doing entertainment journalism.

The role of the trades has been an issue for me from the start of my career. And it’s evolved in this weird way. The idea that it could get worse is actually a strange thing, and yet here we are.

Looking at today’s trade landscape: Deadline’s lead breaking news is Jeff Schell out as Paramount president. They have it as an exclusive. I have it as old news. Was Jeff Schell really ever the Paramount president? Kind of. He’s been on eggshells since the deal closed. A lot of this stuff that’s come down today officially has just been the norm.

Their number two story is Extraction 3 getting a summer slot at Netflix. So maybe the least unsuccessful big expensive action title at Netflix is going to go for a third time. The piece will tell you how popular it is and how wonderful it is. I wouldn’t watch it if you tortured me, frankly. And I really like Chris Hemsworth. No interest at all.

Variety’s top story and cover is that Hacks ends on a high. The idea that you’re doing a cover story, which is a feature, and kind of positioning it like it’s a criticism piece — it’s by Michael Schneider, who does write television criticism. So what is it? It’s lunch meat and shoe polish at the same time. They’ve also got their Legal Impact Report for 2026, which is when Variety tries to influence influencers and get attention and ad sales by thanking top attorneys for being so wonderful.

Then there’s a headline I’m not going to name the show for, but it’s about why the creator explains why a certain character — spoiler, they literally have the word “spoiler” in the headline — was killed off early in the season. Which is a spoiler by itself. Without actually giving away the name of the character, you’re telling the audience that somebody important dies early in the season. Most people reading the trades aren’t TV critics who’ve seen it early. That’s called a spoiler. Even if you don’t tell me exactly who’s going to die, now I have it in my head. But they need headlines, they need clicks.

Jeff Schell, Paramount, and the Middle Eastern Money

Jeff Schell’s departure is being presented as breaking news, but it’s a formality. He’s been a dead man walking since the Skydance deal closed. This is similar to the $24 billion from the Middle Eastern groups that are funding roughly a quarter of the Paramount Skydance purchase. The Wall Street Journal presented it as new news a week or so ago. I guess that’s their role — when something becomes more official and specific, they put it out there. But we’ve known this was there the whole time. Since the middle of last fall, really, we were aware that this big chunk of funding was coming from the Middle East.

And of course, the Trump administration isn’t going to do anything about it or concern themselves with it, even though it’s borderline illegal in terms of the historic rules about who can own broadcast networks and things like that. I don’t think they’re going to act on it. They should do something, but what are the odds?

Paramount Skydance is also launching a publishing imprint, which is kind of ironic. The one time a merger was actually stopped that people in this industry can point to involved Paramount and Simon & Schuster. So in the midst of all this corporate drama, they’re starting a book imprint. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

Cinema United’s Filmmaker Leadership Council: Good Intentions, Wrong Tool

Cinema United — which used to be NATO, the National Association of Theater Owners, until they got tired of being confused with the boom-boom group — has announced a Filmmaker Leadership Council. Jerry Bruckheimer, Emma Thomas, Ryan Coogler, Brad Bird, Jason Reitman, and Celine Song are on the board, with more expected to join. Greg Foster, Cinema United’s senior consultant, was instrumental in forming the council and will serve as executive director.

I’m a big supporter of Cinema United. I don’t agree with everything they’re doing these days, but I believe in what they represent. However, here’s the problem.

These are not the people to be leading the push for exhibition. They are very, very pro-exhibition, and I respect that enormously. Emma Thomas is Chris Nolan’s wife and producer — a great producer who has made his visions possible functionally and then some, a partner in all kinds of ways. I give her enormous respect. Jerry Bruckheimer has one of the great producing careers of all time, top ten no question, and even if you’re not a huge fan of his kind of movies, you have to respect what he’s done. I think Brad Bird is a freaking genius. I know how Jason Reitman thinks about the industry. I have a sense of Ryan Coogler.

But can they, in this committee role, be anything more than front people for the movement? “Let’s keep cinema going, let’s keep cinema going.” Per the organization, the council will work with Cinema United to provide vital feedback and recommendations on the most pressing issues facing theatrical exhibition today — consolidation, windows, promotion, marketing, innovation, and technology.

Greg Foster, my fingers are crossed for you, but I think you’re basically setting up a promotional event, all things considered. And that, to me, is unfortunate, because there’s a lot of work to do.

The last time we had a bunch of important people sitting on a stage talking about exhibition, it was Scorsese and Spielberg — as important as anybody is or has ever been in this business — saying it’s over, movie theaters are over. Before that, it was 3D is coming, 3D is the thing. Which of course turned out to be something nobody really wanted outside of Avatar. They still do it, particularly with animation, because it’s easier and cheaper and they can screw another buck or two out of families. But for regular movies, 3D has been a failure. Then it was different frame rates. That came and went. We keep hearing from geniuses — and they are truly geniuses, I’m not making fun of them on that basis — but they keep saying “this is the thing.” And then Spielberg and Scorsese just kind of gave up. Of course, they’re both still making movies for theaters.

These filmmakers will do a CinemaCon event next week in Vegas. They’ll share their insight into how great movie theaters are and how important the communal experience is — stuff we hear every single year. They’re much more important to the film business than I am, great minds all. And yet they can’t change anything. My experience is that they don’t really understand the business of exhibition and distribution and the relationship between them.

These are filmmakers. They’re making art, and they make great art. Even as producers, they’re making art. Making the donuts, however complicated and however brilliant, is not the same thing as selling the donuts. And it’s not the same thing as being the retailer for the donuts, which is what exhibition essentially is — maintaining a brick-and-mortar operation and everything that entails.

I hate to be cynical about it. I wish I could get excited and tell you it’s going to change something. But it doesn’t change anything. It just creates more stories in the trades.

What Exhibition Actually Needs

What I’ve found over the years, particularly back when Cinema United was still NATO, is that there’s this fundamental difficulty with really bringing exhibitors together. There are now four exhibitors in the country with over 1,000 screens each. The other roughly 18,000 screens belong to smaller exhibitors — some with 150 or 300 screens, so they’re not nobodies, not irrelevant at all. But the exhibition business has gotten very top-loaded.

And then there’s this sense within the organization and the industry that exhibitors can’t collude. Meanwhile, studios are colluding all the time and just lying about it. The exhibitors have this kind of moral high ground, and they don’t collude effectively. There is no consistency between the groups.

The MPA pays an enormous amount of money to their leadership — former government officials — to go to Washington and try to change policy. That’s their primary role. Cinema United, even though they’re related to MPA and used to be very tight with them, are no longer quite as close. There’s disagreement between the groups. There’s been a separation. Things they used to do in tandem, very effectively, don’t really get done anymore.

What we need is the ability for exhibitors to collude to some degree. They should be lobbying the government for clarity and room to do it legally. Something like making Tuesdays and Wednesdays $5 days or 50% off days should be a standard across the industry. Every exhibitor has their own slightly different version and wants to do their own thing, but the inability to unite as a group and say “across America, exhibitors are going to offer this” is a real problem.

I went through this very specifically with 80 for Brady, a Paramount movie where Chris at Paramount created a promotional stunt with cheaper tickets on multiple days. It played out, but not as well as it should have because it was only in certain markets, and this market was a little different and that market was a little different. The exhibitors couldn’t get together — they’re not allowed to have a unified voice. The idea was right, but it couldn’t work under those conditions.

I am not a believer in variable pricing. I think that would actually come close to the end of exhibition. It’s very destructive, and we’ve seen this with DVD in particular. When you start price competition between theaters and certain movies, the audience is not capable of or interested in chasing all of it down. We’ve found this historically over and over again. They don’t want to figure out that it’s $6 for the 3 o’clock show at one theater across town and $7.50 for the 8 o’clock show somewhere else and which kind of IMAX is this or that. They just don’t want to do it. What happens is it creates distance from actually making the sale, and then people withdraw from the whole conversation and just don’t go.

In this era, it’s easier than ever to not go and wait for something to come to your house. Now that Universal has given up on the 17-day window — great — the next thing is the window to paid video on demand and streaming. That needs to be longer. The window is now as short as two months, which is crazy, and no longer than three and a half to four months. Four months is the long average. It needs to be five or six months.

That window needs to be clearer, because that’s when people feel they’re getting the movie for free, even though they’re paying a monthly subscription. It feels like it’s coming to their house for free as part of this other package. Obviously the cost of going to a movie theater for one ticket, in most cases in most cities outside of matinees, is over $10.

The clarity of the window is critical because the audience begins to sense — and we’ve had this with the very short VOD window — that just three weekends into a movie’s life, it’s already going to TV. It’s over. And that perception lives in people’s heads. It’s not necessarily a function of how people actually behave or spend their money. It’s completely a function of how they think about that window. The movie window, as I’ve explained many times, is not for everyone. Only 10 to 15 percent of America drives the movie business primarily. Every once in a while, 10 or 15 times a year, the bigger movies pull in a wider audience. Sometimes you get movies like The Passion of the Christ where an audience that never goes to movies comes out. Angel Studios has taken advantage of that phenomenon as well.

But no matter how brilliant these filmmakers are — and they are brilliant — putting them on a stage doesn’t solve the structural problems of exhibition.

The Academy’s Deeper Problem

This all connects, in some ways, back to the Academy Awards. The Board of Governors is as brilliant a group as you’d ever find to talk about movies, the making of films, and the quality of art. And yet they’ve let the Academy itself slide into a place where it is less and less relevant every year — not because movies are less relevant, but because the Academy’s choices have been to be deflective, to protect itself rather than actually lead in a real way.

And even when it tries to lead, it screws it up. The inclusion requirements — where you have to fill out a list cataloging the demographics of your cast and crew to qualify for an Oscar — are utter bullshit. That idea comes from Franklin Leonard, the same person involved with BAFTA doing something similar. But BAFTA and the BFI give money to people to make films. They are in charge of deciding who gets funding. If you are funding movies as an organization, you have every right and every reason to say you want filmmakers to live by a set of principles. The Academy does not fund films.

