‘Spider-Verse’! ‘Superman’! ‘Thunderbolts*’! CinemaCon teases a ton of upcoming movies
The yearly gathering also showed off ‘Project Hail Mary,’ ‘Naked Gun’ and more. PLUS: Disney puts the live-action ‘Tangled’ remake on hold, trailers for ‘M3GAN 2.0’ and ‘Rick and Morty,’ and ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ is officially rescued.
It’s Friday. You have a new edition of Popculturology’s weekly newsletter in your hands. (Or, on your phone. Unless you print this newsletter out every week.) The annual CinemaCon conference was held this week in Las Vegas, giving movie studios a chance to break some news and unveil some trailers. If you were lucky enough to be there, you got first looks at movies like Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse and Project Hail Mary. (I was not lucky enough to be there.)
Before we get into this week’s pop culture news, I wanted to talk about Brain Slop. Yes, there’s a new newsletter at The Omnicosm, joining Popculturology and Snackology. Brain Slop is a weekly newsletter, hitting your inbox on Sunday, that’s full of stories about tech, space, dinosaurs, sports and more. The first edition kicked things off with a duo of killer whales who are hunting down great white sharks to eat their livers.
Bill Kuchman
Brain Slop is basically like being one of my friends who I text fun links to all week. If you’re not already a subscriber, you can add it to your list via your account page.
🍪🧠 Wanna add Snackology or Brain Slop to your subscription? Update your email preferences on your account page.
Double Goggins
Has any other actor pulled off the HBO double dip that Walton Goggins is doing with The White Lotus and The Righteous Gemstones? From his smug look of enlightenment at the end of the penultimate episode of The White Lotus’ third season to his ... his ... um ... well ... exhibitionist display at the beginning of the latest episode of The Righteous Gemstones, it’s all Goggins right now. (Even if he wasn’t part of that episode’s final scene — a scene that made me laugh harder than anything else I’ve recently watched.)
- “Yeah, like a little boy’s dream”: I went into this season of The White Lotus expecting Goggins’ character to be my favorite. I go into the season finale knowing that Aimee Lou Wood’s character is my favorite.
- 📺 The White Lotus Cast Impersonates Parker Posey’s Character Victoria Ratliff
NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS
Beyond the Spider-Verse gets a new release date, awesome art
The two Spider-Verse movies are all-timers, animated movies that not only rewrote the rules for that medium but also should have been celebrated alongside their live-action counterparts. (It’s gonna happen one year. It sadly wasn’t this year.)
Despite Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ending on a cliffhanger so massive it led to people accusing Sony of misleadingly not promoting the film as the first part of two-part story, the third Spider-Verse movie has been without a release date since the studio yanked it from its previous March 29, 2024, target.
A release delay isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse had to pause for the dual writer/actor strikes. Then there was the Vulture report that Phil Lord, one of the co-creators of the Spider-Verse movies, had created “a web of production turmoil” behind the scenes. Fans of these movies wanted the third installment to be good, and if an extended break meant that Lord, Chris Miller and everyone else involved could not only get the story right but also do so in a way that didn’t create a toxic work environment, that’s a good thing.
Hopefully the Beyond the Spider-Verse team has reached that point, because Sony announced a new release date for the film on Monday, slotting the sequel in for a June 4, 2027, release.
Honestly, let’s normalize having three- or four-year gaps between movies in a series again. George Lucas knew what he was doing when he spaced out the movies in the first two Star Wars trilogies in three-year chunks. (Sony Pictures)
- The Spider-Man rises: Over in the live-action corner of the Spider-Verse, Sony also revealed that the fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man movie will be titled Spider-Man: Brand New Day. This was also the subtitle of the soft Spider-Man reboot that followed the “One More Day” storyline where Peter and MJ’s marriage was erased in exchange for saving Aunt May’s life. (Sony Pictures)
Krypto saves the day in Superman sneak peek
DC Studios co-boss James Gunn and his Superman stars David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult made an appearance at CinemaCon on Tuesday night to share some new footage from the upcoming DC Studios movie.
The sneak peek was thankfully put online on Thursday, and I really, really love everything I’ve seen from this one. I hope Gunn nails it. (The Hollywood Reporter)
