The 10 New Rules of Movies

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Programming note: Today’s edition is free for all. Starting next week, future editions will be available to paid subscribers. I hope you’ll join me on this journey to the center of my movie-spoiled mind. On to today’s thoughts …

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I’ve been thinking about 1976. It’s 50 years ago, sure. And OK, I’m preparing for a 1976 Movie Draft on The Big Picture with a beloved guest. And fine, I am obsessed with 1970s cinema, the way it reshaped the industry and shaped my own taste. But that’s the thing. It isn’t exactly as we remember. Take, for example, these data points.

That, of course, is a list of the biggest movies released in ’76. Just one year after Jaws redefined the blockbuster, American movies could become just about anything. When we think of what made this year so special, Rocky is probably the first title that comes to mind. It won Best Picture, topped the box office, launched Sylvester Stallone as a megastar, and, 50 years later, is the subject of the forthcoming I Play Rocky, a making-of biopic from Amazon MGM. It’s still valuable. After that, what comes to mind? Maybe Sidney Lumet’s eerily predictive Network. Or Martin Scorsese’s similarly future-seeing Taxi Driver. Or Brian De Palma’s landmark horror film Carrie. None of those movies rank among the 10 highest-grossers, which strikes me as instructive.

I’m (unintentionally) fond of catastrophizing the state of movies, a fact you will no doubt see expressed here at times. So this lineup of 1976 makes me wonder how I might have responded in real time to these successes. There are certified masterpieces here, of course, All the President’s Men chief among them. But there’s also a third-time-around remake (A Star Is Born), another remake (King Kong), an action sequel (The Enforcer, the third Dirty Harry movie), and an anodyne war picture (Midway). Show of hands, who’s seen In Search of Noah’s Ark, a Christian-themed documentary distributed by Sunn Classic Pictures exploring the alleged final resting place of, well, Noah’s Ark? Anyone? I love this little data point. Sure, schlocky sequels and remakes are dotted across the 100-year history of movies. And yes, thrilling films for adults can transcend their limitations to become phenomenons. But more than anything, it’s a healthy reminder that most movies are transient sensations, not history-defining cultural landmarks. They’re released and then are tucked away into the crevasses of our cultural memory. The movies move on.

Which has me thinking about right now, and whatever it is that is happening at the movies. It does feel like … something is happening. Attendance and box office are up. Literary adaptations have come roaring back. Young stars are connecting with audiences. Key auteurs we’ve been tracking for 20 years have ascended to the center of movie culture. Is this a boomlet? Or maybe a lovely passing coincidence? Or quite possibly a rumble from the depths of a society yearning for the monoculture? I’m not sure, but it’s something. I’ve been hosting a podcast about the space for nearly 10 years—tracking box office, hanging in theaters, watching everything—and this is clearly the most sustained period of cultural penetration since the halcyon days of 2019, when men and women were crying in the aisles, thanking their lucky stars for Quentin Tarantino/Greta Gerwig/Bong Joon-ho/Thanos. We’re not back to those days yet, probably can’t ever go back. But I’d like to try to get my arms around this.

So there are things I’m noticing in this moment that seem to indicate what we want, what’s possible, and where we should go. They’re new rules. Not new ideas, but by looking at 10 movies from 2026, maybe we can see what is happening here.

Amazon MGM

1. It’s Not IP, It’s ID

The story of the year is Project Hail Mary. There hasn’t been a non-franchise mainstream movie that appealed to critics and audiences like this since Sinners. It is likely an awards contender and its winking posture but hyper-earnest follow-through is a smartly designed postmodern riff on Spielbergian friendly alien sci-fi spectacle. I quite enjoyed the movie both times I saw it—I was a bit less charmed the second time around, but more astonished by the actual staging and production. What I’ve come to appreciate about this so-called “big swing” is how it clearly acknowledges and leverages its forebears—E.T., The Martian, Castaway—without slipping into cosplay. And while cute aliens and Andy Weir novels are powerful draws for audiences, I believe Project Hail Mary has emerged as the new standard for studios to capture a four-quadrant audience because it is an easily identifiable idea but completely unknown as an experience. Getting people out to theaters isn’t as easy as slapping a superhero in the center of the frame anymore. We don’t want to know everything. Lure us. There’s a series of mousetrap dynamics that have to fall into place. Right star, right setting, right filmmakers, right tone, right time. Project Hail Mary was a bingo. I hope it starts a wave.

