Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Paul Feig’s Detention, Warner’s Free Willy, and a Bunker
Let’s go!
If you enjoy today’s edition, please hit the like button or leave a comment.
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Paul Feig will direct horror film Detention for Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes.
Warner Bros. is developing a Free Willy reboot.
Reinaldo Marcus Green (dir: King Richard) will make a Roberto Clemente biopic.
Disney names former Disney+ President Alisa Bowen CEO of Fubo.
Netflix orders A24 golf drama Jupiter Island.
Disney+ is developing Stuart Gibbs’ Spy School as a series.
YouTube creators the Stokes Twins are jumping to Netflix.
Artists Equity launches a scripted television division.
Julianne Nicholson will reprise her Mare of Easttown role in Task S2.
Andrea Riseborough joins Jeremy Strong in Paramount+’s limited series 9/12.
Diego Calva boards Possession remake.
Sony Pictures Classics acquires Bunker, starring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem.
EKKL Entertainment launches with plans to release 7–10 films annually.
Greenwich Entertainment acquires Cannes FIPRESCI winner A Girl Unknown.
Yesterday’s correct answer: 3 Emmy wins for The Twilight Zone.
41% got it correct.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Paul Feig is embracing his darker side. Feig, best known for defining 2010s comedy with Bridesmaids, and making last year’s sexy, scary The Housemaid, is now doubling down on horror with Detention.
He’s joined by a trio of horror-loving companies: Blumhouse (Obsession), Atomic Monster (Backrooms), and Platinum Dunes (A Quiet Place).
The film follows seven strangers trapped in an abandoned school overnight, only to discover they’re connected by a horrifying secret and trapped for a reason.
From the chaotic food poisoning scene in Bridesmaids (2011) to the excruciatingly uncomfortable The Office episode, “The Dinner Party,” Feig plays well with discomfort and payoff. The same precision that makes a punchline land can make a scare unforgettable, and I can think of few directors who have a better sense of timing than Feig.
Casting is ongoing.
Prepare to cry at a killer whale. Warner Bros. is developing a Free Willy reboot, produced by the Russo brothers’ AGBO (Prod Co: EEAAO). The original Free Willy (1993) followed a 12-year-old orphaned boy who befriended a captured killer whale, and it spawned multiple sequels and a television series. The iconic scene where the protagonist Jesse leads the orca Willy to jump over a breakwater rock has brought generations of audiences to tears.
Mary-Margaret Kunze (Icebreaker) and Jade Halley Bartlett (Netflix’s The Boroughs) have been tapped to pen the script.
Some Warner Bros. remakes are fantastic, like Ocean’s Eleven, and the recent A Star Is Born. We hope Free Willy joins the category, as people’s relationship to nature has only deteriorated in the 33 years since the original film.
Reinaldo Marcus Green has another athlete in his sights. The King Richard director is set to write, direct, and produce a feature film celebrating the life of baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente. Essentially a god in Puerto Rico, Clemente recorded 3,000 hits in his 18-season run with the Pittsburgh Pirates. A legend on and off the diamond, Clemente was an avid humanitarian who tragically died in a plane crash while delivering aid to earthquake victims in 1972.
Green’s King Richard (2021) scored six Oscar nominations, including Will Smith’s infamous Best Actor win. Whoever plays Clemente will be an instant Oscar favorite.
Tidbits:
Disney replaces Fubo co-founder David Gandler with ex-Disney+ President Alisa Bowen. She was one of the founding members of Disney’s streaming leadership. Disney took a 70% stake in the pay-TV service Fubo last October, following an antitrust lawsuit Fubo filed after Disney tried to launch its own sports streaming service.
The small screen’s newest sports fixation: golf. Netflix has given a straight-to-series order to Jupiter Island, a golf drama from A24 and Connor Hines (creator: FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy & Carolyn Bessette). It’s been a strong week for Hines, who just scored his first Emmy nomination for Love Story and signed an exclusive deal with Netflix to continue developing series for the streamer.
Disney+ is developing Spy School, a series adaptation of Stuart Gibbs’ bestselling children’s book series. Chuck creator Chris Fedak is penning the adaptation, bringing his spy expertise to a much younger audience. The series follows a teenager recruited to a science-focused magnet school, only to discover it is a front for a secret CIA training academy. Emma Watts, with Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort, will produce alongside 20th Television.
YouTube icons The Stokes Twins (141M subscribers) are coming to Netflix. They have made their name through prank videos and wild challenges since 2008. The move is in the same vein as Netflix’s deals with YouTube creators like Mark Rober (79.3M subscribers), recruiting proven stars from its biggest online rival, YouTube.
Mini Tidbits:
Pixar’s Toy Story 5 (2026) makes $800M at the global box office, and is expected to surpass $1bn by the end of its theatrical run.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity is getting into scripted TV. Heading up the new division is Griffin Zucosky, former director of development at Universal Content Productions.
Harris Katleman (EP: The Simpsons, NYPD Blue) dies at 97. Katleman was the President of Twentieth Century Fox Television, where he oversaw productions of iconic TV shows like M*A*S*H, In Living Color, and Doogie Howser, M.D.
