The CjH Entertainment Plus

Wildwood: Laika Spent 16 Years Building This by Hand. It Shows.

Sixteen years.

That's how long Laika spent making Wildwood. I think about that number for a second. In that time, some studio executive somewhere probably made roughly four thousand decisions to hand beloved franchises to algorithms, and one small studio in Oregon looked at a book about crows kidnapping a baby and said: "Yes. Let's build this. With our hands. One frame at a time."

I respect the stubbornness. It borders on insanity.

The film opened today. Travis Knight — who directed Kubo and the Two Strings, then disappeared into the Transformers toy box for a while — comes back to direct the studio's most ambitious project yet: an adaptation of Colin Meloy's Wildwood Chronicles. Meloy is the Decemberists' frontman, which already explains the entire Pacific Northwest forest-goblin vibe.

The setup is simple. Prue McKeel, a headstrong kid in Portland (played by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), watches her baby brother get carried off by a murder of crows. And yes, an actual murder of crows — the phrase stops being cute very quickly. She follows them into the Impassable Wilderness with her awkward classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), and finds a hidden world of talking animals, military coyotes, bandits, giant birds of prey, and Carey Mulligan as an exiled aristocrat who might know something about the whole baby situation.

That's the plot. Here's the thing nobody warns you about: you stop seeing it as "a movie" about twenty minutes in.

Every frame is handmade. Every stitch of clothing, every feather, every leaf. The New York Times gave it 100 and wrote that it feels quietly remarkable in a world of AI and reboots — which is the polite newspaper way of saying this thing was made by human hands while everything else was assembled by prompts.

Metacritic has it at 87, universal acclaim, 96% positive. Critics who normally write "fine" about everything are using words like "astonishing" (Empire) and "once-in-a-generation" (Film Focus Online). IGN gave it a 60 — the contrarian uncle at every Thanksgiving dinner — arguing the story occasionally stumbles. Fair enough. It does wander in the middle. But complaining that a stop-motion epic's plot has some soft spots is like complaining that a handmade violin has fingerprints on it.

Here's the part I keep circling back to: the rating is PG-13, for "strong fantasy violence, bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language." Read that again. This is a children's fantasy. About a kid saving her baby brother. And Laika had the nerve to make it genuinely dangerous — like the 80s classics it clearly worships. The Dark Crystal. Labyrinth. The ones that treated kids like they could handle being scared.

Somewhere there's a conference room full of people who decided all family films must be focus-grouped into smooth, frictionless content. Meanwhile in Oregon, an animator spent a week moving a puppet two millimeters at a time so a coyote soldier could blink convincingly.

I know which one I'd rather watch.

Is it perfect? No. It's long — 132 minutes — and the middle act does that sprawling-fantasy thing where factions pile up faster than you can learn their names. Mahershala Ali plays a bandit leader, which sounds like the one casting decision that required zero thought and produced a perfect result anyway.

But the ending credits carry a phrase that never appeared on Laika's previous films: "Handmade in Oregon." They never had to say it before. They do now. The world changed around them.

Sixteen years of someone's life. Moved by hand, frame by frame, into something that feels like a dream you had as a kid.

The irony, of course: Hollywood will spend the next six months trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm behind Wildwood's success. There isn't one. There's just a studio that refused to stop caring — and a reminder that some things only exist because a human being sat in a room and moved them with their hands.

Sources: Metacritic, The New York Times, Empire, IndieWire, The Hollywood Reporter, Film Focus Online, The Upcoming, Rendy Reviews

The funniest thing about Hollywood's obsession with comic book movies is that it took them nearly twenty years of shared universes to arrive at an idea that should have been obvious from the start: a Batman villain who is literally a man made of clay is, conceptually, a horror movie waiting to happen.

Tomorrow, October 23, DC Studios is going to prove that. Clayface opens in theaters. Rated R. Body horror. A Batman villain origin story directed by James Watkins — the man behind Eden Lake, The Woman in Black, and the Speak No Evil remake — from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini.