2. Sure Bets Aren’t So Sure

Avatar: Fire and Ash earned $1.49 billion at the global box office. It’s the 16th-highest-grossing film in the history of movies. That’s good, right? Well, yes. But maybe no? The third installment of James Cameron’s motion-capture environmental family adventure saga made nearly $900 million less than its predecessor, The Way of Water, and roughly half of the original 2009 film. This is a steep decline. The movie, which arrived just three years after we all met our beautiful Payakan, suggested a repetition, a redundancy, and a creakiness that is rare among Cameron achievements. I don’t think Disney is going to cancel Avatar, and I’d like to see more installments. (I would be curious to know how much Disney was expecting the film to make, given its enormous cost to mount and execute.) I choose Avatar as the example here to operate in good faith—I’ve grown quite sour on the Fast & Furious/Jurassic/MCU/DCU/Star Wars mega-franchises in recent years, as the studios have squeezed those lemons dry. But I love Avatar and revere Cameron. So I hope this is understood as equal opportunity concern-noting. There’s more signal than noise in the result on this movie, and particularly in the lack of legs it demonstrated into January when it could have dominated even more. The “and another and another and more fan service and more of your friends returning” strategy was so reliable for so long in the 21st century and it is still the clearest draw for mass audiences. But it is undeniably waning, and being backfilled by other kinds of movies. Our apologies to Big Jim.

3. Read a Book, Dummies

I’ve had Maika Monroe stock for a very long time. The first time I saw her in a movie was Jason Reitman’s Labor Day in 2013, followed in quick succession by a double-shot of genre nastiness, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows and Adam Wingard’s The Guest. She quickly got hoovered into the studio spectacle machine with The 5th Wave and Independence Day: Resurgence in 2016. We know what happened to those films. But I held my Monroe stock. She struck me as an ideal leading woman for these genre times—flinty, empathetic, and just blank enough. In recent years, she has comfortably settled into an early Jamie Lee Curtis-esque arc in movies like Greta, Watcher, Significant Other, and, most notably, Longlegs. She’s not a Scream Queen and not a Final Girl and not a sexpot. She’s an evolution.

So it is with great fascination that I witness the success of Reminders of Him, a Colleen Hoover adaptation about a young woman who, after going to prison for manslaughter due to a violent car crash, re-emerges to claim her life and family. It’s isn’t a great movie, by turns saccharine and dull. But it is working—it’s the eighth-highest-grossing movie in America this year so far. It’s earned $86 million worldwide. And Monroe is at the center of it all—the story, the poster, the marketing. But so is Colleen Hoover, the mega-brand in publishing whose transition to Grisham-esque heights at the movies is one of the more fascinating developments in the space. And maybe it is Hoover who is helping launch Monroe to greater heights, not unlike seeing a young and rising Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock in A Time to Kill, a movie that seemed to be pointing big red arrows at its future stars, who were savvy enough to choose the right literary adaptation at the right time. Project Hail Mary, Wuthering Heights, The Housemaid. These properties are rocket boosters for pre-existing stars. There’s a lot of books out there, and a lot of worthy authors. Who’s next?

A24

4. Stars Will Come, If You Build Them

My favorite story of the movie year is The Drama, a very funny, very snivelly character study about young people holding each other to all the wrong standards. It’s creeping toward $100 million worldwide and that is due in part to yet another clever “hide the ball” campaign by A24, but most especially because of its two stars, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. For Pattinson, this is the culmination of an intuitive, sincere, and genuinely cool approach to his own stardom, ever since he chose to work with David Michôd, David Cronenberg, Anton Corbijn, James Gray, Werner Herzog, Brady Corbet, the Safdie brothers, the Zellner brothers, Claire Denis, Robert Eggers, and Ciro Guerra in succession between 2014 and 2019, right as the Twilight series concluded. He teamed up with Christopher Nolan for Tenet in 2020 and has since taken on the mantle of Bruce Wayne. But he has stuck to his values as a curious and risk-taking cinephile movie star. He cashes in all that good will with The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, and Netflix’s Here Comes the Flood, a heist movie opposite Denzel Washington, this year. (Not to mention another compelling A24 vehicle in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime.) I don’t think you can overstate just how complete and unique Pattinson’s approach has been. And it never feels overmanaged or sweaty. He’s just got great taste, and The Drama paying off is so heartening.