The Academy Awards saying you can’t get an Oscar if you don’t fill out this form — which is not really the stated purpose, and I understand that, but it is effectively what happens — doesn’t belong in that situation. The Academy Awards are not a judgment of your moral standard. Whether or not you have the “right kind of people” on your crew or cast — whether it be gay, trans, any gender, any religion — has nothing to do with the quality of a movie. That’s a different issue, and quality is what the Academy Awards are supposed to be for.

This brilliant Board of Governors has allowed things to slide into a weird place where everything is equivocation. The pendulum has swung left and right, and the Academy has swung pretty far to the left. But that’s not the complaint, certainly not my complaint. My concern is that instead of approaching things aggressively, they’ve chosen passivity. We didn’t do it. It’s not our fault. Don’t mess with anything. Don’t change anything. Keep it the same because that’s how you grow. No, it’s not.

Steven Soderbergh Burns His Past

Steven Soderbergh burned 44 years’ worth of notebooks and says it was the right thing to do. I love Steven and haven’t seen him in many years now. I used to see him pretty regularly. We actually shot an interview with him once — just his feet, because he didn’t want to be seen on camera. I was hoping it would become legendary. It hasn’t turned out to be legendary, but some people love it. I love it.

The notebooks contained work product from over four decades of film and television projects — some made, some abandoned. Anything still relevant had been typed into computer files years ago. He didn’t want to hand them over as part of his archive, and he realized he didn’t want them invading his space with a false sense that they were still important. He went to a friend’s house in the Hudson Valley, leafed through the notebooks at a fire pit, sprayed them with lighter fluid, and torched them. He said it was really cathartic.

Steven is a dramatic human being and a brilliant one, truly one of our greatest filmmakers, though he hasn’t been as prominent as he once was. I look forward to seeing The Christophers, which I think I’m seeing tomorrow. I haven’t had a chance to see it before now. I relate to the impulse to strip down — I’ve been giving away my poster collection, because I have too many and not enough wall space. They should be seen. So for birthdays and events, I’m giving them away, trying to strip down to the essentials.

Steven was one of the great genius filmmakers of his generation, absolutely brilliant. He makes great movies and brings extraordinary skill to everything. And at the same time, he tried to get into the distribution side and just got slammed in the face because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about in that regard. Could not be a smarter human being — as smart a person as you’ll ever find in this business — and yet it’s not his thing. He had this theory, he had that theory, but he was wrong. I think we had that discussion once. Never had it again.

He just didn’t get it. It’s hard to get it, because you have to be thinking on a different wavelength. The different roles in this business are not the same.

The Rest of the Day

Arnie Olson passed away. He wrote Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He was 64 years old — way too young. He also wrote Cop and a Half, which was a Burt Reynolds movie and a punchline for a long time. It was in that category with Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot — not Kindergarten Cop, because that was actually a hit.

Mitchell Fink passed away at 82. He’d been around forever. I wouldn’t say I knew him very well, but I knew him back in New York. He may have taught a television class I was in at NYU at some point. I’d run into him places — “Hey, Mitchell, how you doing?” He was a nice enough guy. Rest in peace.

Film Independent, which also backs the Independent Spirit Awards — which, like the Academy Awards, has faded completely — received a legacy gift from Samuel and Ruth P. Cohen and will fund a new fellowship for international filmmakers. Honorable, good, and great. Thank you, Film Independent.

Bill Lawrence is talking about Season 3 of Shrinking, which I think is now all online. Terrific season. It does feel like the end of this cycle, and Lawrence has talked about the fact that the next season — and he hopes the next three seasons — will be another cycle with a different focal point in terms of the core story. That makes perfect sense, but everybody else is getting very confused by it and wanting to turn it into something wacky. I don’t know why.

Guy Pearce, Raffey Cassidy, Andrea Riseborough, and Alessandro Nivola wrapped production on a movie called High End in Ireland. Good for everybody. There’s also a great cast assembling for Armand Hammer’s The Thing That Hurts, which Wes Anderson is producing — Alfre Woodard, J.K. Simmons, Noémie Merlant, Golshifteh Farahani, Felicity Jones, among others. Armand is a great filmmaker, so I’m always happy to see what comes out next. He’s close friends with very close friends of mine, but that’s not why I look forward to his work. He’s always kind of dismissed me, which is weird. He looks at me in social situations like, “Why the hell are you here?” Life is funny sometimes.

IndieWire has a piece on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how to screw up a reboot. The deal didn’t go through. People are obsessed with the property, but the commercial industry — not just one studio — decided they didn’t want to do it. Is that “screwing it up”? If that’s your tree and you’re obsessed with that tree, sure. But the forest says maybe they didn’t think it was worthy. All of these companies sell their television products to other studios when they don’t want to make them. I just watched a new series going to Hulu that’s made by Warner Brothers — the first thing that comes up is a Warner Brothers logo. This is the norm. The idea that nobody would make Buffy the Vampire Slayer 25 or 30 years later is not unusual, not a freak show, not a rare thing.

The Michael Jackson biopic reshoot story — Kate Erbland reports it took 22 days and cost $15 million, completely changing the ending. God bless Lionsgate and their publicity team, cleaning up the mess before it becomes a mess. The movie’s coming out in a few weeks, so we’ll all know soon enough.

Tom Holland saw The Odyssey and calls it an absolute masterpiece. Not surprised, not unexpected, and even if he’s in the movie, I respect his opinion. Bless him. The new Chris Nolan movie was shot entirely on IMAX cameras, apparently. They’re pushing the art form, as artists do.

The National Enquirer’s archives are being mined for microdramas in a new deal with a company called Gamma Time. They’re betting that microdrama viewers have a taste for the sensational, with upcoming productions about Drew Peterson, Richard Ramirez, Karen Read, and Wanda Holliday. That’s kind of funny.

J.J. Abrams downsizing — I think we talked about this yesterday. It was actually not a terrible story. He’s turning 60, his business has changed, and he doesn’t need the entire infrastructure in Santa Monica. He has so much money that if he just wanted to keep it, he would. This is not a man under financial stress or being run out of town.

Jennifer Salke is apparently producing a series at Amazon MGM Studios, which I guess is part of her exit package.

The Market

Trump called off his escalation with Iran late last night. In his infinite… whatever — we can’t really call it wisdom, even as a joke — he decided not to plunge us all into death and despair for many decades to come. Good choice, Don. You’re a genius.

The Dow is up nearly 1,200 points. This morning it was up over 1,500. But it’s still 5% lower than it was when all of this started. It was 10% lower; now it’s 5%. So it has not recovered. The S&P 500 is up 150 points. NASDAQ is up about 680.

How is this affecting entertainment stocks? Same answer as always: not very much. Everything is up except Comcast, which is down almost four cents — meaning almost nothing. Disney is the one company really affected by Middle East tensions because of gas prices and park attendance. They’re up 3.3%, almost at $99 a share. I expect by tomorrow they’ll be over $100 again, which is where they should live. Netflix is also up, closing in on $100 post-split, which is about right — though I think the valuation of Netflix is still wildly oversized. Paramount is up a little but still just an $11 share, which is about where they want to be. Warner Brothers Discovery is floating in that $27 range, which means nothing. Sony is up half a buck, about 2.5% of the company’s value.

Up and down, up and down.

We’re still eight days away from Netflix quarterly earnings, which will come out during CinemaCon. And of course, Netflix doesn’t go to CinemaCon. They would have been there had they bought Warner Brothers, but they didn’t. So we’ll be dealing with those earnings while sitting in Vegas on the last day of the convention.

Not a lot of actual news today. Kind of the norm lately.

David Reads The Trades: April 7, 2026

2026-04-07T14:16:06-05:00

Toplines

Sony Pictures Entertainment layoffs are underway, with an estimated 200–300 mid-level employees expected to be cut; the company is refocusing on ROI drivers including Crunchyroll, anime, and PlayStation IP adaptations.
The Lionsgate/Graham King Michael Jackson biopic Michael opens April 24th; the film ends during Jackson’s Bad Tour rather than with the 1993 Neverland Ranch investigation sequence, which was cut following objections from the Jackson estate.
Lionsgate and Universal (international) are targeting at least $700 million worldwide for Michael; the original cut ran over three and a half hours, and Graham King still hopes to produce a two-part story.
Paramount/Skydance has confirmed that approximately $24 billion in Middle East funds — from Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi — are backing the $108 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition, representing over 20% ownership of the combined entity; the investors will allegedly not receive board seats.
Paramount/Skydance issued warrants to existing Paramount shareholders as part of the equity syndication, sending the stock up roughly 3–3.5%, though it remains under $10 a share.
Netflix will report Q1 earnings a week from Thursday; Disney’s Q1 results drop in early May, on the final day of CinemaCon.
The Drama starring Zendaya opened to approximately $15 million domestically, consistent with her Challengers opening.

Sony Layoffs: Painful but Not Shocking

Deadline’s breaking news this morning is Sony Pictures Entertainment layoffs underway today. The specifics are thin, but the broad strokes are there: Sony is refocusing around return-on-investment drivers — Crunchyroll, anime broadly, PlayStation IP adaptations for film and television — and cutting things that don’t fit that mandate. Pixomondo, apparently, is one of the casualties. I’ll be honest: I don’t even know what Pixomondo is. But they’re not doing it anymore.

The statement Sony put out is everything you’d expect from someone who just got their MBA. “Over the last year, we have sharpened our strategy and clarified where we believe the greatest opportunities exist. As we lean into those priorities, we need to operate with greater focus, speed, and alignment to strengthen our differentiated capabilities.” Boy, somebody went to business school. “We are aligning our organization with where the business is going, not where it has been.” Yeah. You don’t say.