Trailers:
GKIDS’ Godzilla Minus Zero
Release: Nov 6
Antenna Releasing’s This Is Buzz
MTV documentary
Release: Sept
Paramount+’s MobLand S2
Cast: Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan
Release: Sept 18
Netflix’s The Gentlemen S2
Cast: Theo James, Ray Winstone
Release: Sept 3
Roadside Attractions’ Buddy
Cast: Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace
Release: Aug 28
Watermelon Pictures’ Gaza documentary American Doctor
Release: Aug 14
Prime Video’s Sterling Point
Showrunner: Megan Park
Release: Aug 5
mk2 Films’ The Lost Children of Tuam
World Premiere: July 11
IFC’s Idiots
Cast: Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr
Release: Aug 28
Square Peg’s Crows Are White
EP: Ari Aster
Release: Aug 26
Release Dates:
A24’s The Debut
Dir: Jesse Eisenberg
Cast: Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti
Release: Dec 11
FX’s American Horror Story S13
Cast: Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett, Ariana Grande
Release: Sept 24
TNT Sports’ dunk league, DUNKMAN
Founder: Shaquille O’Neal
Release: July 21
Inaugural Entertainment’s The Fix
Cast: Liam Neeson, Zachary Levi
Release: Sept 11
Paramount Animation’s untitled Freddy the 13th
Dir: Dan Trachtenberg (Prey)
Release date: Friday, Oct. 13, 2028
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
HBO is pulling off an old-school TV crossover. Julianne Nicholson is joining season two of HBO’s Task, reprising her Emmy-winning role as Lori Ross from the streamer’s Mare of Easttown.
Nicholson gave a beautiful performance as the lifelong best friend to Kate Winslet’s Mare, carrying the weight of devastating family secrets while remaining completely devoted and loyal to those she loved through it all. Given that both series were created by Brad Ingelsby and are set in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the idea that they exist in the same universe isn’t entirely surprising, and it’s probably the closest we’ll get to a second season of Mare of Easttown, so we’ll take it.
Task season two is currently in pre-production.
Paramount+ is not F**KING around. They’re bringing out the big guns for their new limited series 9/12. Jeremy Strong will portray a class-action lawyer who stands up for 9/11 first responders (full breakdown). And now, Andrea Riseborough joins as the headstrong wife of a cop (Barry Pepper) who suffers from leukemia after working at Ground Zero. Riseborough will bring the biggest bulldog energy, hopefully the primary driver of linking Pepper and Strong. Want evidence? Just watch her riveting, heartbreaking Oscar-nominated performance in To Leslie (2022).
Releasing summer 2027. Created by Tobias Lindholm (Dir: Netflix’s The Good Nurse) and Frank Pugliese (prod: House of Cards).
Diego Calva’s fraught tale of love. Calva has been cast in Smile director Parker Finn’s remake of Possession, alongside Callum Turner and Margaret Qualley as the film’s fractured couple. The 1981 original was a disturbing body horror, a terrifying allegory for divorce, following a man watching his wife slowly descend into madness right after learning of her affair.
No word on Calva’s role, but he was excellent as the star of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, a dreamer who becomes a studio head with a soft spot for the broken and the crazed.
The Paramount film is set to start shooting this month.
Casting Tidbits:
Noomi Rapace
Trevor Donovan
Tracey Ullman
All those casting tidbits and more here.
FESTIVALS AND DOCS
Locarno 2026 is upon us. And the line-up has films starring some of the best actors working today.
Here’s the buzziest film:
Down the Arm of God
Star/Co-writer/Producer: Caleb Landry Jones
Producer: Luc Besson
Studio: EuropaCorp (Lucy)
Synopsis:
In a small Texas town during a brutal winter, a determined young pastor’s efforts to aid the homeless clash with his congregation’s biases, challenging both faith and community values.
This role, assuming he’s the pastor, has Landry Jones screaming all over it. And we’re glad he got to do a little writing.
Here’s a breakdown of the rest, including one with Monica Bellucci and another with Isabelle Huppert: https://theindustry.co/p/locarno-2026
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Sony Classics picks up Bunker starring Penélope Cruz & Javier Bardem. From Dir/Wri: Florian Zeller (Dir: The Father).
Synopsis:
When an architect accepts a morally ambiguous project — building a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire — his wife begins to question their marriage after 17 years together.
Zeller wrote the film for Cruz and Bardem, who have been married 17 years. This marks their 5th film together after Jamón Jamón (1992), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Loving Pablo (2017), and Everybody Knows (2018).
Zeller’s The Father twists Anthony Hopkins’ relationship with his daughter(s) through scenes that both stabilize and destabilize him; it’s brilliant. We look forward to how Zeller mines Bardem and Cruz’s marriage for similar fractures.
This will be a major Oscar film for SPC this year, with a wider theatrical release early in 2027.
Tidbits:
Michael Scott (producer: God’s Not Dead) launches EKKL Entertainment. The new family/faith platform promises to release 7-10 films theatrically/year. You may remember that their first acquisition was the lovely She Dances, starring and co-written by Steve Zahn (The White Lotus). That film premiered at Tribeca in 2025. EKKL’s platform will also include a streaming ecosystem with 350 films, including Scott’s God’s Not Dead series. EKKL is co-founded by Willie and Korie Robertson of Duck Dynasty.
Chinese drama A Girl Unknown (2026, clip) is acquired by Greenwich Entertainment (U.S. Distribution: Dreams starring Jessica Chastain). The film won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and follows the coming-of-age story of a young woman during the peak of China’s strict one-child policy.
Legendary pop singer Bonnie Tyler, best known for her song Total Eclipse of the Heart, dies at 75. Her songs were frequently used in film and TV, such as the tractor race scene in Footloose (1984), and the Fairy Godmother’s performance in Shrek 2 (2004).
Tidbits:
Banijay and RedBird IMI’s All3Media $8bn deal closes
Michael Fassbender’s production company expands
All those tidbits and more here.
ON THIS DAY
1981. Escape from New York premieres in the US.
Written by Gabriel Miller, Madelyn Menapace, and Tony Jaeyeong Jeong.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
Follow us on: Facebook | Instagram
Want to advertise with us? Email: clarke.scott@theindustry.co