I want to sit with that list of names for a moment. Mike Flanagan is the person studios call when they want horror with actual emotional damage in it: The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass. He wrote the story, then had to hand the director's chair to Watkins over scheduling conflicts, and somehow the project just kept collecting exactly the people you'd want if you were building a grotesque character study. Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, the washed-out actor who loses his face to a gangster and his mind to an experimental treatment. Naomi Ackie. Max Minghella. David Dencik. Eddie Marsan. Nobody in that cast is here for a paycheck.

The official plot reads like a Cronenberg film that accidentally wandered into Gotham. Hagen climbs from Gotham street kid to Hollywood leading man, gets horribly disfigured by a local crime boss, and then submits to an unauthorized treatment that restores his looks while loosening his grip on reality. James Gunn — who had to be talked into this — has been refreshingly blunt about it: he never planned on making a Clayface movie. Flanagan pitched him the idea, wrote a great first draft, then an even better second draft, and Gunn found a place for it. When the head of a studio admits the movie exists because the script was too good to say no to, that's the closest thing to a blessing this industry has left.

A few details I keep circling back to. The runtime is 108 minutes. The budget sits somewhere between thirty and forty-four million dollars, which in 2026 blockbuster terms is roughly the catering budget for an Avengers film. This is a mid-budget horror movie wearing a comic book costume, and honestly, that's the most interesting thing DC Studios has done in years. The smallness is the point. A man turning into living clay doesn't need a third act full of sky beams. He needs one bad room and an audience willing to sit in it.

Watkins has also been doing press about how the shadow of Batman hangs over the whole thing without the character ever appearing. Gotham as a place with an inherent rot, a city where the litter doesn't get picked up and the buildings loom over you. Which is funny, because Batman has always been a horror protagonist trapped in an action movie. Every gangster in Gotham who got their face rearranged was already living in a horror film. They just didn't get their own movie about it until now.

The final trailer, released back in September, is holding something back. Entertainment Weekly reported they're deliberately keeping Clayface's final form out of the marketing, which either means the filmmakers understand restraint or the movie only has about ninety seconds of monster in it. Both of those can be true at the same time. Some of the horror press has already started saying the word Cronenberg, which is the kind of comparison that gets people excited and sets the movie up to disappoint them. Lower your expectations a little. Raise your curiosity a lot.

Here's what I actually think, underneath all of this. The superhero genre has spent years trying to figure out what to do with itself now that the novelty wore off. The answer was never "make them grittier" or "make them funnier." It was "let them be other genres." A horror movie about a Batman villain. A mid-budget character study with a comic book on the cover. Nobody asked for it, the studio head admits he didn't plan it, and somehow it's the most sensible thing DC has scheduled all year.

I find that reassuring. The best decisions in Hollywood are the ones nobody planned.

Sources: Variety, Joblo, Dread Central, Fiction Horizon, GeekTyrant.

The Movie Warner Bros. Tried to Kill Just Became Their Biggest Summer Hit

Wile E. Coyote spent seventy years getting humiliated by a bird. This week, he finally caught something: Warner Bros.

Let me explain. Because the punchline here is so perfect it almost sounds made up, and I've double-checked so you don't have to.

Coyote vs. Acme was a finished movie. A real one. Directed by Dave Green, starring Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor, and a cartoon coyote finally getting his day in court. The plot, in case the title left anything to the imagination, is that Wile E. Coyote sues the Acme Corporation for selling him decades of faulty products. Rockets that blow up. Springs that snap. Catapults that fling the wrong thing. Honestly, the strongest legal case in cinema history. The man had receipts going back to 1949.

Warner Bros. watched this finished film and decided it was worth more dead than alive.

They shelved it. For a tax write-off. The official studio move was to delete a completed movie from existence and take the deduction — the cinematic equivalent of a corporation tripping over its own anvil, except they did it on purpose.

Then something inconvenient happened. People found out.

The backlash was loud enough that Warner Bros. ended up selling the film off to Ketchup Entertainment for a reported $50 million instead of burying it. It opened in theaters on August 28 to genuinely positive reviews, and audiences kept showing up. And this week, Coyote vs. Acme crossed $126 million at the worldwide box office — officially passing DC's Supergirl, which finished its run at roughly $126.5 million and was widely considered one of the year's biggest flops.

