Cinema isn’t just about the latest Disney/Pixar project or Star Wars spin-off. Memorable storytelling is happening all over the film industry, from Hollywood’s box-office-busting superhero smashes to small, innovative indie experiments. The Verge’s film section is here to help you sort through the latest Hollywood news and reviews, from favorite genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and horror to the independent movies that matter.
Despite Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s success, the MCU is on shaky ground.
The March 2nd start date will cost Paramount millions of dollars, as it must pay $7 million each day the deal doesn’t close after September 30th.
Separately, Paramount revealed in its Q2 2026 earnings report (pdf) that its streaming service gained 2 million subscribers over the past few months and will soon add a short-form video feed, similar to HBO Max and Netflix.
If you said that in your head in a weird little voice, good news: Dropout is now streaming Don Hertzfeldt’s legendary animated films, from Rejected to World of Tomorrow. Paper Trail, which just won the short film category at the Annecy Festival, will be available September 1st.
The writing has been on the wall about Marvel’s Blade movie starring Mahershala Ali being dead in the water, but in a new interview with GQ, the actor explains why he’s done talking about the project falling apart:
Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.
Christopher Nolan’s three-hour movie has had additional 70mm IMAX showtimes added, which are now scheduled to run through September 16th.
After experiencing the movie in both standard widescreen and IMAX, our reviewer Charles Pulliam-Moore wrote that “By shooting The Odyssey completely in 70mm, Nolan crafted a film whose size and visual detail could make it feel immersive in ways that most modern features aren’t.” Might be worth getting a ticket, even if AI bots aren’t much help.
In the process of getting through his thoughts, he does a pretty good riff about the people who say they “make” stuff with AI. As for Musk’s version of The Odyssey, Johnson says, “I’m excited for the Cyclops to have two eyes.”
This time around, Jumanji’s avatars, played by Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black, escape the game in “demo mode,” before a family jumps into their bodies to fix things. The trilogy’s final film is set to release in theaters on December 25th.
The trailer for Michael B. Jordan’s The Thomas Crown Affair remake remake is out, and it looks to be as sexy, heisty, and suave as the 1999 Brosnan/Russo version. The Oscar winning actor directs as well as stars, with Adria Arjona and Kenneth Branagh along for the ride.
The streamer just put out the first trailer for Below, a limited series about a sea monster in a small fishing village, which also includes Josh Hartnett doing a serviceable Newfoundland accent. It starts streaming on October 8th.
During a Comic-Con panel about the film’s return to theaters, the director reiterated his hatred of all things AI, telling the crowd:
“What we’re protecting is the beauty and the redeeming power of art. It’s not about who gets the job. We are protecting a lineage of art. If we cut a generation of people from learning their craft, you’re cutting the rest of the history of that medium away from them for what? … I chose good. You have to put in time. You have to do every element by hand. A human made a decision of depth.”
This single-serving site, IMAXXING, lets you punch in your closest theater, a few parameters, and a notification window to get an email alert when seats to The Odyssey are available — theoretically a handy, low-stakes use of AI agents. (You’ll just have to ignore the image of Clavicular as Odysseus and the repeated incorrect usage of “frame mogging” on the webpage.)
Does it work? I signed up, so we’ll see if I can get a ticket for the Lincoln Square AMC in the next month. Similarly, OpenAI has a social video about how to set up an agent to check for tickets too.
[IMAXXING The Odyssey]
The acclaimed documentarian who’s taken on Enron, Elizabeth Holmes, and so many more is finally showing Musk. It almost wrapped up in 2025, but then… Premiering at the 83rd Venice Film Festival in September, the “hit piece” (according to Elon Musk in 2023) clocks in at 232 minutes. There’s a lot of ground to cover. Absent from the VFF line-up: Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman, Artificial.
The final Coyote vs. Acme trailer underlines how much the movie’s really about consumer safety — a very topical subject that David Zaslav apparently didn’t think would resonate with audiences. The movie’s out August 28th.