Here’s the thing though: unlike a lot of the corporate-speak we’re going to talk about today, the argument Sony is actually making isn’t really bullshit. This is a company making a strategic pivot. It’s 200 or 300 people, all in the middle range of the income spectrum, and they’re thinning out the room. Not fun. Not okay. Not happy. But it is what it is.

The good news — and I use that phrase cautiously — is that it’s hundreds and not thousands. Because thousands is what’s still happening at Paramount. Thousands is what’s going to happen at Warner Bros. when that deal closes further. We are still in that time. But I’ve been having this argument, and I’ll say it again: I think we are toward the end of it. The Wall Street Journal has been beating this drum for years now — the industry is dying, employment is collapsing, the sky is falling. And yes, in the context of raw labor statistics, there’s something to it. But in terms of what it actually means for this industry in this moment, it doesn’t mean what they keep insisting it means. It’s been Chicken Little all the way, the same people, over and over again.

I like Ben Fritz’s work, generally. There’s nothing wrong with Ben Fritz. But they just have a tendency to beat this thing to death. And I’ll tell you how far this has gone: I found myself agreeing with Sharon Waxman on Twitter the other day about the Ben Fritz piece from the Journal. I’m agreeing with Sharon. Shocking. Truly shocking. Though I’m sure Sharon and I agree on more than people would expect. Just not on certain other things. Anyway.

I do feel for the people at Sony who are going through this. Middle management is a strange and difficult place to find yourself without a job. There’s nothing easy about being fired because you were in the middle of the org chart, making decent money but not life-changing money. If you were making mid-seven figures, you’ve got something to fall back on. If you were pulling low-to-mid six figures and spending like you were making two or three million, losing the job is genuinely hard. I hope the people affected land somewhere good.

The Michael Spin Cycle

The top story in Variety this morning is “Inside the Michael Overhaul.” It’s written by Brett Legg with Rebecca Rubin and help, which means we’re in for a treat — a lot of fictionalizing, or at least a lot of presenting single-source guesses as established fact, which is what they do a lot of over there now. But there’s something genuinely interesting buried in the piece, and it’s this: they’re now trying to sell us on the idea that Michael is one movie.

That is not what I’ve understood for the last year and change. My understanding has been that there are two movies. There was a three-and-a-half-hour cut. There was real momentum toward a two-parter. And now, suddenly, Lionsgate is using Variety — as Variety is usable — to float the story that it’s just one movie. Except there’s also this little side door left open: but there could be another movie. There could be another movie. It’s weird. It’s very weird.

What happened is pretty obvious. They watched what happened to Wicked — the self-abusing second film that should never have been a second film — and Graham King and Lionsgate looked at those numbers and said, I don’t know about Michael 2. Let’s just call it Michael and not tell anybody about Michael 2. Which, fine, as a marketing strategy. I get it. But let’s not pretend we don’t know what they’re doing.

The Variety piece, with characteristic careful sourcing — “somebody who has seen the movie,” not “we have seen the movie” — tells us the film ends during Jackson’s Bad Tour, with him preparing to take the stage. The original script apparently concluded with his sorrowful gaze as police car lights flash behind him — 1993, a decade after Thriller gripped the culture, Jackson accused of child molestation. The sequence with investigators arriving at Neverland Ranch was shot, but it’s on the cutting room floor.

The spin on why that scene was cut is where it gets interesting. According to this piece, the Jackson estate’s attorneys objected not because they minded Michael being depicted as accused of child molestation — apparently that was fine — but because one of the accusers, Jordan Chandler, has a settlement that allegedly bars any depiction or mention of him in a film. My guess? They didn’t name him in the movie. My guess is there was a pseudonym, because that’s what people in this industry do. But they’re telling us now it was a mistake by the Jackson estate, and the estate then put $10 to $15 million of its own money into reshoots, making them partial owners with an equity stake.

Did they already have an equity stake? Of course they already had an equity stake. How much did they put in originally? When? Why? I don’t believe any of this. I’m not saying it’s completely untrue — I don’t have any reason to say that definitively — but I also don’t have any reason to believe it’s true. This feels like a story that has been created. We’ll be at CinemaCon next week and we can ask the questions and they’ll have these answers ready, which will only confirm that the answers were prepared in advance.

I want to be clear about something: I don’t care how they made the sausage. I’ve never cared. I’ve been involved in making things over my career — as a writer, director, producer, production coordinator, God knows what else — and I’ve been party to all kinds of things on sets and in edit bays. I was there when George Clooney freaked out on Baby Talk, for what it’s worth, and in a good way. The point is: what happens on set, in the cutting room, in the reshoot process — it doesn’t matter. What matters is what the movie is. If the movie’s bad, sure, have whatever conversation you want. But if people enjoy it, the story of how the sausage was ground up is just a distraction from the work.

That said: Lionsgate is absolutely using this story, and using Variety specifically to tell it, for a reason. The strategy is pretty transparent. End the film at the zenith — the Bad Tour, the electrifying performance — and leave the audience wanting more. Let them ask what happens next. And then, if the movie performs, they’ll make Michael 2.

I had actually assumed for a while the film would end with Thriller — that would have been the natural cultural peak. Ending with Bad is interesting to me personally. I was 21, 22, producing a Black music video show that had been based at KBC in New York, and a syndicator took over. Anyway, that’s a whole different conversation. But I remember sitting in a post house in New York City when the Scorsese-directed video for “Bad” hit MTV, and everybody in that studio stopped what they were doing. Every table was on it. It was a cultural moment, a genuine event.

But here’s the thing: ending with Bad means you’re ending at the beginning of the problems. There is so much story left. And they’re over there saying they have 30% of footage in the can that they can use for a second movie if they want to make a second movie. If? Graham King still hopes to turn Michael into a two-part story. Still hopes. So all of this is very murky, and I think they just don’t want to admit it. I think it’s a two-part movie. They want people to see it as though it’s the only movie, feel the incompleteness of it, and then come back for more. That’s the play.

Internally, Lionsgate and Universal — which has international — are targeting at least $700 million worldwide. That’s not an outrageous number for this movie. I don’t know that it does more than $300 million domestic, but internationally I think it could do five or six hundred. And China is going to be a very significant variable here. Whatever China does on this movie is going to matter a lot to the final number. Graham King is a hard-ass producer — good in certain ways, scary in certain ways — but I’ve always liked Graham. He’s also as full of shit as anybody. And I’ll note, since we’re talking about Graham: the movie I talked with him most about, the one I remain genuinely disappointed hasn’t been made, is the Dean Martin movie he was going to make with Scorsese right after The Departed. It never happened. Anyway.

Paramount/Skydance and the Middle East Money

Paramount confirmed this morning what was not exactly a secret: the Middle East funds that backstopped David Ellison’s prior bid for the Warner Bros. assets — the bid that was ultimately rejected in favor of Netflix — are back in the new deal. They didn’t go anywhere. They were never going anywhere. And now Paramount/Skydance is confirming that approximately $24 billion in Saudi and Abu Dhabi money is part of the $108 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition, giving those investors over 20% ownership of the combined entity.

The statement from Paramount/Skydance is a masterpiece of corporate nothing. The successful equity syndication is “an important milestone in the Warner Brothers Discovery transaction process” and the “resulting diversification of its shareholder base” and “the value of the warrants described below enhance long-term shareholder value.” They also believe the warrants “support its longer-term objective of a wider and deeper public float.” Translation: they’re coming for your money. They want retail investors in this thing eventually.

The warrants issued to existing Paramount shareholders are new, and yes, the stock shot up Tuesday. It’s up 33 cents, and it’s still under $10 a share. So I’m not sure “shot up” is exactly the right characterization of a 3.5% move on a sub-$10 stock, but okay, sure.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the question of whether foreign sovereign wealth funds can own more than 20% of a company that owns CBS is a real, legitimate question. It’s the kind of question the SEC or the FCC would normally examine. It’s the kind of question that, under any other administration, would at minimum generate significant regulatory scrutiny. Under this one? I don’t think anybody’s going to look at it very hard.

They’re rationalizing it away with a lot of flowery, businessy language, and the Hollywood Reporter piece barely gets into it. But it shouldn’t go away. It’s a real issue. The trade press has a tendency to treat these mega-deals as sports scores — who won, who lost, how much — without sitting with the more uncomfortable implications of what it actually means when foreign governments own significant chunks of American media institutions.

Now, I want to say something on David Ellison’s behalf, which is not something I do naturally. He was getting beat up in the press yesterday for saying that 70% of the country is center-left or center-right, in the context of defending CBS News. I actually agree with him on that. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I think it’s probably more than 70%, frankly — it’s just that it leans more center-left than center-right on most issues. But we are a centrist country. Not a Trumpist country. Not a left-wing extremist country. People just want to live their lives. That’s a recurring theme in everything I do, and I think it’s genuinely true.

Whether I trust David Ellison to actually run CBS News in a centrist way is a different question. The early signs are not great. There’s already been what I’d call a terrible start at CBS News, and there are credible threats about what’s going to happen to 60 Minutes this summer. It may lean further right. It’s already showing signs of drifting from where it’s been historically, which has been genuinely centrist long-form journalism for decades.

But here’s the thing: until it happens, you can’t really claim it happened. It’s not fair, even to David Ellison, to convict him of something in advance. What I will say is this: right now, Trump is kissing Ellison’s ass because they’re friendly and it’s useful. If there were a Democratic president, my guess is Ellison would lean a little further left. Call that cynical. I think Larry Ellison’s politics, at the end of the day, are downstream of his money. His money is what matters, first and last. He’s navigating the Mad King as best he can, and I’m not saying that’s okay, but it does skew any reading of his actual ideological commitments.

