Robert Hamer
Happy Summer, readers. Or at least, as happy as it can be right now. Hopefully you did not have any international travel plans. Or road trip plans. Fingers crossed you don’t live near a data center and planned to just relax and enjoy the quiet peace of your neighborhood, either. Drink plenty of water and monitor yourself for heat stress, too. Remember when summer used to be nice?
Anyway, what movies can we look forward to over the next three months?
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE – In Theaters June 5
Directed by Travis Knight
Starring Nicholas Galitzine, with Camila Mendes and Jared “All But Two Movies I’ve Acted In Since Winning An Oscar Twelve Years Ago Has Lost Money At The Box Office” Leto
What is it about? Adapted from a four-decade-old toy commercial cartoon show, Prince Adam returns to his home planet to save it and the rest of the universe from the evil forces of Skeletor.
How am I feelin’ about this one? Look, if the fans love this, good for them. Joey seemed to have fun with it, too. But do you want to know how I know Amazon more or less expects this movie to be a 50-megaton bomb, anyway?
Just last month, they quietly moved their upcoming release of the live-action Voltron movie from theatrical to a streaming exclusive. Yikes. Already giving up on the effort to make live-action versions of 80s-era Saturday morning cartoons the Next Big Thing before it even began…
DISCLOSURE DAY – In Theaters June 12
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Emily Blunt, with Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth
What is it about? If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?
How am I feelin’ about this one? I mean… maybe? Kinda depends on how far away they are from us. Because as much as some people resent encountering this sentence in any context, in the case of extraterrestrials, I have to type it: Barack Obama is (probably) right. In an observable universe that is approximately 94 billion light years in size, populated by an estimated one to two trillion-with-a-“t” galaxies, with each galaxy containing anywhere from 100 to 400 billion stars, the chances of our entire universe containing at least one other planet with the conditions to support complex life rounds up to about 100%. I truly do not believe this is a weird or woo-woo opinion to have. But the odds of that life ever being able to travel to us? Or communicate with us? Or even observe us from their vantage point? Much, much lower. When our former President said, “the distances are so vast,” that is almost an understatement. Aside from our own Sun, the nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, and if we traveled there at the speed of the fastest manned space flight in history, it would take us approximately 115,000 years to reach our destination. For context, going back that far in time would bring us to around the period when homo sapiens first started migrating out of Africa. And that’s our closest celestial neighbor. Even if we somehow found a way to travel near or even at the speed of light, and discovered proof of the existence of life on a planet residing at, say, the other end of the Milky Way galaxy, it would be tens of thousands of years before we could physically arrive at their planet to say hello. Would they even still be around by the time we touched down on their home planet? If we could travel at or near the speed of light to visit life forms residing in Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, it would take at least two-and-a-half million years before we could make first contact. All of these constraints and inconceivable distances we’re dealing with are the same ones that any extraterrestrial life forms, no matter how advanced, would also be limited by. The disheartening reality is that we probably aren’t alone out there, but the sheer size of the universe and the nature of spacetime itself will prevent us from ever interacting with intelligent life from other planets.
Oh right, this is supposed to be a movie preview article. Anyway, Steven Spielberg is returning to the subject of extraterrestrials for the first time since the experience of watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made us hate life and ourselves. Facetiousness aside, this is an interesting topic to revisit cinematically, since we have made some pretty astonishing astronomical discoveries since 2008. Thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, we now know there are way more exoplanets in the Milky Way than we originally thought. Many of them habitable (again, we are very unlikely to ever reach them ourselves, but it does lend to my insistence that there is life outside of Earth)! We can now measure the chemical makeup of the atmospheres of exoplanets, capture images of black holes, and can measure extreme cosmic phenomena with a precision that seemed only possible in science fiction at the dawn of the 21st century. So while I find the lens flares, CGI animals, and mawkish tone of the trailer for this movie off-putting, I am intrigued to see how this filmmaker’s views of space and alien life have changed since the era of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And he is apparently planning to surprise us narratively! At CinemaCon 2026, Spielberg said that he has been playing his cards close to the chest regarding a major plot reveal two-thirds of the way into the film, so much so that the marketing materials for Disclosure Day have been deliberately obscuring it. This is from the same man who directed what seemed like a typical awards-baiting historical biopic, but instead snuck in one of the ballsiest political messages of any mainstream movie released in my lifetime. The same man who directed what looked like a schmaltzy horse melodrama but was actually a tribute to myriad international film aesthetics of the 20th century. The man who took a hideously smug and irritating tribute to branded fanboyism and adapted it into… look, I never said he was perfect, okay? I’m just saying, even pushing 80, Spielberg is still capable of novelty.
