Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
PSKY, AMC, TIFF.
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THE INDUSTRY TLDR
A judge halts the PSKY WBD merger for at least 2 weeks.
AMC Theatres has $1.59bn in Q2 revenue and an $11.4M net loss.
The Kissing Booth filmmakers are adapting Gordon Korman’s Son of the Mob.
Disney+ is developing zombie drama Afterlife with Archie.
Brave director Mark Andrews joins the animated John Carter of Mars series.
Lewis Pullman joins Julia Garner in Apple TV’s true-crime series Guilty Creatures.
Toni Collette cast in Daniel Roher’s Netflix heist film Positano.
Liza Colón-Zayas joins Elisabeth Moss in Hulu’s legal drama Conviction.
Bill Nighy co-stars in The Portrait of a Lady.
TIFF announced premieres for I Play Rocky, Misty Green, and A Talent for Murder.
Deon Taylor directs biopic on streetball star Grayson “The Professor” Boucher.
Pathé picked up international distribution for Bong Joon Ho’s animated Ally.
Friday’s top answer: Inception, our reader’s favorite Nolan film.
33% voted for it. 2nd place was The Dark Knight with 29%.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Don’t skip the footnotes. A judge has ordered a 2-4 week temporary restraining order blocking the merging of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
During this time, the court will review the antitrust lawsuit brought by 12-state AGs.
The Court seems to be pushing back on Paramount’s argument that they aren’t really consolidating the studio market (e.g., Universal, Disney, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros.) but instead creating a new competitor in the streaming market (Netflix, Apple, Amazon).
In a footnote, the judge stated:
“The Court notes separately that it cannot accept Defendants’ argument that the Transaction will produce efficiencies in the streaming market.”
They continued:
“Courts have expressly and repeatedly rejected the defense that a challenged merger will result in economic efficiencies ancillary to competition in the relevant market.”
This will likely move to a longer delay, resulting in a trial next year. It seems that Paramount has already sent a list of concessions to the state AGs, but it’s unlikely the State AGs will concede.
It’s going to be one battle after another, as the chances of Paramount closing this transaction by September 30, 2026, are starting to look less certain. That’s a key date: if the deal doesn’t close by then, Paramount will owe WBD $0.25/share every quarter ($650M/quarter).
AMC Theatres Q2 2026 earnings. Plus, the change from last year:
$1.59bn revenue
↑ 14%
$11.4M net loss
Up from $4.7M loss in Q2 2025
52.2M domestic attendance
↑ 13%
CEO Adam Aron stated that:
“Nolan’s The Odyssey with an encouraging media reported $124M domestic opening, is the latest reminder of the strength of today’s theatrical marketplace. It follows a second quarter in which six different films delivered impressive domestic opening weekend grosses exceeding 75 million,”
2026 has been a bit of a boon theatrically with Lionsgate’s Michael and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie hitting a billion with Toy Story 5 very close.
Three adaptations:
The filmmaking duo behind The Kissing Booth trilogy (starring a younger Jacob Elordi) are reuniting for Son of the Mob, a YA romantic comedy adaptation of Gordon Korman’s bestselling novel. Vince Marcello and Jay Arnold will direct and adapt the project, respectively, telling the story of a teenager born into a mob boss family desperate for a normal life but unable to escape his family’s deep criminal ties. Red Sage Studios, the young adult-focused production company from former Amazon MGM Studios head James Farrell, is collaborating with Sun Distribution (Telefilms Group) on the feature film adaptation, with production beginning in Canada later this year.
Supernatural novel Grim Death and Bill the Electrocuted Criminal, written by Mike Mignola (Creator: Hellboy comic franchise) and Thomas E. Sniegoski, is being developed as a TV series by Echoverse, an audio content studio. The original novel is a dark comedy following a man named Bentley who has agreed to work for Death in order to release his parents from purgatory.
Disney+ is developing a drama series Afterlife with Archie, aiming for a Halloween 2027 premiere on the streamer. Based on the comic of the same name, the show will follow Archie Comics characters in the town of Riverdale, which has turned into a hellscape after a zombie outbreak.
Mini Tidbits:
Back to Barsoom. Oscar-winning Brave director Mark Andrews has joined the upcoming animated series John Carter of Mars as supervising director and co-showrunner. Andrews is returning to the interplanetary hero’s story after penning the live-action feature adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic sci-fi series back in 2012 (the flop).
PBS Chief Programming Executive Sylvia Bugg has passed away at just 55. Spending decades in public broadcasting, Bugg worked as General Manager for General Audience Programming, overseeing all non-children’s content and leading PBS’ programming strategy.
The king of late-night producers, Peter Lassally, has died at 93 years old. From Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show to David Letterman’s Late Show to Craig Ferguson’s The Late Late Show, Lassally’s producing career in late night spanned over five decades. Dubbed the “host whisperer.”
Trailers:
Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday
Release: Dec 18
After much delay, Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut:
Sunrise Films’ The Deb
Cast: Rebel Wilson, Natalie Abbott
Release: Aug. 25 (on VOD)
Release Dates:
Sony’s Skeletons
Cast: Brie Larson, John Goodman, Kyle Gallner, Willa Fitzgerald
Dir: JT Mollner
Prod: J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot
Release: June 4, 2027
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Toni Collette (Mickey 17) joins Netflix film Positano, directed by Daniel Roher (Dir: Tuner). The film follows a suave jewel thief who stumbles into a heist that will change his life when he decides to help a mysterious woman on a high-stakes score. Collette stars alongside Matthew McConaughey and Zoe Saldaña, though the character details are under wraps.