The Kennedy Center, the DOJ, and the Ongoing Absurdity

The Kennedy Center is defending its name changes in court, and the DOJ — which has fully become a private law firm for Donald Trump — is arguing that Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio, who filed the lawsuit, hasn’t suffered any tangible harm from the board’s decision to adopt a secondary name and close the center for renovation. Technically, they’re right. Joyce Beatty personally has not suffered reputational harm or physical harm or intangible harm. The Kennedy Center has suffered. The country has suffered. But Joyce Beatty personally? The DOJ argument technically holds. That’s how they’ll win this, by making it about Ms. Beatty rather than about the institution.

The center’s defense includes the claim that using a secondary name for a federal entity is not uncommon — they cite Fannie Mae as an example of a federal institution operating under a nickname. Yes. Putting your own name ahead of a dead president who has a building in his honor is exactly the same thing as a Depression-era housing agency having a nickname. Exactly the same. The same logic applies to renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War, which is also apparently on the table. All of these things will go away when Trump is out. We’ll go back to calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico. It’s all disgusting and it’s all consistent. Somebody’s fighting it, at least.

The renovation argument is presented as a choice between a focused two-year project and a prolonged multi-year series of patchwork repairs. And fine, the Kennedy Center genuinely needs work. Everybody agrees on that. But this is the same Donald Trump who knocked down the East Wing of the White House without telling anyone he was going to do it — just ordered it done inside his little air bubble. The idea that what Donald feels like doing is simply what Donald should be allowed to do is, of course, absurd. Unfortunately, we have a DOJ and elements of a Supreme Court that seem to have reached a different conclusion.

I’ll stop there because this is not a political podcast. But we’re all touched by the politics whether we want to be or not.

The Emerald Fennell / Basic Instinct Non-Story

There was a rumor circulating on Twitter about Emerald Fennell remaking Basic Instinct at Sony. It turns out Joe Eszterhas — who is always looking for a bit of attention, and hasn’t had a lot in the last decade — was apparently the one floating this. My guess is he’s not a hundred percent lying. Somebody at Sony probably said, sure, we’re thinking about redoing it, maybe with Emerald Fennell, she’d be great. But now everybody’s people — her people, his people, the studio’s people — is denying it ever happened.

There’s a certain contingent, particularly in Europe, that’s been trying to pin bad-faith projects on Fennell since Wuthering Heights, which many people over there felt she ruined. I disagree. I’m not the biggest fan of the source material, but I think she did what she was trying to do, and it was effective on its own terms. Whether it was the right choice is a whole other conversation. But this Basic Instinct thing feels like it got out of hand fast, and now everyone’s running away from it.

Zendaya Is a Movie Star, Full Stop

There’s a story making the rounds calling Zendaya the new “indie box office queen” based on The Drama’s opening. I’d push back on the framing. She’s not the indie box office queen. She’s a movie star. Period. The Drama opened to around $15 million. So did Challengers. Both of those openings rest on her — Robert Pattinson, for all his considerable gifts as an actor, does not open movies. He’s genuinely one of my favorite and most underrated working actors. I thought he was remarkable in the Jennifer Lawrence movie from last year — she gave this enormous performance, one that I think was fantastic and underrated in a weird way, she didn’t even get an Oscar nomination — and Pattinson was quietly brilliant playing the asshole husband against her. But he doesn’t put people in seats. The opening of The Drama is on Zendaya, and so is Challengers.

Beyond that, she’s been the engine or a significant part of the engine behind years of massive IP films — Dune, Spider-Man — where you can’t isolate her contribution, but she’s clearly driving something. And this year alone she’s got Dune 3, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and The Odyssey, on top of the new season of Euphoria. She says she’s going to hide out after all of that. She won’t. But she’s going to have a year that would be remarkable by any standard. She’s a movie star.

J.J. Abrams Is Downsizing, and That’s Fine

The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision has a piece by Boris Kitt — a smart guy, worth reading — about why J.J. Abrams is downsizing: closing the beloved Santa Monica office that everybody loved, moving to New York. People are whining about it. Stop. He’s going to be 60 years old this year. He’s changing his life. Steven Spielberg apparently moved to New York this year too, which I hadn’t even clocked.

J.J. has projects. He directed The Great Beyond, which is coming out in November. He has The End of Oak Street from David Mitchell, out in August. He’s got a Dr. Seuss adaptation — Oh, the Places You’ll Go — coming in a few years from Jon Chu. He’s not out of the business. But his last studio deal at Warner Bros. was signed in 2019, and he lost his key executive Hannah McGill to Netflix a year or two ago. It’s not the Bad Robot that it was. It’s not the empire he was building. And that’s okay. People are allowed to restructure their lives. The Santa Monica office was great. I get the nostalgia. But J.J. Abrams doesn’t owe anyone a continuation of his previous mode of existence.

Howard Stern’s Former Assistant and the NDA Racket

Howard Stern’s former executive assistant — Leah Kuh, who actually lived with Stern and his wife at their Southampton home — is trying to void her NDA, claiming hostile work environment. She was apparently terminated for cause, and her firing, she says, was a result of pressure from an animal rescue organization run by Stern’s wife.

She was making $265,000 a year as an executive assistant. She got a raise before she was fired.

I’m sorry, but this doesn’t sound like someone being held in a dungeon in Southampton. And the NDA exists for exactly this reason. This feels like a shakedown. I don’t enjoy defending very rich people who do very stupid things, but sometimes the math just doesn’t add up.

This got linked in the piece to the De Niro assistant situation — where De Niro’s former personal assistant was awarded $1.3 million after a gender discrimination and retaliation trial. Her title was VP of Production and Finance. Her complaints included being asked to button his shirt and wash his sheets. You genuinely cannot make this stuff up. People who are wildly overpaid for proximity to celebrity, who then discover that the job involves some unpleasantness, and who then decide to monetize the unpleasantness. I don’t know what to tell you.

Hacks, Podcasting Costs, and the New Season of Summer House

The new season of Hacks is good. Angie Han’s review in The Hollywood Reporter calls it trading sharpness for sweetness, which is accurate. It does feel like a swan song — warmer, more of the supporting cast, going back to characters who’d drifted away in previous seasons. I like it. It’s not as sharp as it was, but there’s something genuinely lovely about it.

There’s a piece in IndieWire about podcast production costs — narrative podcasts run $300,000 to $600,000 a year. Host, reporter, fact checker, sound designer, composer, executive producer, senior producer, junior producers, art department. For a daily show, that works out to roughly $1,000 to $2,300 an episode, depending on scale. I’m doing this for free, on Substack, unedited. That has always been my thing — the DP30 interviews are still on YouTube, 30-plus minutes, uncut, because I want the full picture, not the edited one. The idea of a production budget for what I do is honestly absurd. But $1,000 an episode for a proper production? Not outrageous. Once you’re making millions off a podcast, it makes complete sense.

The Summer House spinoff — In the City — premieres May 19th. Apparently one of the former core couples of Summer House is now in a post-divorce scandal involving a friend of theirs and a sexual affair, which the show is dropping right into. It’s somehow structurally similar to the whole Vanderpump Villas / Mormon Wives entanglement, which I can’t believe I know enough about to have an opinion on, and yet here I am. Building brands is hard. Two of the Summer House alums are apparently cameo-ing in an upcoming Hulu show, and they have made abundantly clear they have no business acting.

Stock Market Check

Dow is down roughly 250 points. S&P 500 down about 30. NASDAQ down 158. Entertainment stocks: Netflix and Disney are both down slightly, both still under $100 a share. Disney really should be over $100 — the reason it isn’t is ongoing fear about what oil prices and consumer headwinds are going to do to the parks, which remain an enormous part of their revenue picture. Paramount/Skydance is up 33 cents — call it 3.5% — on the warrant news. Warner Bros. Discovery is hanging around $27. Comcast is up seven cents. Sony is barely moved.

Netflix drops Q1 earnings a week from Thursday. Disney’s Q1 results come in early May — specifically on the last day of CinemaCon, which is an interesting scheduling choice. Everything is confused. Everything is being buffeted by macro forces that have nothing to do with whether the movies are good or bad or whether the streaming numbers hold up. We’re all just watching and waiting.

David Reads The Trades: May 6, 2026

2026-04-06T15:02:59-05:00

Toplines

Super Mario Galaxy opened to $131.7 million domestic per Universal, slightly below the $146 million opening of Super Mario Brothers in 2023 but in line with expectations.
The Drama, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, opened to approximately $15 million for A24 — matching Challengers’ opening weekend.
Project Hail Mary held 57% of its audience in its third weekend with another $30 million, though it appears unlikely to reach $300 million domestic or $300 million international.
Hopper has just passed $150 million domestic.
The total weekend box office hit nearly $200 million.
CBS is replacing its late-night programming with Byron Allen’s syndicated Comics Unleashed in the 11:35 p.m. slot, effectively abandoning original late-night television.
The WGA reached a new deal with the AMPTP, with a notably less adversarial tone under new AMPTP negotiator Greg Hessinger; DGA and SAG deals are expected to follow shortly.
Gulf States funding for the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery was reconfirmed at approximately $24 billion, including commitments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar Investment Authority, and Abu Dhabi — information that was known months ago despite being treated as breaking news.
Guy Lodge has been elevated to chief film critic at Variety, replacing Peter DeBruge, who left to run South by Southwest.
Dune Part 3 IMAX tickets are going on sale months ahead of release, following the model used for The Odyssey.
The Alien 3 assembly cut — roughly 30-40 minutes longer than the theatrical version — has landed on HBO Max.
The Glenn Powell/Judd Apatow comedy has been titled The Comeback King, with Powell playing a country western star in free fall. Universal is releasing.

A Personal Note Before the News

Before I get into any of this, a bit of personal news: my godson Darius and his lovely partner — I’m honestly not sure of their official status — just welcomed a baby girl. Tatiana was born on Easter Day over in Hawaii. I don’t know if that makes her my godniece or what, but congratulations to all involved.

Super Mario Galaxy and the Problem with How We Talk About Box Office

Super Mario Galaxy opened this weekend a little below Super Mario Brothers but not significantly so. Universal is reporting $131.7 million, which is great. It’s not quite the $146 million that the first film did three years ago, but it is what it was expected to be.