SUPERGIRL – In Theaters June 26
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Starring Milly Alcock, with Eve Ridley and Matthias Schoenaerts
What is it about? While celebrating her 23rd birthday, Kara Zor-El joins up with a young girl on a journey to avenge her father’s death.
How am I feelin’ about this one? Looks like we’re off to the races with James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Universe. Superman wasn’t a massive, era-defining hit, but it turned a healthy profit and made Warner Bros. Discovery’s head honchos comfortable enough to greenlight the rest of his planned “Gods and Monsters” phase of this rebooted cinematic universe. Their cinematic follow-up is sticking with Kryptonians, though, as now we’re going on an adventure with the Man of Steel’s younger, more cynical, less even-keeled cousin Kara Zor-El in another galaxy. Which is cool because the whole appeal of Supergirl is that she isn’t a moral paragon like Superman. She’s less experienced. She has a more pessimistic view of superheroics. She has a rebellious streak. She makes mistakes. Not only that, but setting this movie completely off Earth will allow more stories in that weird cosmic register that Jack Kirby brought to DC Comics in the 1970s. One the other hand, the trailer looks very…
… Guardians of the Galaxy-esque. Which is weird, since Gunn is not directing this movie. That would be Craig Gillespie of I, Tonya and the Dalmatians Literally Killed Her Mother Origin Story Cruella. And look, I enjoyed the first Guardians of the Galaxy twelve years ago. But what was fresh and unique back then has become formulaic nowadays, which is why Gunn put a definitive end to it within a multimedia franchise that is normally allergic to putting an end to anything in its cinematic universe. So while I do believe Supergirl’s snarkier attitude than her cousin is a good fit for the character, I would much rather see that personality bounce off of people on Earth than in a milieu where I’ve already seen Chris Pratt quip around in three times.
But maybe I’m rushing to judgment. After all, the weird space setting of the DC Universe was Jack Kirby just taking the space stuff he created for Marvel and transplanting it onto the fictional universe of his former competitor, and the result was still something that felt distinctly different. I am more than open to the possibility that there will be distinguishing features here to make not just another rehash of the movie trilogy that put Gunn on the map as a mainstream filmmaker in the first place. Another major advantage this movie clearly has in its favor is its star, Milly Alcock, an absolute cutie pie who has been praised in early test screenings as a titan of charisma giving a star-is-born performance.
EVIL DEAD BURN – In Theaters July 10
Directed by Sébastien Vaniček
Starring Souheila Yacoub, with Tandi Wright and Hunter Doohan
What is it about? Following a tragic death, a mourning family comes together in a secluded house and accidentally unleashes the Deadites.
How am I feelin’ about this one? I have mixed feelings about this revival of the Evil Dead series. On the one hand, this would seem like exactly the kind of Best-Case Scenario™ when it comes to Hollywood strip-mining every single Boomer-era intellectual property to capitalize on our culture’s refusal to evolve. Sure, Sam Raimi’s original trilogy came to a literally perfect conclusion in 1992 and no future installments needed to be made after it. But the show was pretty fun, I have heard great things about the stage musical, and the concept of making standalone stories centering different characters in different settings completely detached from the “lore” of the mainline series being terrorized by the same monster is a good one. Heck, it worked for Predator! So why not just hand the Necronomicon to new writer/director teams to put their own spin on it every few years?
There is just one small problem, at least from my own perspective — I don’t really care for these new Evil Dead movies all that much. Evil Dead Rise was fine enough but hardly a new horror classic, and I found Fede Álvarez’s remake flat-out bad. I don’t need my Evil Dead movies to be as funny as Army of Darkness or even Evil Dead 2, but the relentless po-faced brutality of both of the more recent movies in presenting the same iconography and general setup of the classic trilogy felt monotonous and strained rather than inspired. I don’t need the star of these movies to be as effortlessly charismatic and funny as Bruce Campbell, but I would prefer someone with… more, than what Jane Levy and Lily Sullivan were serving. The only thing both films truly knocked out of the park in my view was the thing every single installment of this franchise has always done extremely well, which is the top-notch gore effects.
