Angels and Demons
The daily edition of The Industry will be in your inboxes shortly.
For now, here’s a deep dive on the freshly announced films from:
Sony Pictures Entertainment
Sony Pictures Classics
Angel Studios
StudioCanal
Danny Boyle, Dwayne Johnson, & Aaron Sorkin all took the stage at CinemaCon in Vegas to share footage from their new films.
CinemaCon is a mad mix of avid cinema distributors and the gambling-crazed.
Sandwiched in between are some genuinely spectacular presentations from distributors:
Sony - 14 films
There was one performance at CinemaCon that floored me. Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning.
Aaron Sorkin took to the stage to present the trailer for his sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network. Sorkin serves as the writer and director on this one, and shared that it follows a Facebook whistleblower (Mikey Madison) who finds a journalist (Jeremy Allen White) to help her go public.
The trailer starts with Zuckerberg out of focus, practicing his courthouse defense on a mock set. When the camera focuses, I thought they’d gotten a look-alike actor, until I realized it was Jeremy Strong.
He has become Zuckerberg. The slimmed-down face, the waddling gait, the perfect vocal inflection, and the dead eyes. It’s scary how much Strong’s performance sucks you in. Could garner an Oscar nomination.
Releasing October 9th.
Another film floored me:
Resident Evil
Dir: Zach Creggar (Weapons)
Cast: Austin Abrams
Release: Sept 18
On stage, Creggar shared that in this film, unlike his previous, there would be no:
“Non-narrative acrobatics, time jumps. Just locking in with one protagonist moving from A to B.”
The trailer opens with Abrams entering a home after being chased by an unknown force. He curls up under the telephone and leaves a voice message for a loved one about how this might be the last time they ever speak.
What struck me is that Creggar seems to have a fixation on suburban homes as places of psychological terror. We’ve seen it in Barbarian, Weapons, and now Resident Evil. In fact, the real terror of the trailer was in the wide open outdoor spaces that Abrams sprints through to avoid his literal demons.
Two newly announced films:
Bloodborne
Animated feature video game adaptation
R-Rated
Prod: PlayStation
Buds
Animated film
Plot: A young plant breaks the first rule of being a plant: don’t talk to humans.
Release: Dec 2027
The rest of Sony’s slate:
The Breadwinner
Cast: Nate Bargatze and Mandy Moore
Release: May 29
Insidious: Out of the Further (6th in series)
Release: Aug 21
Klara and the Sun
Dir: Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit, Thor)
Cast: Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams
Release: Oct 23rd
The trailer took us to a fanciful world, where the veneer of getting an AI companion (Ortega) is dressed up as commonplace. Waititi is a master of making dystopias look like utopias. He did it in Jojo Rabbit, and it seems he’ll do it again here.
The Nightingale
Cast: Dakota and Elle Fanning
Status: Currently Filming
Release: Feb 12, 2027
Zelda
Release: May 7, 2027
Helldivers
Dir: Justin Lin
Cast: Jason Momoa
Lin’s word on the video game adaptation: “satire with humanity.”
Release: Nov 10, 2027
Grandgear
Dir: Takashi Yamazaki (Godzilla Minus One)
Prod Co: Bad Robot
Release: Feb 18, 2028
The first look clip showed a robot battling a kaiju in a city. Like a low-fi Transformers, in a good way.
Sony also showed scenes from its two Spider-Man films, the live-action Spider-Man: Brand New Day and the animated Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse. Both interestingly showed the main characters (Tom Holland and voice actor Shameik Moore, respectively) stuck in alternative realities where no one knows who they are.
And the presentation ended with Jack Black, Dwayne Johnson, and Kevin Hart all taking the stage and giving each other a bunch of grief:
It was all pretty funny, until Johnson turned it heartfelt by acknowledging their new spin on the series pays tremendous debt to Robin Williams.