And that’s where I keep getting stuck. This constant celebration of the miraculous nature of the most expected outcomes is not a healthy methodology for how we talk about box office. Obviously, Super Mario Galaxy and movies like it are critical to getting to the bigger annual number. But when these movies come out, they’re not a surprise. Thank God they didn’t fail, yes, but nobody should be saying “Oh my God, I can’t believe Mario Galaxy did almost as much as the first one.” That’s the expectation. That’s why they’re making them. That’s why they’re putting the money into it.

There’s been a schism in the box office world for 20 years now, with these giant tentpole movies on one side. People who aren’t really knowledgeable about box office talk about how these films are everything, the whole thing, that’s all there is. Meanwhile, people in the independent world complain about these movies eating everything else. The way I see it, and have for quite a long time, is that what happened to the box office reminds me of Soldier Field in Chicago.

Soldier Field is a great old stadium, 80 or 90 years old, right on Lake Michigan. When they wanted to improve it, they basically built a modern facility on top of the old one — glass, skyboxes, modern features — planted right on top of this ancient stone structure. It looked like an alien ship had landed on an archaeological site. Actually, I was channel surfing yesterday and caught a bit of The Silver Chalice, that terrible movie that technically introduced Paul Newman. The plot involves an artisan who’s asked to create an ornate silver chalice to hold the cup that Christ drank from — the Holy Grail. The cup itself is nothing, just a plain vessel with no uniqueness. The chalice is this very ornate thing built around it to honor the idea of Jesus. That’s kind of what happened at Soldier Field, and it’s kind of my point about box office.

When CG evolved in the early 2000s — really 2002, with Spider-Man as the kickoff, the first $100 million opening weekend — the world changed in terms of box office. Through the ’90s, exhibition had gone through bankruptcies and reconfigured into multiplexes that were not as big as they’d gotten during that period where they were doing 30-plus screens at some of these places. That doesn’t really happen anymore because it was just a bad choice. The standard now is in the teens: a few bigger theaters and some smaller ones, about 50-50 in a lot of these houses. The design is that you can expand the number of seats when you have a big opening like Mario Galaxy.

That’s why you don’t see sellouts the way you used to. I remember when The Grove here in Los Angeles first opened with a Star Wars movie — I think it was Attack of the Clones, not Phantom Menace — and people were lined up down the street. One show would be playing, the next one started in an hour, and they were still lined up. You don’t see that anymore because people pre-buy their tickets, they know their seats, they don’t have to show up hours ahead of time. All kinds of changes have happened in exhibition.

The point is that when these $100 million opening weekends arrived, which did not exist before the CG universe, it did on some level undermine the smaller business and the middle business. But it didn’t make it go away. People talk about it like it’s gone or it doesn’t exist or can’t exist. It’s just not true. I wrote a piece yesterday for Hot Button about how people keep saying “it’s all over for the business, everybody’s dying.” It’s not. The business is resettling after the industry went way too much on content spending for the creation of the legacy streaming companies. They’ve now come back to a much smaller number. And weirdly enough, my 30% prediction, which I’ve had for a long time, has turned out to be pretty much exactly right, according to at least one analysis released over the last week.

We’re now actually below the amount of work that was available going back a while. The peak was after COVID — after we came back, the amount of work peaked. But then they all realized, almost simultaneously and magically, that they needed to cut back on content. It was way too much content for anybody to make a living. These companies were losing billions and billions of dollars. And on television, by the way — not because of the movies, because of television. People get very distracted and don’t separate television and movies. They’re different models. They were built as different models. They continue to be different models. They should be different models.

There is no real economic logic to doing a $200 million movie for streaming. Netflix can do it all they want — it’s their money, not mine — and they have a massive budget, $18 to $22 billion a year. They can spend a billion on movies that are huge and terrible every year, make fewer of them than they were, and just continue on. Some of them have an audience, some don’t. How Netflix decides what they need to have versus what they must have is a creation of their own mindset that I can’t always rationalize, but it is what it is. It doesn’t work for anybody else. Financially, it does not work for any of the legacy companies.

The movie business offers the opportunity to get a return on revenues before you go to streaming. Direct-to-streaming, you don’t have that opportunity. There is no direct cash revenue if you make a movie directly for streaming. So if you’re spending $150 or $200 million on a direct-to-streaming movie, you’re asking for the limitations you have. It is a loss leader, essentially. There is no direct cause and effect that can be measured in any real way. These organizations have systems where they claim it means this and that — it’s all just made up math. It’s an Excel sheet. It is not anything real. The reality of paid streaming is that it’s about keeping your subscribers. Advertising is changing this a little bit, but we haven’t really seen it yet.

Congratulations to Universal on Mario Galaxy. They did a nice job. They took what is a more complicated sequel compared to the original and found most of the audience they got for the first movie, which leans heavily toward kids but includes nostalgic adults in their 40s and 50s who played Super Mario and still do. They’re working on spinoff shows and everything else, and those will have their degree of success. But none of this is a surprise.

A lot of this business is just doing the job. The highs are high and the lows are low, and that’s all true. But look at Warner Brothers — they had their great year last year. They’ve had a couple of flops to start this year. But a big part of that great year was movies that were expected to do the business they did. Movies like the last Conjuring, which some of us would consider junk. Not everybody would, but it did a lot of business, and that’s part of the mix.

Pam Abdi and Mike DeLuca — we can talk about them as geniuses and how smart they are and how much they love movies, all of which is true. But they’re also smart enough to mix in with their originals, which really drove things last year — Sinners, Weapons, ultimately One Battle After Another. Those movies drove a lot of business and a lot of excitement, but they mixed in the stuff that’s essentially assured to make a certain amount of money. Sometimes those movies flop. That’s part of the business too. But it is very important, at least in my mindset, that we keep this balance in our heads about reasonable expectations, unreasonable expectations, and disappointments. They are part of the flow of a very mature business.

That was the other theme of my piece yesterday: none of these are really surprises. This is the business. It is not a high-flying business. A $100 or $150 million weekend is exciting, but it’s also just a basic piece of the business model. If Mario Galaxy had opened to $100 million, it would have been a disappointment in terms of just doing business. Can you really be disappointed with a $100 million opening? Well, you can, but you shouldn’t be.

I saw Anthony just the other day, and I was happy to see him, and we gave each other a hug. He’s a smart guy. But it is his job in some ways to promote these things for these companies. Part of his gig doing box office for the trades is to promote these movies and how they’re marketed. That’s all very important. But this flippant idea of box office that we get from people like Bellini, who talk about it like it’s the over-under all the time — it’s ridiculous. It’s stupid. It is not a realistic mindset about how the business works or how it should work. It’s not realistic about the ambitions of the industry or what we should expect from it. It always flops between “this is a huge opening” and “this is a bad month” and “this was a big surprise.” There’s always an excuse for why a surprise did well, and the movies that flop, well, that’s the industry, kids want to go play their video games. The truth is kids do want to play video games, but they also want to go to the movies. And they do go to the movies.

Before the ’70s, there was the old studio model where people went to a movie theater with very limited television and no internet. People went to the movie theater to get cool — they remember the signs that said “air conditioning.” People would sit there for six or seven hours watching two movies and shorts and newscasts. That was a different business. There were still A and B movies, serials, all kinds of filler. And then you had your Jimmy Stewart movie or your Bette Davis movie or your Frank Sinatra movie. Completely different model. This model is this model. We need to be more realistic about it.

We have to be able to see the forest and the trees and the separation between television and film. Television is a much more complicated universe because it’s a much more daily part of people’s lives. People watch six to eight hours of television every day. That television is running in households for six to eight hours a day on average, some places more. Famously, part of Fox News’s thing is that they have viewers who can’t use the remote properly, so they watch Fox 24/7.

The point is that there’s a huge business with all these elements, and it does change all the time. It is not a consistently flat business, but the business is very mature. People who normally spend $100 a month on home entertainment — whether cable, cord-cutting with ad-free streamers, or some combination — are not going to suddenly jump to $200 a month. They’ve already been reconfigured to spend $40 to $100 a month just having internet in their house. That’s a change and should be taken into consideration, even if it doesn’t directly map to entertainment spending, except in the case of Comcast, which makes its money through selling internet services into the household, not really cable service anymore.

These are all separate businesses, and they’re all connected. We have to see the forest, we have to see the trees. In terms of how Wall Street sees it — it’s all bullshit. Listening to people from Wall Street talk about this industry continues to be aggravating and stupid almost every single time. There are very few serious Wall Street people who understand how this business works. I listen to Pivot, and Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher talk about the film industry, and they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. They just don’t. It’s not because they’re not very smart — they are very smart about a lot of things. But we’ve reached a point where we think they know about everything in the world. They don’t. They’re just people. Everybody has their boundaries. They have remarkable lives and remarkable careers, they’ve learned a lot of things and talked to a lot of people — all great. But they don’t really understand the film business, certainly, and they don’t even really understand the television business, even though they’re in it on some level. Wall Street does not understand this industry. You can see it in the valuations of these companies. But that is another conversation for another day.

Also at the box office this weekend, the total was nearly $200 million, which is really where you’d want it to be — usually that’s a May-level number, and May is probably not going to be that strong. Project Hail Mary held 57% of its audience and did another $30 million, but it’s not looking like it’ll get to $300 million domestic, and it’s probably not going to get to $300 million international either. International is catching up a little with domestic, but it’s still below. I’m not completely sure why. Hopper is just passing $150 million.

And the idea that Mario Galaxy is “the number one movie of the year so far” — well, duh. You could have guessed that months ago. There was no other movie released before this point in the year that anybody could have realistically expected to do this kind of business.

Zendaya Is a Movie Star. Period. So Is Timothée Chalamet.