So will this third go at it finally win me over? Well, much like the last two, they are using this entry as an opportunity to showcase a fresh-faced rising star filmmaker instead of an established name, which is nice. I have not seen Sébastien Vaniček’s debut feature Infested, but I have heard good things, so that’s promising. The cast is made up of names I am almost entirely unfamiliar with (only Hunter Doohan is vaguely recognizable to me), but Campbell was an unknown in the first movie as well. The trailer showcases family dysfunction to a degree that might lean into THE MONSTER IS A METAPHOR FOR TRAUMA tedium, but it could also lend a subversive twist on an often overidealized-to-the-point-of-outright-fetishized aspect of American life. I’m not writing this one off, is what I’m saying.
THE ODYSSEY – In Theaters July 17
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Matt Damon, with Zendaya and Tom Holland
What is it about? An adaptation of Homer’s epic poem about the legendary Greek king of Ithica’s long and perilous journey home following the Trojan War.
How am I feelin’ about this one? So this is it. The follow-up to Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture. He was literally bound by nothing after Oppenheimer managed to defy all odds and become one of the highest-grossing movies of 2023 and one-half of a cultural phenomenon despite being a three-hour-long historical biopic about a World War II-era scientist. He could have asked for $250 million for a cinematic tone poem about his mother’s gardening hobby (I have no idea what his mother’s actual hobbies are, to be clear) and Universal probably would have cut him a check.
What he asked for instead was to adapt one of the most enduring Greek tales of all time, about the wartime king Odysseus and his decade-long journey home after leading his men to victory in the most apocryphal war in human history. This is an interesting project for him to pursue, since it represents the first time he has ever expressed in interest in a fantasy storyline. He tinkered with the supernatural in The Prestige and his conception of dreams in Inception is largely fantastical, but both movies have their toes dipped in some semblance of “hard” science fiction. But personified gods? Sorcery? Creatures from myth? That is new territory for one of the most powerful Hollywood filmmakers of the 21st century and I look forward to the thought-provoking discussions of what this might signal for him as an aute-oh what’s that? A bunch of online weirdos are being weird in their weird little online spaces and groupchats with reactionary centrist news media pundits because a black lady was cast in it and Achilles or maybe Elpenor is being portrayed by a trans man? Okay, I guess we have to do this…
The Odyssey, one of the oldest and oft-adapted stories in recorded history, is not based on literally true events. Historians don’t even agree on whether Homer’s depiction of the Trojan War was loosely based on a real conflict or made up out of whole cloth. Lupita Nyong’o is not even the first woman of color to portray the mythological characters Helen or Clytemnestra in the hundreds of renditions of this story, and no, this is not equivalent to Sydney Sweeney portraying Rosa Parks because that’s a real person. “Buh buh but she was still Greek and the Greeks were blonde-haired blue-eyed Aryan…” bitch, her mythological origin story includes being hatched from an egg! And why are men of my generation still obsessed with Brad Pitt’s version of Achilles? Seriously, for over twenty years, dudes around my age have had a borderline homoerotic fixation on this one character in Troy as The Ideal Manly Man™ and now we’re deluding ourselves into thinking Ancient Greek warriors had six-pack abs and a California tan? Hey, dudes, you should try reading The Odyssey at some point. Achilles is a jerkass who took on a gay lover during the war who later reveals to Odysseus that he regrets choosing glory over longevity when he travels to the Underworld.
Have you guys tried… not being weird little online freaks? Have you tried not turning every single instance of a nonwhite person or a gender-nonconforming person appearing in a movie adapting something you absolutely have not ever read before into some psychosexual culture war? Can you just, like, take a break from that for a few months?
TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA – In Theaters August 7
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
Starring Hannah Einbinder, with Gillian Anderson and Eva Victor
What is it about? A filmmaker hired to direct a new installment of a long-running slasher movie franchise becomes obsessed with the reclusive actress who played the “Final Girl” in the original movie.