Read that again. The shelved tax write-off is now Warner Bros.' highest-grossing summer release of 2026.

There are a few things worth sitting with here.

First: the movie is literally about a corporation being sued for its defective products, and it was almost destroyed by a corporation treating it as a defective product. If you'd pitched that irony to a studio executive, they would have rejected the script for being too on the nose.

Second: Warner Bros. doesn't even make the money. Ketchup Entertainment does. The studio manufactured the flop of the summer, sold off the afterthought for $50 million, and is now presumably explaining to shareholders why their biggest summer hit is a movie they tried to delete. The coyote didn't just beat the Road Runner. He beat the studio system. He should probably sue for that too.

Third, and this is the part that should genuinely worry executives everywhere: the audience figured it out. Hollywood has a recurring habit of treating viewers like they're an ATM with taste buds — marketing junk until it's dead, then wondering why nobody shows up. But the Coyote vs. Acme saga played out in public. Fans, filmmakers, and critics all said the same thing: you don't get to erase a finished movie because the math scared you. And the box office rewarded the fight. The people went. The movie worked. The math, it turns out, was the thing that was wrong.

I find that quietly satisfying. Hollywood loves to lecture everyone about "giving the audience what they want," usually right before giving them the opposite. But here, the audience literally told them what they wanted — the movie, not the write-off — and went and bought tickets to prove it. A cartoon coyote with a billboard lawyer outperformed a caped superhero with a nine-figure budget. There is no reading of that sentence that isn't a little bit hilarious.

Will studios learn anything from this? Please. These are the same people who learned nothing from the last five times this exact thing happened. Some executive is already pitching a shelved-movie cinematic universe. That's a joke. Probably. I hope.

But today belongs to the coyote.

He spent decades being the joke. The explosions. The anvils. The springs. The long walk home with a sign that says HELP. And now the biggest Looney Tunes victory of his entire career is real-world: the movie they tried to bury is the biggest hit of the summer, and the corporation that buried it is standing in the crater going meep meep.

Sources: Koimoi; Zoom TV Entertainment

Something strange is happening.

People are excited about a Disney movie again. Not a live-action remake. Not a sequel to a sequel to a streaming series. An original film. I had to sit down for a minute. Originality at Disney. I wasn't sure I'd live to see it.

The trailer for “Hexed” dropped last week, and the reaction has been... oddly tender. Fans calling it “something special.” Comment sections using words like “magical” without irony. It's like watching someone fall back in love with an ex they swore they'd never call again.

The pitch is almost aggressively classic Disney. A teenager named Billie Doe discovers she has secret magical abilities. Her mother — cautious, practical, the kind of parent who reads the label on everything — gives her a bracelet that keeps those powers locked down. Billie takes the bracelet off. Naturally. Teenagers and restraint have never been on speaking terms. And off she goes into Hexe, a vast witch realm, dragged into a mother-daughter road trip that will apparently unravel family mysteries big enough to change the world of witches forever.

See? Classic. Mother, daughter, forbidden magic, a world built on secrets. It's the kind of logline that could've been pitched in 1989 or 2026, and that might be exactly the point. Nobody's reinventing the wheel. They're just finally polishing one up and putting it back on the car.

The voice cast, though. This is where my eyebrows did something involuntary. Hailee Steinfeld plays Billie. Rashida Jones is the mother, Alice. Jodie Foster — two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster — voices the villain, Queen Celeste, who is described as willing to “stop at nothing” to hold onto her power, which is animation-speak for “she is absolutely going to try to kill a child.”

Walton Goggins voices a reclusive, magical three-eyed cat named Beef Roger Crummchuk. I need to pause there. Beef Roger Crummchuk. That's the character's name. Someone got paid to write that down and everyone in the room nodded. I love it. Three-eyed cats named Beef. This is the Disney energy I signed up for as a child and then quietly watched drain out of the company sometime around the fifth Frozen-adjacent announcement.

