Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Channing Tatum’s dance, Natalie Portman’s power, and a balloon.
Let’s go!
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Here’s some Sundance cliff notes:
Josephine is the best-reviewed film of the festival. I saw the premiere and thought it was an astonishing, powerful film (cover story below).
Olivia Wilde’s The Invite and John Wilson’s The History of Concrete are also garnering fantastic reviews. A24’s The Moment has had a disappointing reception.
I spoke with Ryan Coogler after his eye-opening Sinners conversation with Elvis Mitchell. And he thanked everyone who attended our workshop, with his now-nominated costume designer (Ruth E. Carter) and editor (Michael Shawver).
Thanks to the DGA for the invite to a really interesting panel with Jay Duplass and Gregg Araki.
I also met Richard from The Ankler, who had an interesting reaction when he realized who he was talking to. But it was great to finally meet him.
I also ran into Boots Riley on the street, and he showed me the unreleased trailer to his next film.
This past week, we’ve done some great interviews with Moby, Jon Watts (dir: Spider-Man: No Way Home), Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Dir: Half Nelson, Captain Marvel), and Crystine Zhang (prod: Josephine). More on those soon.
COVER STORY
Sundance’s Josephine, starring Channing Tatum, is a crippling drama about the extreme loss of innocence of an eight-year-old.
I saw the premiere at Sundance and was blown away.
Here’s the synopsis:
After 8-year-old Josephine accidentally witnesses a crime in Golden Gate Park, she acts out in search of a way to regain control of her safety, while adults are helpless to console her.
It’s an incredible feat of filmmaking that quickly breaks with the hyper realism of the horror that the child witnesses and pushes it to extreme fantasy.
After the screening, I sat down with one of the producers, Crystine Zhang (who has three films at Sundance this year), to dig into what resonated with her when she first read the script.
Zhang shared:
“The story and also the perspective from an 8-year-old girl, it’s very unique… she’s innocent, even in the end, but she just becomes a stronger, more mature girl.”
That maturation process is actually inhibited by her parents (Tatum and Gemma Chan), who compound the problem.
Zhang explained:
“Some people, like the mother, would not put this pressure on an 8-year-old girl and tell her, ‘it’s okay, the world is beautiful, the sky is blue, tomorrow the sun is coming up again.’ But the father represents another group: the truth.”
And that’s what’s riveting. To see someone so young contend with something so adult, something so unimaginable.
But the most miraculous feat of the film is that there’s a healthy dose of humor. In fact, at the premiere, the audience burst out laughing many, many times, if only to release the heart-twisting tension.
I hope Searchlight or Focus Features picks it up. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Briarcliff and Bleecker Street make a bid. Seems like a good fit.
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Amazon MGM’s Mercy (Chris Pratt) tops the domestic box office with $11.2M.
Yoshi is revealed in the Mario 2 teaser.
Anonymous Content taps Darren Walker as president/CEO.
Netflix’s Korean content hits 4.5B+ views since mid-2023.
CBS renews Matlock and Elsbeth.
Patricia Clarkson joins Scorsese’s What Happens At Night for Apple/StudioCanal.
Aaron McVeigh + Emily Carey lead UK thriller Stray.
Ji-young Yoo boards Presumed Innocent S2.
Travis Scott joins Nolan’s The Odyssey.
The Gallerist, starring Natalie Portman, premieres at Sundance.
Neon picks up Alex Ullom’s 4 X 4: The Event for worldwide rights.
Magenta Light launches Magenta Edge Films with a wild film from Fantastic Fest.
Michael Diliberti set to direct comedy Miami PI.
Dogwoof takes UK/Ireland rights on ballooning doc The Balloonists.
Prime Video greenlights UK crime drama Dirty.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
The domestic Box Office this weekend was a bit of a disaster zone (with some notable exceptions). Blame it on the snowstorm.
Here’s what’s notable:
Amazon MGM’s Mercy starring Chris Pratt opened this weekend, pulling in $11.2M domestically and $11.6M internationally for a total of $22.8M WW. The budget is estimated to be $63M. It’s a good opener for an original sci-fi. But not the type of mega numbers Pratt’s franchise films demand ($118M domestic opening for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3).
Iconic Events opened Return to Silent Hill (3rd in series) this weekend, which did poor business with $3.2M domestically. It’s a massive drop from Silent Hill 2, which opened at $8M. And the first film, which opened at $20M, and crossed $100M WW by the end of its run.
Sony Pictures opened Clika this weekend on a low 522 screens. It brought in $1.275M. Check out the trailer.
Movies that were impervious to the cold were A24’s Marty Supreme, which brought in $3.5M (36% drop), for a domestic total of $86.3M and $104M WW. Disney’s Zootopia 2 fared even better with $5.7M (38% drop), for a grand domestic total of $401.4M domestic and $1.74bn WW.
The worst casualty of the weekend was Sony’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which dropped 71%. Its worldwide total is decent with $46M.
Tidbits:
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (Mario 2) trailer has a lot of fun little easter eggs for fans. The big new reveal was obviously his dino buddy Yoshi, but eagle-eyed fans would see a bunch of well-known faces (Birdo) and locations. Surprisingly, even though this sequel carries the Galaxy name from the third game, I saw a lot more locations from the more recent 5th game, “Odyssey”, like the Sand Kingdom and Deep Woods. A sequel to Mario was inevitable after the first made a billion plus dollars, but at least they did their homework and played the games. In theaters April 3rd. Trailer here.