How am I feelin’ about this one? I feel guilty. I adored I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s thrillingly original exploration of gender identity through the prism of specifically 90s-era Millennial nostalgia, but I did not really write about it all that much on here. I should have. It was so uncanny, so unpredictable, so haunting, so beautifully synthesizing of the director’s own struggles with Millennial nostalgia and their gender identity that it succeeded better than any other movie I can recall in simulating the feeling of transness without ever being About Transness™ (I say this as a cishet male — if there are any trans or gender nonconforming readers who think I’m way off, please sound off in the comments!).
I was hardly the only person who loved it, either, which is probably why Schoenbrun very clearly enjoyed a wider canvas of budget and creative contributors for their follow-up feature, moving from their relationship with network TV tween supernatural adventure shows to popular low-budget slashers à la Friday the 13th. Scenes in the trailer are evocative of David Lynch, Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper, and even a dash of Tim Robinson… but the cumulative effect is 100% Schoenbrun. The consensus around the film itself seems to validate this feeling so far, as it got a very enthusiastic response at the Cannes Un Certain Regard section, where it had been selected as the opening film and won the Queer Palm.
Also, how cool is it that Gillian Anderson is in a movie like this? It appears that she’s in full devour-the-scenery mode as the slasher equivalent of Norma Desmond, and I am here for it. While her The X-Files co-star has been busy insisting on projects that exclusively portray him as a Sex Chad Adonis, Anderson has been diversifying her acting portfolio with roles in projects ranging from The House of Mirth to Tron: Ares, with this one looking like her most flat-out fun role yet. I… sort of feel the Best Supporting Actress whispers are a tad optimistic, but maybe I’ll be wrong.
COYOTE VS. ACME – In Theaters August 28
Directed by Dave Green
Starring Will Forte, with John Cena and Lana Condor
What is it about? After every product made by the ACME Corporation has backfired on Wile E. Coyote in his pursuit of the Road Runner, a down-and-out human billboard attorney represents Coyote in a lawsuit against ACME.
How am I feelin’ about this one? Oh hey, remember this project? We were supposed to have seen this quite some time ago, but a certain David Zaslav decided it would be more prudent to his company’s bottom line to just ice the project entirely for the sake of a tax write-off. This came as a complete surprise to the creatives behind the movie and enraged both fans and filmmakers who saw Warner Bros. Discovery as a cynical art-killing cartel not worth risking a project on. The backlash was so great that it eventually sent a Ghost of Christmas Something over to David’s bedroom, and he eventually decided to reverse course on burying the film in favor of just selling it off to another bidder for an initial asking price that most studios were not willing to meet. All seemed lost. But after relentless campaigning from fans and artists, Ketchup Entertainment came to its rescue and the film coming to theaters this August! Hooray!
But will all this pressure and activism ultimately be vindicated? I hope so… but I have my doubts. I want to be clear — I am very happy to see any feature film survive suppressive attempts against it. That this has the opportunity to be seen by the masses is, in of itself, a good thing regardless of anything that comes afterward. But I do worry that, financially, Dave will end up with the last laugh. Much like how comic book fans near-unanimously sided with Neil Gaiman over Todd McFarlane in their dispute over Miracleman, only for the revived Miracleman series to tank when Gaiman finally regained control of the character, there is a difference between what the fans say they want and what the general public is actually willing to pay for. This is especially true when something has been in development hell or legal limbo for many years.
But how much buzz has this really attracted since it was saved from oblivion? This is anecdotal, but I have not met anyone in my personal life who was aware Coyote vs. Acme was coming out this summer. They weren’t even aware of the premise of the film, and when I told it to them, their reactions were usually some variation of, “Oh, heh, yeah, that sounds like a clever setup… I’ll wait until it hits streaming.” I can’t blame them, frankly. The Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Corporation for all the defective products they’ve sold him comes off like a great setup to an improv comedy skit or a Family Guy aside, but a feature-length movie? The stars, producers, and entertainment industry figures who fought for this to be seen at all certainly seem to think so. I hope I’m wrong and this movie is a hit. I’d hate to give David Zaslav a win.
What say you, dear readers? Do you think the wait will have been worth it for Coyote vs. Acme? Will The Odyssey live up to the hype? Am I wrong about the possibility of us making contact with life from other planets? What are you doing to ensure a data center is never built near you? Let us know in the comments.
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