And what about Zendaya? In addition to being the lodestar of young Hollywood, with appearances in some of those same blockbusters alongside Pattinson, she’s also returning as MJ in Spider-Man: Brand New Day and leading Euphoria Season 3. In that series, as with The Drama, she shows an extraordinary comfort with awkward, transgressive material. Your mileage may vary on how much you like these things, but the list of ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s true-blue stars who would have taken on The Drama in all its cringe-edgelord glory or Euphoria, with all of its nudity, violence, substance abuse, quests for faith, and bodily fluids, is vanishingly short. Showing up for a movie like The Drama is a message to the people who green-light movies: We can handle it. We want it. I understand that publicly traded corporations are afraid of a little controversy, but the general public has much bigger dramas to worry about. Push us a little with your movies, especially if your stars want to do the same.

5. The Youth Must Be Served

I took my daughter to see Hoppers and GOAT in successive weekends. We had a ball with both movies. Two weeks after we saw Hoppers, out of nowhere, she plaintively asked me “Why did that girl become a beaver?” This led to an interesting exchange about how to save the environment and if we are doomed. This is called imprinting. These two movies were released three weeks apart. Neither one was wounded by the other. One featured a male lead, the other a female lead. One was about animals playing a form of basketball called “roarball.” The other is about an ecologically-minded girl coping with anxiety by entering her consciousness into an animatronic beaver. Weird stuff in both cases. They’re both original! Kids love these movies, they’re both among the top five of the year at the box office. Perhaps this is my theater-poisoned mind speaking, but why are there not 4-7 new kids features coming from every studio every year?

Warner Bros.

6. Break a Taboo, Why Don’t You?

I still don’t really click with Emerald Fennell’s movies. I really want to. But somebody is. Wuthering Heights made nearly $250 million at the box office, making it clearly one of the highest-grossing costume dramas of all time, and also the biggest one to prominently feature egg yolks as a stand-in for post-sex bedsheet viscosity, kneaded dough as a stand-in for pounded flesh, and penetrated fish mouths as a stand-in for, well, you know. Interesting film, Fennell is not one for subtlety. And, as with The Drama, its success, particularly among young audiences, is so encouraging because it means this century of desexualized, faux-puritan heroism is circling the drain. Let these beautiful people smash their bodies together on screen. If not to satisfy a primal urge then at least to demonstrate that we are all still using our physical bodies in the world every day, not slumped over in a hover-chair, pressing buttons to have food delivered while we train our eyes and minds on Episode 462 of Love Is Blind. (No shots, I kind of enjoy that show.) Sometimes you gotta get out there and knead that dough, though.

7. Franchises Are Fine …

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is hurtling toward a billion dollars. Cool!

8. … But Visionaries Are Better

At last week’s CinemaCon in Las Vegas, three films drew the loudest reactions, generated the most engaged enthusiasm, and rattled beyond the halls of Caesars Palace: The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, and Avengers: Doomsday. The presentations for all three movies were introduced, hyped up, and organized around their directors—Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, and Joe and Anthony Russo, respectively. It was as clear a sign as anything happening right now that filmmakers are not just the key ingredient to making something special, they are the selling point. More than a media event, CinemaCon is a highly curated investor’s panel pitched at theater owners. Putting these middle-aged men in front of the masses to pitch their wares is all you need to know about where big-budget filmmaking with an eye toward lasting legacy is headed. We have to make more of them, which only happens by nurturing, supporting, and marketing more men and women behind the camera.

9. Marketing Is a Privilege, Not a Right

I first learned about Mark Fischbach, a.k.a. Markiplier, in 2013 from my little sister Grace, then 13. She’d become hooked on his YouTube videos, one of the earliest signs of the Creator Economy surge that we are now living through (and perhaps I have benefitted from). I was bemused by the Markiplier experience, but I really dug how locked-in Grace was on the world he was building. She didn’t hang with him for everything he’s launched over the years, but she still has a warm feeling toward him, the way I do toward ’90s Mets like Dave Magadan and Todd Hundley. Which leads us to Iron Lung, Fischbach’s self-financed theatrical success story, one of the crazier things to happen at the movies this century. The self-distributed movie earned $50 million on thousands of screens around the world. It’s hard to overstate how difficult this is to accomplish—the studio-theater cartel is a complex system that can only be hacked by way of demand. Fans wanted to see Iron Lung, a sci-fi-horror video game adaptation that suffocated me but clearly thrilled fans of Fischbach and the game. And they got what they demanded. It was a reminder that we can get what we want if we keep asking for it. And that the best way to do that is to advocate for yourself the way Fischbach so smartly has over the past 15 years. That he has reportedly also shared the profits with his cast and crew and likely inspired a generation of creators to pursue an independent path like this is lovely.