Daniel Roher’s most recent film Tuner was also a heist movie with pizazz, with great chase sequences, killer soundtracks, and unexpected romcom elements. This is exactly the type of film that Collette thrives in, an energetic genre film like Knives Out (2019). We’d love to see her again in a villain role like Mickey 17 (2025), where she can walk the line between funny and intimidating.
Lewis Pullman (Marvel’s Thunderbolts*) joins Apple TV’s series Guilty Creatures, alongside Julia Garner. Based on Mikita Brottman’s true crime book Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida, the show follows two God-fearing lovers whose forbidden affair ends in murder and a lifetime of guilt.
His performances as characters with the same name, “Bob,” in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Thunderbolts* (2025) perfectly portrayed a likable everyman who hides a dark secret. Pullman has a knack for playing characters who seem harmless on the surface but carry a quiet intensity underneath. That hidden quality should make him a strong fit for a series centered on faith and guilt.
Tidbits:
Emmy winner Liza Colón-Zayas has found her next project post FX’s The Bear. David Shore’s upcoming Hulu drama series Conviction will follow Elisabeth Moss as a criminal defense attorney who finds herself closely involved in a high-profile murder case that forces her to compromise every legal and moral obligation to gain an acquittal. Colón-Zayas’ role is undisclosed, but if it’s anything like her scene-stealing The Bear character, she is sure to pull on the audience’s heartstrings.
Mini Tidbits:
PBS and the BBC’s The Portrait of a Lady has cast BAFTA winner and British staple Bill Nighy (Love Actually) in the upcoming TV adaptation. Nighy will star as Mr. Touchett, whose infatuation with the titular Isabel completely consumes his final days, so much so that he leaves her a massive fortune. Filming has begun in the U.K.
Matthias Schweighöfer (Army of Thieves) joins New Line’s horror The Conjuring: First Communion. The plot is being kept under wraps, but we know that the film is a prequel that follows the younger years of The Conjuring franchise’s exorcist duo Ed and Lorraine Warren. No info on Schweighöfer’s role.
After stealing the show in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme (2025), Mia Threapleton is joining the historical drama The Price of Peace from director Anthony McCarten (wri: The Theory of Everything). She’ll portray Winston Churchill’s youngest child Mary, who would accompany her father to numerous historic summits.
10-year-old Theo Clark Leber to lead Amazon MGM’s feature Lizard Music, alongside Dwayne Johnson.
FESTIVALS AND DOCS
TIFF is bringing in some massive films for its Gala and Special Presentations sections.
Plus a few well-known actors are back to directing:
Amazon MGM’s I Play Rocky
Trailer
Misty Green
Dir: Chris Rock (5th feature)
Cast: Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, Anna Kendrick
Evil Genius
Dir: Courteney Cox (2nd feature)
Cast: David Harbour, Patricia Arquette
Girl Group
Dir: Rebel Wilson (2nd feature)
The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd
Dir: Tim Blake Nelson (6th feature)
Cast: Amanda Seyfried and Scoot McNairy
John Madden’s Onwards and Sideways
Cast: Laura Linney, Rhys Ifans
Bleecker Street’s A Talent for Murder
Cast: Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich
Full line-up here.
Tidbit:
The international film community has lost one of its great pioneers. Simon Field, the former director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, has died at the age of 80. One of the first champions of acclaimed filmmakers like Wang Bing, Christopher Nolan, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, he even produced the latter’s Palme d’Or-winning film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Field has been incredibly influential behind the scenes, helping to shape the landscape of both international and independent cinema.
TECH SECTION
AI studio Utopai is betting that fart jokes never go out of style. The studio is developing The Most Serious Fart, an animated feature adaptation of Not Another Teen Movie screenwriter Mike Bender’s bestselling children’s book. A silly story with the central message being not to take yourself too seriously, unlike the rest of Utopai’s upcoming slate, the movie will only be using AI as a tool to help an undisclosed studio of human animators and illustrators.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Deon Taylor (Dir: Black and Blue starring Naomie Harris) is making a feature film adaptation of streetball star Grayson “The Professor” Boucher’s life story. The film will follow a young Boucher – a college basketball player – who walks into an open tryout with the world’s greatest streetball players. Grayson Boucher is a world-famous streetball player and influencer who has appeared in films like Semi-Pro (2008) and gained a social media following for making videos where he coaches NBA players.
The Terminator screenwriter William H. Wisher Jr. has died at 71. Wisher also co-wrote the sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), redefining the science fiction genre alongside director James Cameron. Subverting classic sci-fi cliches, Wisher’s writing popularized tech-noir dystopia, completely changing how filmmakers approached futuristic storytelling.
Pathé picks up international distribution for Bong Joon Ho’s (Dir: Parasite) first animated feature Ally. Set in the deep ocean, the film follows a piglet squid named Ally who dreams of one day seeing the sun and becoming a star in a wildlife documentary. The film’s cast includes Bradley Cooper, Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy), Ayo Edebiri (The Bear), and Werner Herzog.
ON THIS DAY
1926. Norman Jewison born in Toronto, Ontario.
Written by Gabriel Miller, Madelyn Menapace and Tony Jaeyeong Jeong.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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thanks for the shoutout to Canadian Legend Norman Jewison!! Meet him a few times, very nice gentleman