Also at the box office: The Drama, starring Robert Pattinson but more importantly starring Zendaya. Somebody was having a conversation about whether Zendaya is really a movie star. She’s been a real movie star for quite a while now, coming off of Euphoria and Spider-Man and Dune. But what’s really interesting to me, and what actually kind of surprised me, is looking back at her filmography since Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019 — seven years of this. She co-starred in that obviously with Tom Holland, and it did huge business. She was in Space Jam as Lola Bunny, but I don’t really count voiceover as anything. Then Dune, another Spider-Man, back to Euphoria, Dune Part Two. The only real movie besides The Drama that she’s done outside of a giant franchise is Challengers.

And what did Challengers open to? $15 million. What did The Drama open to? Just about $15 million.

The difference between Challengers and The Drama is that Robert Pattinson is a strong B-plus movie star — and that’s not a reference to his acting, which I think is actually underrated, but to his status as being able to open a movie. He’s not really an opener. He’s kind of in that Robert Duvall category — a very strong addition, but not the guy who actually drives business. And again, not a judgment of anybody’s acting skills at all. Just business.

But Zendaya opens movies. She was able to open Challengers, which should not have opened by normal standards. We can give A24 a lot of credit for being brilliant — they are, and they do great marketing and publicity — but she opened the movie. The two guys in Challengers are neither one of them anything close to a movie star. Josh O’Connor is beloved by a lot of film critics and makes a lot of movies that seven people see. It doesn’t make them bad movies; it just means not a lot of people are going. Mike Faist was in West Side Story. They’re valuable talent, good actors, people who are attractive — they don’t open movies. Zendaya opens movies. And Zendaya opened The Drama.

By the way, the last A24 hit was Marty Supreme. And what’s the truth of Marty Supreme? For all the hype around what Timothée Chalamet was doing, Timothée Chalamet is a box office opener. Period. The idea that there’s any question about his ability to open at the box office is just stupid. The guy is one of the top five, certainly, and you can make an argument about where he stands in that group.

Go back to Beautiful Boy in 2018 — didn’t really open. So there was still a question mark. He’d done Call Me By Your Name, which did much more business than expected but didn’t kill it as a box office thing. But then look at the run he’s been on: Wonka, Dune again, A Complete Unknown, and now Marty Supreme. The guy opens movies, period. There’s an audience for him. There’s an appetite for him. Yes, he can certainly make a movie nobody ever wants to see, and I’m sure he will again sometime soon. But obviously Dune 3 is not going to be that movie. He’s a movie star. He is our modern version of the movie star.

The question now for people like me who think about box office all the time is: is $15 million the new $20 million? Maybe. It used to be that a $20 million opening was the standard for a star-driven film, and maybe $15 million is the new standard. That’s something we may just have to get used to. Part of that is that we’ve accepted a universe in which there are fewer movies released by companies that have the money to afford to release them. People who don’t really know what the hell they’re talking about continually confuse how many wide releases there are versus how many releases there are at a wide level that actually have the marketing money to support them. It is expensive. It requires marketing dollars.

God bless A24 — they do a great job, and so does Neon, and so do others trying to do this. There are surprises in that regard. But basically the top 10, 15, or 20 movies released worldwide are movies that do these huge numbers and they’re not smaller films from independent companies. Marty Supreme still hasn’t gotten to $100 million domestic. May never get there, maybe they’ll do a re-release. But Marty Supreme is the number one movie ever at A24, and it did not do $100 million domestic. Meanwhile, there will be at least 10 to 12 movies this year that do $100 million domestic, and none of them are going to be Marty Supreme. That is a different part of the business.

Marty Supreme is a hugely successful indie film. A24 is a hugely successful company, even though they’ve had a bunch of flops. Their current method seems to be releasing a lot of things that aren’t going to do big theatrical business, then making their money back on streaming value. That’s the business they’re in. They’re in an independent business. And Timothée Chalamet can open an independent movie, a studio movie — not any movie, as I say, he’ll find failure at some point — but not right now. These are all real movie stars.

The lesson with both Marty Supreme and The Drama is simple: it helps to have giant movie stars in your movies. That’s the lesson here, really.

And by the way, Variety ran a headline about how the Mario Galaxy movie “eliminates the box office but leaves room for Project Hail Mary.” No, it didn’t. The box office has room for everything. The box office has room for $250 million on a weekend. It’s the third week for Project Hail Mary, so it’s already down to $30 million — there was room for it to do $50 million if the business called for it. This idea that one movie “left room” for another is bullshit. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not a cup that’s filling and going to overflow. People want to go or they don’t want to go.

The Drama’s Backlash: Not Controversial Enough, Not Serious Enough

There’s now a backlash against The Drama because of the movie’s central hook. Spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the premise is that Zendaya’s character reveals, during a conversation about the worst thing each person ever did, that she was involved in potentially threatening the lives of children. I’ll leave it at that.

My feeling about the movie is that this hook is not strong enough tea to make up for the rest of the film. Over the weekend, I watched the earlier film from this filmmaker — his first feature that got him attention in the United States — and that film had the same kind of gimmick in a way, the idea that something is so shocking. But it actually is shocking in his first film. Here, it’s not.

The backlash story in the Hollywood Reporter references a supposed “film critic” who broke embargo and went early. In fact, it’s a guy who does socialite coverage for AOL named Michael Privé, who I’m sure is a very nice person, but he’s not a film critic. Maybe he plays one on Rotten Tomatoes. But he felt he had to go ahead early to compare the film to Columbine, accusing it of humanizing and normalizing school shooters. Bullshit. Just bullshit.

What I wrote in my review is that if Zendaya’s character had just killed a puppy when she was 10 years old, that would have been much more shocking and a more realistic and serious issue for people questioning who she is. The idea that she was thinking about doing something, didn’t actually do it, doesn’t actually do anything — and then, spoiler, she flips and becomes an activist for gun control — the whole thing doesn’t hold up. To me, it’s a failure in terms of what they’ve done to the movie. I really like everybody in the cast. They did a good job. It’s nicely shot. There’s nothing really wrong with the movie except for that premise.

Now, of course, there has to be backlash. Parkland survivor Jackie Coren is talking about her concerns about the casting. Please just calm the fuck down. There is nothing okay about what happened at Parkland. There is no level of respect one can pay to people who’ve lost family and gone through the tragedy and horror of that event. But the movie does not make fun of Parkland. The movie does not make fun of school shooting at all. In fact, as I’ve been saying, it makes too much of it given the context in which they present it. Everybody’s got to calm the hell down.

What’s actually interesting about the idea of school shootings as an issue in this film is the idea that a young person — maybe 12 or 13 years old — was driven by the public nature of school shootings to consider this as an option when she’s depressed and being abused by other kids. That’s actually a real issue. That’s something of substance. The idea that kids think about this now, because they keep seeing it on TV, is a real issue. But it’s not in this movie. It’s not what this movie does.

So for me, the backlash should be: why didn’t they take this issue more seriously? Because the way they present it, it’s not serious enough to cause what happens in the movie, and it’s not serious enough as a conversation. But the movie is a romantic comedy in some ways, and it’s Zendaya, so you can only take it so far — you’re not going to make her a full villain. This hook that’s now so controversial is actually not remotely controversial enough for the quality of the film, and not remotely controversial enough in terms of really addressing the issue. It does take school shooting too lightly on some level, but not in a way that’s disrespectful. Not everything needs to be maximum outrage all the time.

The headline on the Hollywood Reporter piece asks: “Was the wedding-focused promo misleading or a marketing masterclass?” Neither. Both. It wasn’t misleading, because that is what the movie is about. And it’s not a marketing masterclass — it was a good piece of marketing. Marty Supreme was also a good piece of marketing, really more great publicity than marketing. But Zendaya. But Timothée Chalamet. Movie stars matter.

CBS Gives Up on Late Night — And What It Means for the Affiliate System

Moving from box office to the television business: CBS has decided to give up on late night completely. They will replace the Stephen Colbert slot with Comics Unleashed, Byron Allen’s syndicated show, which is junk TV at best. Byron Allen has made a fortune doing these syndicated shows — he’s got several of them, including one based on junkets — and has built an empire out of it. God bless him, good luck to him. It is junk, and it’s really, really cheap.

I read about it in the Late Nighter, a newsletter I subscribe to and am a big fan of — it just covers late night television, but it’s got good people involved who really know what they’re talking about. They pointed out that a typical joke on Comics Unleashed featured the late Louie Anderson, because that’s how old most of these episodes are. They’ve ramped up to have more episodes since they took over the 12:30 slot about a year ago, starting sometime in August or September. Now Comics Unleashed is moving up to the 11:35 slot, and they’re talking about another syndicated Byron Allen show pushing into the 12:30 slot.

What this basically means is that we’re going to start seeing affiliates bail. None of the stories on this choice tell us anything about how Comics Unleashed has performed in terms of numbers compared to the show that was there before — After Midnight, which I’ve already forgotten about even though it’s been gone less than a year. That show was modestly successful but not enough to pay its host enough money to make it worth her not being a stand-up comic most of the time, where there’s a lot of money these days if you can play stadiums and big theaters over 5,000 people. And she can.

Is it the end of late night as we know it? Maybe. I’ve talked before about how Saturday Night Live almost went away about 40 years ago, almost giving way to wrestling on Saturday night on NBC. There have been many years of the now 51-year-long SNL franchise that lost money for NBC. It’s never been a hugely profitable show. There have been profitable years, but the majority, I would estimate, have not been moneymakers. It’s been a loss leader. But they made money early on, stuck with it, and when the 11th season came along, the decision was being made whether to switch to wrestling on Saturday nights. They tested it out in that slot when SNL wasn’t on. They’d already gone through a few people who’d failed at running the show, like Jean Doumanian, rest her soul. It was a slot they considered dangerous, and they were losing money. Wrestling was very cost-effective and more live and fresh than Comics Unleashed, which is basically four or five comics sitting around telling jokes they told on stage five or ten years ago.