The new casting news adds Henry Winkler as Nigel, a skittish potoo bird — yes, a potoo, a real bird that looks like a failed first draft of an owl — and Dan Stevens as Hieronymous, the queen's blustering grand councillor. And then there's the cameo bench, which reads like someone emptied a 90s comedy green room: Alan Tudyk, Cheri Oteri, Kathy Najimy, Wayne Knight, Rachel Dratch, Chris Parnell, Pat McAfee, Drew McIntyre. A WWE superstar and an NFL punter-turned-talk-show-host in a Disney animated feature. Sure. Why not. It's original, after all. Let it be weird.

Behind the camera: Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand directing, with the story cooked up by Disney Animation's chief creative officer Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller. It opens exclusively in theaters November 25, 2026 — Thanksgiving week, the slot Disney historically reserves for the animated films it actually believes in.

And maybe that's the quiet significance here. Not the trailer itself, which is perfectly fine. Not the cast, which is stacked to a degree that feels faintly desperate. But the slot. The release date. The positioning. Disney is treating this thing like it matters. Like they remembered that the company used to make its legend on stories that started on a blank page instead of a boardroom spreadsheet.

Will it be good? No idea. Trailers lie the way smiles lie — professionally. But for the first time in a long while, I'm not watching a Disney announcement and doing mental math about which remake it pays for. I'm just... curious. Wondering what happens when the bracelet comes off.

Funny. A movie about a girl unlocking her hidden power, and the audience might be the ones having the transformation.

Sources: ComicBook.com, SoCalThrills, Wrestling Headlines.

There's something beautiful about a movie whose entire pitch fits on a napkin. A man is swallowed by a whale. He has one hour of air. That's it. That's the movie. No multiverse. No post-credits scene teasing the Whale Cinematic Universe. Just a man, a whale, and a tank slowly running out of oxygen.

Which is maybe why audiences looked at Whalefall and said, politely, "no thanks." The film opened this weekend to about $8 million domestic on a $60 million budget, playing in over 3,000 theaters to crowds that mostly weren't there. Deadline called it a belly flop, which — for a movie that takes place inside a whale's digestive system — is the rare insult that doubles as a plot summary.

Here's the thing, though. The movie didn't fail because it's bad. It failed because nobody could figure out how to sell "claustrophobic whale horror" to people who are already paying for Street Fighter. Whalefall is sitting at 70% on Rotten Tomatoes with an 82% audience score. That's not a disaster. That's a movie critics mostly respected and audiences mostly liked. It just... stayed home. Everyone agreed the premise was too weird to risk $20 on, right up until the moment they could watch it in sweatpants.

The premise is exactly what the title promises, and I respect the hell out of that. Jay Gardiner, played by Austin Abrams — fresh off Resident Evil and Weapons, clearly having the best year of anyone's career — dives off the California coast to recover the remains of his dead father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). The ocean, being the ocean, swallows him whole. One hour of air. Directed by Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You, Love and Monsters, Spontaneous), adapted from Daniel Kraus's 2023 novel, with Kraus co-writing the script.

And here's where it gets interesting, because every single review of this movie drew the same line through it: the whale works, the flashbacks don't. When Jay is inside the animal — acid, panic, an hour ticking down — it's reportedly some of the most visceral survival filmmaking in years. The A.V. Club called it "so strange and bold it's hard not to respect it." The Wrap said the premise is "rad as hell" and that Duffield is "100% committed to the bit." The Globe and Mail went with "an absurdly entertaining mix of family melodrama, survivalist thriller, and exceptionally gooey horror."

But the minute the film surfaces for air — literally and structurally — it loses people. Flashbacks to Jay's family. Mitt. His mother (Elisabeth Shue). Grief, reconciliation, lessons from dad that conveniently become survival tips. The Hollywood Reporter, being the least generous, called it a "Dumb Underwater Survival Thriller," which is technically accurate and somehow missing the point. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus says it best: "unforgettably visceral whenever it isn't getting mired in flashbacks."

I find that funny, in a dark way. The movie about a man trapped inside something huge and suffocating is at its best when it's trapped inside that concept, and at its worst when it tries to escape into something respectable.