It’s already been a pretty great year for horror, and that looks to continue with the new Resident Evil, helmed by Weapons director Zach Cregger. The latest trailer makes the movie seem both like a new twist on the franchise, and also like it’s pulling inspiration from the most recent games.
An interview with ‘Sheep in the Box’ director Hirokazu Kore-eda.
Sure, it’s just a poster, but should Ryan Gosling’s “La La Hand” been kept as it was?
.catalyst_:
I know it doesn’t matter, and he has expressed that he’d like it changed, but in a world where AI can change anything you want in a second, it feels like an actor’s intentional choice at the time of production is important. That hand being wrong takes away from the moment that this piece of art was made in.
Again probably doesn’t matter, I’m sure all parties are consenting. It is okay to make a mistake and have that mistake live and breathe, it makes the art just a little more human, and that is so important.
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If there was any doubt that DC Studios’ Clayface feature was going to be a proper body horror, the movie’s latest trailer makes it pretty clear that director James Watkins has cooked up something that’s going to make your skin crawl.
This is a story about how AI destroyed a long-running site of film data. It’s not just that search no longer refers traffic or that the site itself, The Numbers, is getting scraped. It’s also that there’s no way to defend 30-year-old webpages against malicious actors attempting to get the data early so they could win their Polymarket bets.
[Stephen Follows]
In what seems very much like a desperate attempt to save face after failing to convince the world that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a bad film, Elon Musk says that Grok Imagine will generate a “historically-accurate” adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. One can only imagine what “historically-accurate” means here.
The actor has expressed regret over the flat positioning of his hand in the La La Land poster over the years. Maybe he’s joking, but Lionsgate has now corrected it anyway, unveiling a tweaked design for the movie’s 10th anniversary that’s replacing the previous version “across every platform in the world.”
No amount of clever editing can make this Seedance-generated mess interesting.
The first full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday may not reassure you that the MCU is back on track, but it does suggest Marvel is finally pushing artistic boundaries.
swingdingaling:
The haters said it couldn’t be done but they’ve done it: they made a whole movie of people looking at stuff just off screen
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The theater chain reported earning $1.6 billion over the past few months, its highest quarterly revenue to date. In the earnings report (pdf), AMC CEO Adam Aron says he expects theaters to have their “strongest yet post-pandemic year” in 2026, citing the blockbuster release of The Odyssey and the upcoming debuts of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Dune: Part Three, and Avengers: Doomsday.
The epic made $264.1 million worldwide this weekend — Nolan’s biggest global opening yet — with $124.5 million in the US alone. Not bad for an R-rated adaptation of a 3,000-year-old poem. Fittingly, it’s likely to run on and on too, with no big competition until Spider-Man arrives, and IMAX 70mm screenings sold out for weeks.
As reported by The Wrap, A24 says it won’t, after all, go after a creator for using a Backrooms-adjacent wallpaper. You know, the generically yellow one. Smart move. After a Reddit user reported getting a complaint on behalf of A24, Backrooms director Kane Parsons said it “should not be happening.” A24 then said in a statement it “makes no claim over ownership over the yellow wallpaper.”
Following its wildly successful theatrical run, Curry Barker’s Obsession is now streaming on Peacock for everyone who wants to be scared silly at home.
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Projects like Odysseus: The Fall highlight how the AI hype machine is powered by stunts and stolen valor.
Matt Reeves’ follow-up to The Batman has been delayed once again, and Warner Bros. now plays for the film to debut on Feb. 18, 2028. In the meantime, you can check out this new screen test from the film.
In an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, the man who loves pushing technological boundries enough to anger his fans with controversial remasters had this to say about people who oppose artificial intelligence in film making:
“It’s very much like sitting here saying, ‘Well, I believe the horse and the buggy is really where it’s at. These cars, they break down, they need gas, there’s all kinds of problems with them and pretty soon they’ll be making them into tanks, and then they’ll be killing people. It’s terrible.’ There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.”