But NBC did not want to give up that time slot. They’d gotten Saturday Night Live, and they created 11:30 on Saturday nights. Since then, Saturday night has become a bad TV night. There was a time when Saturday night was a great TV spot — Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, maybe The Love Boat for a period. Huge successes on Saturday nights. Now people don’t watch TV on Saturday, so SNL does an East Coast/West Coast simulcast — here in Los Angeles it’s on at 8:30, then plays again at 11:30. They fill prime time with sports rolling over from the day or SNL rolling back. It is not a cash cow day. There’s been talk about completely giving up Saturdays, Friday nights, even the 10 o’clock slot across the board — though that last idea has had a resurgence lately and isn’t in favor at the moment.

The affiliate system, in my opinion, is even more broken than cable as an issue. However, all the cash right now in television — there’s more cash in cable (which includes satellites, includes virtual cable like YouTube TV) than there is in streaming. It’s a more profitable business. They make billions a year on it, and they’ve taken losses of billions on streaming in the past. Streaming is catching up, but cable is still above, which is why cable still exists in mass and is apparently still in over 50% of the country. That’s where they make their money. So they’re finding ways to eat from both troughs at the same time. That is the television business right now.

CBS has owned-and-operated stations, so they’re guaranteed to keep whatever it is, eight or nine or ten spots. But the hundreds of affiliates at 11:30 at night — I think we’re going to start losing them. The question is whether affiliates can make money on local programming or just syndicating a show like Comics Unleashed themselves. They’re paying the network to have that slot. What’s the financial arrangement? I don’t really know, and I won’t know for a while. It’ll take a few months or a year before television stations start deciding if they really need the show.

Then the question becomes: what about Jimmy Kimmel? He’s been on a track to retire pretty soon regardless of Trump. I think in some ways Trump has actually extended his lifetime — certainly increased his numbers — and increased his interest in staying and fighting till the end. I think we’ll see him at least through the end of the Trump administration, so another three years. But he may well retire the year after or even during; he’s been talking about it. If you lose Kimmel, who do you put in that slot? Are you starting from scratch or acquiescing to the nature of the thing? Do you move Nightline back up to 11:30? I don’t know if anybody watches Nightline anymore. I was a Nightline watcher for 20-something years — Ted Koppel and Nightline, that was it, that was a thing you had to watch, very important television. It is not anymore.

NBC still has a 12:30 show, though they’ve cut back the budget. They still have an 11:30 show, which isn’t the number one show but may become the number one show as everybody else goes away. Late night is an issue, but CBS is giving up on it, and that may just be the nature of the beast. A lot of the talk about “oh, they just watch it on YouTube” — that’s part of it, but it’s also about what a broadcast network is and what its parameters need to be. In some ways, it becomes like cable: diminishing returns, but still extremely valuable.

The Future of Cable, Streaming, and Why Nobody Wants to Talk About the Real Reason Cable Won’t Die

There’s still all this conversation about where the football rights are going — deals being made a few years earlier than expected because of out clauses. The NFL lives under an exemption, as do the NBA and Major League Baseball, that allows them to be more manipulative as a group about how their television rights work. They’re basically monopolies, given freedom by Congress to be monopolies, but that freedom can be taken away.

I’ve been saying this for a long time: for streaming to become fully what streaming is going to become, cable has to go, because it’s a chunk of money coming out of people’s wallets that they’re not spending on streaming. If somebody’s spending $50 or $80 or $120 a month on cable, they’re not spending that on streaming. Some people don’t care about money — they’ll spend $200 or $250 a month on whatever they want. But the vast majority of our country, it does affect their lives. We already pay more than anybody else for streaming. We pay more than anybody else for cable. We pay more than everybody else for television, us and Canada.

The future of cable doesn’t really make sense. The model where everybody’s getting paid to be on cable does not make sense going forward. Streaming makes sense as a delivery system. Nobody really cares how it gets into your house — a wire, a stream, a satellite. As long as it’s consistent and doesn’t break down, that’s what people care about. That, and the price point: what does it cost me to have stuff in my house and feel like I’m seeing everything I want to see?

The more we get rid of cable and that chunk of money, the more that money goes to streaming. Disney, which has ABC and ESPN and makes a lot of money on cable, will theoretically just move that money to streaming. But Disney makes more on the cable bundle than on the streaming bundle. It’s more profitable. So they want that cable bundle to last as long as possible.

I just signed up for MLB TV and YES Network, as I do every year because I’m a Yankees fan on the West Coast. They made me initially sign up for a month of ESPN’s streaming service, but I already have almost everything ESPN does through YouTube TV. For whatever reason, YouTube TV did not make a deal where ESPN’s streaming service was included — even though almost every other major cable outlet has a deal where if you’re paying for ESPN on cable, you don’t have to pay for the online version. As a YouTube TV subscriber, I had to pay separately, and I’ve now canceled it because I get everything they do already. ESPN’s streaming service is expensive unless you don’t have cable. This is all the constant fighting and figuring out how it’s all going to siphon through.

My guess continues to be that in five to ten years, we will see the end of cable as we know it, at least for 90% of the country. All these people have had opinions about the end of cable — linear doesn’t mean anything, the world’s coming to an end. They’ve all been surprised, and they won’t admit it, because they’ve just been wrong. They’ve been surprised about how slowly cable has gone away. The reason it’s gone away slowly is because these companies have a vested interest in keeping it, because it is more profitable than streaming has been. Period. It has nothing to do with what you’re getting in your television set. It’s not about the consumer. It’s about them and how much money they’re squeezing out of each format of delivery. Delivery doesn’t matter to anybody at this point. It’s cheaper to do streaming than cable. There’s no upkeep in terms of delivering over the internet — the internet is the upkeep. Yes, there are costs of keeping your app ready and fresh, but cable is a fairly limited delivery system. Streaming is much less limited. We will get there in time. But in the meantime, there are financial reasons why we’re not getting there, and nobody wants to talk about it very much.

Jonathan Majors and the Daily Wire

There’s a Deadline story — three days old at this point — about details emerging on why a crew walked off the set of Jonathan Majors’ Daily Wire movie. Apparently Majors and another actor fell through a window during a scene on a movie that was already in trouble and having problems with crews and unions and everybody else. It’s a problem movie. I hope Jonathan Majors is feeling well. I hope his brain is feeling well. He is such a talented actor. He is really potentially one of the greatest film actors of a generation, and yet his ego certainly got away from him, and everything got away from him. And of course he hit his girlfriend, apparently, which also got away from him. It’s just a sad story, and I hope he makes a comeback eventually. He’s going to find whatever it is he needs to find. You can’t be Brando before you’re actually Brando. You have to walk before you run.

Inside the WGA Deal: The Tone Has Changed, But Nobody Was Going on Strike

The must-read story of the day is Deadline’s piece on the inside of the WGA deal — how the writers made nice with the AMPTP. I’ve read it. It’s mostly the same old story, but the one thing that’s clear and interesting is that the Writers Guild took a different tack than they have in the past, and the AMPTP has as well. There’s a new negotiator there after Carol Lombardi left — finally — after everybody hated her so much. I mean truly hated this woman. I remember having conversations during the strikes with very smart writers, and I’d say, “Come on, Carol Lombardi is not the devil.” Nope. “I don’t think the AMPTP is really completely evil.” Carol Lombardi is the devil. They just hated this woman.

The AMPTP now has Greg Hessinger as their negotiator, and there seems to be less inherent animosity. But the odds of a strike this time were about zero. Nobody needs another strike at this point. One of the funny things in the piece, by the way, is a sentence reading “the AMPTP were ready to offer this infusion.” The AMPTP was ready, because it’s a singular organization — but apparently Deadline sees them as a they/them. The AMPTP is now a they/them in Deadline, which I found funny.

The point is that things are moving forward. DGA and SAG are still waiting to get their deals done, but I don’t expect anybody to be shut down. We’re in the healing process, which goes back to the piece I wrote. The AMPTP companies, I believe, wanted the last strike to last as long as it did. They used it as cover for cutting back on the industry, which they have. They cut back the amount of content they’re making massively — 30% is a massive cut in content and spending. And they had to do it because they went way, way out of their depth. There was this industry where people were working endlessly, and even though there were irritations about eight-episode seasons and nine-episode seasons instead of 22, and the loss of residuals from network television — all these things had changed the math to make it worse for actors, worse for directors, worse for writers.

We’re now at the point where I think we’ve hit bottom. I think we’ve found the bottom, and now they’re beginning to build back up. You’re not going to see as much of a build as five or seven years ago. What I think you’ll see is a build back to just above where we were when all the legacy streaming companies started business in 2019, right before COVID. I think they’ll get to a spending level on content and talent just above where it was previously. Part of the question then becomes how much of it will be in the United States and Los Angeles versus overseas, and other ways they can save money. California has created a new subsidy program that seems to be working a bit and increasing the amount of production being done here.

This is Los Angeles. This has been the home of the movies forever. People live here because of that. Back when Canada was the big threat 15 or 20 years ago, you knew how many crews there were in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal — crews built up over time. In Atlanta, with Marvel being there for a long time, top crews developed. People from Los Angeles and other places moved to Atlanta because that’s where the business was, they could work consistently, and there was good money. There are crews now in New Orleans, Louisiana in general, less so in Florida but a couple there. These are people at the highest professional level — they’re not hacks, they’re not immature. You build these crews in different cities, and if you’re going to shoot in Vancouver and can’t get one of the two crews there that are considered really good, you just don’t go, or you reschedule.

England is very hot — new studios have been built, Star Wars lives there, Marvel lives there now, Harry Potter lives there. That’s a hot spot in its way, much like Atlanta was. Does it matter that money is being spent in England versus Atlanta or L.A.? Yes, if you’re in Atlanta or L.A. Does it matter to the industry overall? Not really. It matters a lot if you don’t have a job and you want one and you’re really good at what you do. Forest, trees. Forest, trees.