10. Plug and Play

Speaking of video games, that was my overwhelming takeaway from CinemaCon—they’re not only the new superhero for studios, they’re the new Everything. Here’s what we can expect in 2026, ’27, and ’28:

1. Sony

   1. Resident Evil (Zach Cregger)

   2. The Legend of Zelda (Wes Ball)

   3. Bloodborne

   4. Helldivers (Justin Lin)

2. Warner Bros.

   1. Mortal Kombat II

   2. A Minecraft Sequel

3. Universal

   1. More Super Mario

4. Paramount

   1. Sonic the Hedgehog 4

      1. A TBD Sonic Spinoff in 2028

   2. Street Fighter

   3. Angry Birds 3

   4. Call of Duty (Peter Berg, written by Taylor Sheridan)

5. A24

   1. Elden Ring (Alex Garland)

This is not only the vanguard of studio filmmaking, it’s easily the most untapped resource given the 40-plus-year history of gaming. I just saw a fascinating new movie from the Japanese director Genki Kawamura called Exit 8, which neatly replicates the experience of playing the game of the same name. It holds the grammar and pacing, while adding layers of dramatic texture that a game cannot accomplish.

11 Things I Think I Saw at CinemaCon

Last week, after visiting the annual Hollywood exhibitor convention in Las Vegas, we recapped all of the presentations from the major studios, the most exciting footage, best trailers, executive performance, movie star tap-dancing, and cringe-worthy moments on The Big Picture as well as on Matt Belloni’s show The Town.

But the event is such a smorgasbord of movie promotion, there’s plenty I saw and didn’t get a chance to dig into on the episodes. So as an homage to my longtime Grantland homie and Mets Corner pod partner Zach Lowe, these are some things still lingering in my mind a week later.

1. Highlander: John Wick action auteur Chad Stahelski (one of my favorite Big Picture guests ever) is helming this remake of the 1986 high fantasy film about a Scotsman who discovers he is immortal and has to battle several scary dudes. This film sat in the Masters of the Universe, one-year-from-now slot at the Amazon MGM presentation. It clearly matched Stahelski’s neon-drenched, bone-crunching aesthetic honed on the Wick movies. Henry Cavill is starring as the titular ’lander, there can be only one, etc. I’d like for this movie to work, and what we saw was a blend of BTS footage, wide-angle looks at elaborate sets and lighting, some bits about the action choreography, and testimonials from cast members like Cavill, Dave Bautista, Jeremy Irons (lol), and Marisa Abela. I think this will work.

2. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother: We waited a few years for Mahershala Ali to join the MCU as Blade and then that didn’t happen and so now this film exists. Directed by Bassam Tariq, the man behind 2020’s Mogul Mowgli who was to direct Blade, this is a sort of psychic reversal of Highlander—a spiritual action movie, blending the grand religiosity of a Bruce Lee picture with the dark energy of Oldboy. I loved what we saw from this trailer, grounded fight choreography and Ali, one of my favorite actors alive, tapping into the wounded charisma that won him two Oscars.

3. Werwulf: Robert Eggers has made a werewolf movie. It looks bleak, disgusting, and haunted by a slobbering filth. It comes out on Christmas, just like his Nosferatu. I think this will work.

4. Leviticus: One of the most buzzed about movies at Sundance this year was this conversion therapy, queer Aussie horror film. Picked up by Neon, who debuted a mesmerizing trailer for the film last week. Sometimes you get a feeling about a movie and its director (this one is from Adrian Chiarella). I think this will work.

5. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Tears of the Azure Sea: I don’t know much about this Crunchyroll anime film, which was briefly mentioned from the stage in Vegas, but that is the best title for a movie I have ever seen and I plan to continue my dive into anime features after loving last year’s Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc. I think this will work.

6. Street Fighter: So there’s the feeling of capturing a game’s play, like Exit 8. And then there’s the feeling a game gives you in your loins. As a ’90s kid, the Street Fighter 2 sonic palette lives on inside me. This really seems to have captured the energy of the game, and I’m in on Noah Centineo, Action Hero. I think this will work.

7. Hexed: An original animated Disney witch story, huzzah for the Girl Dads and their witchy daughters. I think this will work.

8. Possession: Well, this could go badly. But with Smile’s Finn Parker directing Callum Turner and Margaret Qualley in the leads of a remake of Andrzej Żuławski’s convulsive marriage-horror arthouse classic I am choosing to be hopeful. It was only mentioned in passing at Paramount’s presentation. I think (hope?) this will work.