The latest in their Jumanji series, Jumanji: Open World, sees the game breaking into the outside world. Releasing Christmas this year.
Sony Pictures Classics - 6 films
SPC’s films have mostly played at festivals (The Only Living Pickpocket in NY, Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, Bedford Park, Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas). My personal favorite is Gail Daughtery and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is a wild, zany, bonkers, delightful comedy starring Zoey Deutch and John Slattery playing a sad-sack version of himself.
They showed some cool footage from Unidentified, a Saudi Arabian film directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour (The Perfect Candidate). The true crime drama begins with the discovery of a teenage girl’s lifeless body in the desert, with no one claiming the body, and it becomes a full-fledged mystery movie.
StudioCanal - 9 films
Ink
Dir: Danny Boyle
Cast: Guy Pearce
Synopsis:
A group of misfits and visionaries who had an idea for a new kind of news - one that would give the people what they want, and would change the face of the world we live in today.
Ok, so this has already been announced, but Boyle got on stage himself and spoke about how he was seeing a direct line from his movie, about two young newspaper owners, to the modern media landscape.
The film opens with a young Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) explaining the 5 W’s of reporting (who, what, when, where, and why), and how the last one is the least important. Because once you know the “why,” it means the story is over. Cue our doom-scrolling, never-ending news cycle society.
Boyle uses a unique cinematic style to capture the opening scene. This will be a very dynamic take.
New Films:
Paddington 4
The first three films have grossed $700M worldwide
Escape from New York (reboot)
Original trailer (1981)
The Howling (remake)
Original trailer (1981)
Pippi Longstocking
Film based on the popular character
Producer: David Heyman (upcoming Bond, Harry Potter)
Mr. Men
Film based on the popular book series
Producer: David Heyman
The Mannequin
Cast: Melissa Leo
Based on the book The Midnight Library
We also got to see some incredible footage of Everybody Wants to Fuck Me starring Taron Egerton, which starts goofy and devolves into a straight, zombie-esque horror with throngs of women breaking down Egerton’s door to sleep with him.
There was also some beautiful footage of Andrew Scott in Elsinore, their upcoming film about actor Ian Charleson, who reckons with playing Hamlet while dying of cancer. There’s a nice mirroring about Scott facing his mortality, while the character centers on similar themes. It’s an Ouroboros of art imitating life.
Interestingly, it’ll be the third Hamlet-inspired film in 12 months (Focus Features’ Hamnet, Vertical’s Hamlet, and now this).
Angel Studios - 5 films
Runner
Cast: Owen Wilson, Alan Ritchson
Releasing: Sept 11
Synopsis:
A high-end courier has three hours to transport a liver from Brisbane to the Gold Coast.
The trailer was like Lorenzo’s Oil combined with Hardcore Henry. It takes some big swings with high-stakes action. Wilson and Ritchson have a tried-and-true funny man/action hero chemistry.
More Angel Studios films/dates:
Angel and the Badman
Genre: Western
Co-star: Tommy Lee Jones
Release: Oct 2026
Zero A.D.
Dir: Alejandro Monteverde (Sound of Freedom)
Cast: Sam Worthington, Jim Caviezel, and Ben Mendelsohn
Release: Christmas
Brink of War
Cast: Jeff Daniels as Ronald Reagan, J.K. Simmons
Release: Aug 14th
Synopsis:
President Reagan races against time to make a deal with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that could dismantle nuclear arsenals-or ignite disaster.
Young Washington
Co-star: Ben Kingsley
Release: July 3rd
Emotional Core: George Washington’s moral crisis to abandon his home country of England to be an American soldier/leader.
They went big on the production. And my guess is this will be their biggest hit since Sound of Freedom took in $250.6M worldwide, making it the highest-grossing indie of that year.
CinemaCon continues this week through Thursday.
Upcoming presentations include Neon, Warner Bros., Universal, Amazon, MGM, and Disney.
Written and edited by Gabriel Miller.
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