Anonymous Content finds its new president and CEO in Darren Walker. A former president of the affluent Ford Foundation, Walker will now oversee all areas of the company across film, TV, and representation. Anonymous represents A-list talent like Winona Ryder, John Lithgow, and current Oscar nominee Amy Madigan. And has produced True Detective, The Revenant (2015), and recently Nickel Boys (2024).
Mini Tidbits:
Netflix’s Korean slate has reportedly generated at least 4.5 billion views since mid-2023, led by Squid Game, whose three seasons total nearly 470 million streams.
The Academy Foundation has laid off its 5-person Oral History Projects team, effectively dissolving the department responsible for long-form interviews with industry figures.
Trailers:
Disney+’s The Muppet Show
Cast: Maya Rudolph, Sabrina Carpenter
Release: February 4, 2026
First Looks:
Warner Bros.’ Supergirl
Cast: Jason Momoa (Lobo)
Release: June 26, 2026
Fremantle’s The Uniform
Release: January 23, 2026
Wicker
Cast: Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage
Release: Sundance 2026
Release Dates:
Amazon MGM Studios’ The Beekeeper 2
Cast: Jason Statham
Release: January 15, 2027
NBC’s The Hunting Party (s2)
Cast: Melissa Roxburgh (Manifest)
Release: February 15, 2026
Renewals:
CBS’s Matlock
CBS’s Elsbeth
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
A Shutter Island reunion. Patricia Clarkson (Sharp Objects) is joining Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in What Happens At Night, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming thriller with Apple Studios and Studiocanal.
Twin Peaks meets The Shining, the film follows a married American couple who travel to a remote European town to adopt a baby, only for the trip to slip into a dream-like, disorienting nightmare where nothing is quite as it seems.
Clarkson previously worked with Scorsese and DiCaprio in Shutter Island (2010, scene), a small but unforgettable role as a questioning psychiatrist turned victimized patient. A hallucination of DiCaprio’s character Teddy, her desperation, and unwavering certainty of abuse quietly destabilize his grip on reality.
While Clarkson’s new part hasn’t been revealed, the haunted hotel setting in What Happens At Night is already populated by eccentric figures like a corrupt businessman, a flamboyant singer, and a charming faith healer. My bet is that Clarkson will play the latter, using her calm demeanor and controlled intensity to undermine the couple’s trust and twist their sense of what is true without them even realizing.
What Happens At Night is expected to premiere in fall 2027.
Tidbits:
Rising talents Aaron McVeigh (Dept. Q) and Emily Carey (House of the Dragon) will star in Stray, a gritty British thriller from BAFTA winner David Blair (Takin’ Over the Asylum). The film follows a vulnerable London teen groomed by a violent local kingpin. McVeigh leads in his first feature, with Carey in a key role.
One of the actresses behind the pop trio in K-pop Demon Hunters, Ji-young Yoo, has joined Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent. The plot remains under wraps, along with the specifics of her recurring role, but she will be joining Matthew Rhys and Fiona Shaw for its upcoming second season, set to air this fall.
Not a Red Wedding, a Royal Wedding! Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey joins the cast of Red, White, & Royal Wedding, the sequel to Amazon MGM’s hit queer romcom Red, White & Royal Blue (2023). The logline is undisclosed, but Headey is set to play Princess Catherine.
Yet another person has been added to the gargantuan cast in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Rapper Travis Scott, who appeared on the soundtrack for Nolan’s Tenet (2020), will appear in The Odyssey (image) revealed in a new commercial that aired yesterday during Fox’s NFL broadcast.
Mini Tidbit:
Yvonne Lime, a 1950s actress in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, died at 90. She later co-founded Childhelp, becoming a leading child abuse prevention advocate worldwide.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
The Gallerist, starring Natalie Portman, Jenna Ortega, Zach Galifianakis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Charli xcx, and Sterling K. Brown, premiered at Sundance over the weekend.
It is a beautifully bombastic farce about what is real and unreal.
Put through the high-intensity cinema of Cathy Yan’s (Dir: Dead Pigs, Birds of Prey) frenzied floating camera moves, the unreal is the wacky circumstances in which Portman and Ortega find themselves. But the real is more lacerating: a portrait of an artist who is subjugated by those who control her. From the audience who laps up their cheap spectacle. To the buyers. To the gallery heads who change and pervert their artistic vision.
During the Q&A writer James Pedersen shared:
“I'm fascinated by violent crime and money laundering. And in a world where our art and our commerce are getting increasingly more extreme I thought why not put it in a literal setting and see how those things comedically interact with each other”
Portman summed it up best:
“As artists we're taking something from our souls and it becomes a commodity and there's a magic to that and there's a horror to that.”
This is a zany one, and we could see Neon and A24 snapping this up.
Neon is going in for seconds with It Ends director Alex Ullom, picking up his sophomore feature 4 X 4: The Event for worldwide rights ahead of its production start later this year.
Battle Royale meets Saw, the horror follows eight contestants in the most terrifying Gen Z livestream you’ve ever seen, who must kill or be killed using only what they can order online. Neon will be releasing Ullom’s SXSW premiering It Ends (2025) in theaters later this year.
New York-based documentarian John Wilson’s first feature film, The History of Concrete, premieres at Sundance, covering everything from sidewalk gum to ancient roads.
The unconventional doc explores Wilson’s offbeat observational style, expanding on his singular voice, which he honed across three seasons of HBO’s How To With John Wilson (Touch and Go clip), where mundane subjects become deeply personal meditations.
Notably, Ronald Bronstein (wri: Uncut Gems) and Josh Safdie (dir: Marty Supreme) are also attached as producers on The History of Concrete.
More Indie Filmmaker and International News continues below:
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