9. Behemoth!: All Disney had to say about Tony Gilroy’s latest film, his first thing since the magnificent conclusion of Andor Season 2, is that it is currently in post-production. So … 2026 release? Pedro Pascal plays a classical music world figure alongside David Harbour, Eva Victor, and Olivia Wilde. There’s no one better at anguished character study than Gilroy. I think this will work. And I hope it’s an awards season player.

10. Hershey: So, um, Angel Studios is broadening its reach beyond Sound of Freedom agitprop and faith-based dramas into historical IP. This summer, the studio releases Young Washington about, yes, Young George Washington. And then this Thanksgiving we are getting Hershey, from Freaky Friday and Mean Girls director Mark Waters, starring Finn Wittrock and Alexandra Daddario as the first couple of American chocolatiers. This is not a 30 Rock fake-movie joke. I don’t know if I think this will work, but I’m here for the weird future of insurgent movie studios.

11. And one final thought on CinemaCon: The Paramount Brand. At the outset of the studio’s presentation last week, they shared a “short film” directed by David Ellison’s USC classmate Jon M. Chu highlighting the past and future of the studio, which featured Tom Cruise barefoot on top of the Paramount water tower, memorably recreating this photo. It also featured a wide array of creative figures associated with the studio’s future film slate, including Timothée Chalamet, Sherry Lansing, and Gina Prince-Bythewood, James Cameron, McKenna Grace, the Duffer brothers, Teyana Taylor, Johnny Knoxville, Marlon Wayans, Molly Ringwald, Will Smith, Issa Rae, James Wan, Travis Scott, John Krasinski, Chris Pratt, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, Margaret Qualley, Mark Wahlberg, and Peter Berg, among many others I didn’t get a chance to jot down. It was a zippy bit of content, with the camera bobbing and weaving across the famed Paramount lot, hoping to express the breadth of this new (and likely eventual) corporate media behemoth. It put a shiny gloss on an ugly story of consolidation. I’m as wary of the Paramount-WB merger as anybody, and while I’d like to avoid spiraling out about it once a week here, it was queasily fascinating to watch all that talent dance for movie theater owners and then to hear Ellison guarantee onstage a 45-day theatrical window for the rest of the 2026 movie slate. It’s not wise to take executives at their word ahead of major acquisitions, and so I won’t be so gullible. And I won’t be needlessly optimistic about a bad situation for so many working in the business of movies. But I will have to engage with New Paramount, to see their movies and see how they fit into the landscape, to hope that, creatively, at least, they are led by people willing to take risks and not rehash the same old bullshit. I think I can at least do that.

Vinegar Syndrome

Physical Media Corner

Welcome to the very first installment of 73 percent of why I wanted to start this newsletter. That’s right, I am talking about my beloved plastic. Physical Media is a passion of mine, I’m a collector, a chronicler, a proselytizer for the value of owning a copy of your favorite films. So every issue of this newsletter, I’ll take a moment to recommend a new title that’s recently been issued or an older one I’ve picked up. This is a space for real heads, the burgeoning collector, the grouchy veteran, the priced-out window-shopper, the blu-curious boys and girls.

The first title I want to highlight comes to us from Cinematographe, an offshoot of the legendary Vinegar Syndrome label. I’m in the midst of a Robert Duvall deep dive ahead of a Hall of Fame episode, and so I picked up Badge 373, a down-and-dirty post-French Connection cop thriller just issued. The hardbox edition is already sold out at VS, but the standard edition is available now and if you have a fetish for ’70s movies where the lead is an irrepressible asshole with a thirst for justice that is barely concealing his wounded male ego, well, you should consider adding this one to your collection. It also features an essay from one of my favorite critics, Mark Asch, about Eddie Egan, the infamous NYPD narcotics detective who was an inspiration for Popeye Doyle as well as Duvall’s Eddie Ryan in the film. I was raised on New York cop movies as the son of a New York narcotics detective, and few are as mean, unsparing, and depressing as Badge 373. You can see the film in a lineage that includes Don Siegel’s Madigan, French Connection, Serpico, Report to the Commissioner, Prince of the City, and more. I wouldn’t quite put it in their class, but it is absolutely worth seeing, especially in this new reissue.

Something I Saw That You Will Soon

I see a lot of movies early. Occasionally I’ll let you know what I like to get your hopes up without spoiling much about it. On Monday night I saw Olivia Wilde’s new film The Invite, a four-handed dramedy about two couples having an evening together. Picked up by A24 out of Sundance, let’s just say this one found its target audience in a middle-aged guy with a bad back. By turns hilarious and crushing, I really responded to this, especially my guy Edward Norton’s performance as a man named Hawk. Check it out June 26.

Until next time, see you at the movies.