The WGA deal story is a decent piece about the fact that the tone has changed. But this was not a year anybody was going on strike. There’s been so much blood in the water that nobody was going to kill each other again. The AMPTP wanted the strikes last time as cover for cutbacks, and they covered for a lot of cutbacks during that period. There was a brief peak right after the strikes ended where everybody went back to work, but it didn’t last long. This idea that we’re in a free fall — we’re not. We’re getting back to a stable number. They’ve gone a little further down than they probably should have, but each company is micro-focused on their own budgets and divisions. The pendulum swings, and it went a little too far. We’re probably a little too light right now. But you can see the industry rebuilding some of its base. I think next year at this time, we’ll be having different conversations about where the industry is — maybe not literally where, as in London or Atlanta or New Mexico or New Jersey with Netflix, but the conversation will be different.

Quick Hits from the Trades

Patton Oswalt is doing another comedy special. Jessica Lange is returning for another American Horror Story. There’s an Animal Farm trailer out there.

Netflix has a Lord of the Flies adaptation coming, and the trailer is weirdly focused on killing Piggy — except they never say the word “Piggy” in the trailer, which I found very strange. As someone who’s happily read Lord of the Flies a few times — it’s a very good book — not calling Piggy by his name probably means they’re worried about offending somebody, which is kind of the point. You kind of miss the point of Lord of the Flies if you’re not offending anybody. I guess they don’t want to go too Trumpy.

Savannah Guthrie is returning to the Today Show, which every outlet is treating as their top story. Sure.

Guy Lodge has been elevated to chief film critic at Variety, partnered with Owen Gleiberman. I’m not entirely sure what that arrangement means — the story isn’t very clear about it. He replaces Peter DeBruge, who left to run South by Southwest, which is a Penske company. I assume Peter’s happy with the move, and my guess is there’s more money in it. It’s a great gig, actually — I hope it works out for him for more than a couple years. Lodge has worked his way up since freelancing at Variety in 2011, though I think he was with Chris Tapley before that. Tapley really brought him in and made him a thing there, first using him for Cannes coverage and expanding from there. Congratulations to everybody involved.

The Glenn Powell/Judd Apatow comedy now has a name: The Comeback King. It features Powell as a country western star in free fall, and it’s being released by Universal. The poster has a big showy belt buckle and Glenn Powell’s crotch, which seems like the way to sell anything. It reminds me of one of my fondest memories of Universal releasing a comedy — The 40-Year-Old Virgin, with that poster of Steve Carell’s big dumb face. Universal loved that movie and showed it and showed it for months going into its August release, then had a huge hit because it was just that funny and word of mouth was their advantage.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg say that Catherine O’Hara’s death sent shockwaves through their production, and apparently they’re going to honor her exit in season two. I now know a few secrets about season two that I’m not supposed to divulge, so I won’t.

Hugh Jackman is delivering the commencement at Ball State, David Letterman’s alma mater. SmartLess is doing a live show at the Hollywood Bowl, which seems completely antithetical to the idea of a podcast. I also recently saw an early cut of a Hulu show I’m not supposed to talk about yet — no official date — that I think is going to make some stars. The talent is incredibly interesting. However, there’s a podcasting star appearance on the show, and surprisingly, the podcast people cannot act. Shocking. They talk about themselves all day, every day, and they can’t act. Even playing themselves, they can’t act.

Dune Part 3 IMAX tickets are going on sale months ahead, just as they did for The Odyssey, whose IMAX opening day tickets sold out almost instantly. I assume they’ll try to replicate that.

HBO Max has dropped the assembly cut of Alien 3, the David Fincher third Alien film that got pilloried. I’ve talked about this film for years because of what I still consider the only logical reading of it — Manohla Dargis’s review from the Village Voice, where she said it was an allegory for AIDS. A woman being introduced onto this island — really a planet — of men who were all shaved-headed, and this deadly virus was going to kill everything, and it was back when AIDS was the issue. I thought it was brilliant. David Fincher has denied it, but I still think it makes sense. Fox did what they call the assembly cut at some point — the longer version, about 30 to 40 minutes more — without Fincher’s involvement. That’s now on HBO Max, and I will absolutely go watch it.

Spaceballs sequel is coming out next spring; we talked about that last week. Zendaya teases the end of Euphoria after season three, which we kind of knew. Joseph Collins, formerly of HBO and Time Warner Cable, passed away at 81 — rest in peace. Melissa Gilbert feels her husband Tim Busfield will be exonerated of child sex abuse charges. Let’s hope so. For all our sakes, we have our fingers crossed that he didn’t do this.

There’s another animated Star Wars show coming to Disney+ — the Maul: Shadow Lord show. How in the galaxy has Darth Maul survived this long?

New trailer for Devil Wears Prada 2 is out there. The Boys is ending with a blood-soaked season five, apparently right on time.

There was apparently an SNL cast member in a Vanity Fair video talking about pantsing a six-year-old boy at summer camp — she was a counselor, the kid kept pulling up her shirt, she pulled down his pants, he wasn’t wearing underwear, other kids saw, and now it’s a controversy because we have to have controversy about everything. I was actually just telling a group of people a horrible story about summer camp from my own childhood — a kid got stripped and tied to a tetherball pole while the girls were walking by for a dance. The kid was humiliated. He ended up losing his mind at camp and trying to attack everybody with his tennis racket, which I actually got in the middle of trying to stop. It was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever been party to. Pantsing a six-year-old at summer camp is horrible. I don’t really think we need a national controversy about it. It happens at every summer camp all the time. It’s Lord of the Flies. If your kid is sensitive, be careful where you send them.

Gulf States Funding the Paramount-WBD Merger Is Not New News

The last thing: everybody’s acting like it’s breaking news that the Gulf States are funding the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery to the tune of about $24 billion. I don’t know why this is news. It came up in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, so that was somehow news. But this information was available months and months ago. The only question mark was that Paramount wouldn’t admit it during the period they were still in the fight with Netflix’s competing bid.

There was never really any indication the money had gone away. A couple smaller investors had pulled out, maybe put some back in, maybe haven’t. But the Gulf States money — $24 billion including commitments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar Investment Authority, and Abu Dhabi’s investment arm — this raises serious question marks in terms of foreign ownership of CBS Network, where 20% is supposed to be the maximum allowed for a non-American company to own a piece of a broadcast network. But with this FCC chairman, who the hell knows? There are no rules, and they love Saudi Arabia because they just keep feeding them money. Saudi Arabia is trying to buy everything and the Trump administration is for sale. This is not a political podcast, but you can’t really argue that the Trump administration is not for sale.

This is all news we knew months ago. I don’t understand why everybody’s treating it as brand new. It’s not. It’s the same old news, and it’s terrible. If we had an administration interested in actually managing these things properly and dealing with the many problems of Paramount acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery, this wouldn’t be as much an issue. But this is the same attitude that led to Disney acquiring Fox’s assets without any real regulatory pushback, which led to the end of Fox as a studio. It’s now 20th within Disney, but 20th Century Fox is long gone.

Disney didn’t make promises about Fox as a movie studio. Paramount has made promises about Warner Brothers as a movie studio. But they’re promises. Unless the government says you have to do X, Y, and Z, there are no rules. And even if there were rules, you can’t really enforce commitments for more than five years. The merger doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not a healthy merger. It’s extremely horizontal. The government should be looking at this and saying: what’s good for the health of the industry, what’s good for the American people, what’s the best possible outcome, and here’s where we’re limiting you.

You cannot have CNN and CBS News as one entity. That should never be allowed in this country. There are only about six major television news outlets in the country. The idea that two of them are going to be under one company is not acceptable, regardless of the politics. Selling CNN off would be the right thing to do. It’s probably not going to happen. Brendan Carr has already said he’s looking forward to the ownership of CNN changing, and that is all the subtext of a lot of this.

The Wall Street Journal was apparently reporting that they’ve now secured these agreements, but we already knew the agreements were in place. They just wouldn’t answer the question while the Netflix fight was still on, because it’s horrifying — the idea that the Gulf States are going to own basically a quarter of Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers Discovery. It’s a terrible thing that’s happening, and they won’t do a goddamn thing about it. It’s bad. But it is what it is.

I’ve said before that I root for David Ellison. I want him to be the genius he thinks he is. I truly do. I’m not just making fun of him when I say that — it sounds kind of funny, but I really do hope he’s got something figured out. This is not a good thing, period. Under any circumstance, it should not be allowed. If they somehow disallowed the Gulf States funding, which they won’t, it would maybe break down the entire merger — which would require another $24 billion of commitment from Daddy Ellison, and that’s unlikely. So the Ankler and others who are still trying to figure out how to destroy the thing from within would have their opening. But we’ll see. It’s bad. It’s all bad for America.

The Stock Market Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing Either

A quick market check: the Dow was up about 100 points, the NASDAQ up about 100, the S&P 500 up 22. Entertainment stocks were a mixed bag. Netflix was up over $100 a share for the first time in a long time this morning but settled back to essentially flat. Disney’s down at $96.50, which is too low but is what it is — they were touching $100 sometime last week. Penske is up a little but still under $10 a share, which is not sensational. Warner Brothers Discovery is floating around $27, up nine cents — doesn’t matter. Comcast down a quarter, who cares. Sony down 40 cents, irrelevant. Versant, the spinoff of the legacy companies from NBC Universal, is up 66 cents — 666 the day after Easter. None of it matters. Netflix has its quarterly coming up, so there’ll be some fluctuation. Disney doesn’t report until May.

Forest and Trees

The theme of today, and I didn’t even realize I had this much to say: forest and trees. You’ve got to be able to have both in your head. Understand both. There’s nothing wrong with understanding the trees. There’s nothing wrong with understanding the forest. But if you only know one of them, you’re fucking up.