Metacritic has it at 59 — mixed. CinemaScore gave it a B. The people who showed up thought it was fine; the people who didn't assumed it wasn't. Josh Brolin, to his credit, seems completely unbothered. He told Variety this week that his Ridley Scott sci-fi film The Dog Stars did $8 million domestic in August too. "You don't know if you're going to be part of the zeitgeist or not," he said. His 2017 film Only the Brave bombed and became a streaming hit. He knows how this works.

That's probably Whalefall's real future: not the theater, but the couch. The second window. The "wait, you haven't seen the whale movie?" phase. It got outgrossed by a three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that played on less than a third of its screens. A fraud documentary was more inviting than a whale's esophagus. You can't argue with the market. The market has spoken, and the market is claustrophobic.

But here's what I'll say. A movie this committed to its bit will outlive most of the things that beat it this weekend. Studios keep asking why original movies don't work anymore. This is why. Not because the movies are bad. Because a one-sentence premise about a whale reads as a dare, and most people, on a Friday night, don't take dares from marine mammals.

Deadline called it a belly flop. Consequence called it, and I quote, "without question the best movie I've ever seen about someone being swallowed by a whale." Both statements are true. Only one of them is a review.

Sources: Wikipedia ("Whalefall (film)"), ComicBook, MovieWeb, ScreenRant, Dark Horizons, Startefacts, TheWrap (via JustJared), World of Reel, Variety.

There's something quietly funny about this. Fifty years after Stephen King published *Carrie* — a story about a telekinetic teenage girl and the worst night of her life — the scariest update anyone could make to it wasn't the powers. It was the phones.

Mike Flanagan's eight-episode *Carrie* dropped on Prime Video on October 7th, and within a week it had bullied its way to the number one series on the entire streamer. Not just TV. Movies and shows combined. All of it. In the middle of October, the biggest thing on television is a 1974 story about prom.

The reviews are good, too. Not "good for a remake" good. Actually good. Eighty-five percent on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics, eighty-two from the audience, and a 7.9 on IMDb — which makes it the highest-rated *Carrie* on screen, ever. Including De Palma's. I don't think anyone expected to be typing that sentence this month.

Stephen King did. Sort of. He admitted he doubted there was anything new left to do with the story, then watched it and called it "brilliant" on Threads. His son Joe Hill said the trailer alone had him fighting back tears. When the guy who invented the character and his novelist son both publicly fold, the rest of us don't have much of an argument left.

Here's the part Flanagan changed, and it's smarter than it sounds. This Carrie — played by Summer H. Howell, picked from more than a thousand actors who auditioned — starts homeschooled, sheltered by her domineering mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan, doing that thing she does where tenderness and terror are the same face). Her father's sudden death forces her into public high school for the first time. She's not a lifelong target. She's a newcomer. Curious. Open. Actually hopeful.

Which makes what happens next worse, because Flanagan moved the whole thing to the present day, and present-day bullying doesn't end when the school bell rings. As Flanagan put it to Variety, the locker room scene — *the* locker room scene — "when people have phones in their hands is a whole different thing." The cruelty has a comments section now. It follows her home. It multiplies while she sleeps.

That's the modern retelling. Not a new prom, but a new kind of audience for the same humiliation. The bullies act nice in person and say everything behind a screen, and the show treats that the way it deserves to be treated: as the real horror upgrade. The telekinesis is still the special effect. The phones are the villain.

The cast is stacked with Flanagan people, which is its own kind of comfort. Matthew Lillard is Principal Grayle. Amber Midthunder plays a sympathetic teacher. Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Heather Graham, Katee Sackhoff all orbit the edges. And the episode titles are all class periods — "First Period," "Physical Education," "AP Physics." That's either very clever or very ominous, depending on how well you know the ending. It's both. It's both.

Flanagan has already floated the idea of *Carrie* running as a trilogy, which sounds insane until you remember what he did with *The Haunting of Hill House* and then did again. The man doesn't do sequels. He does layers. If anyone's going to find a second and third thing to say about a girl who burned down a gym fifty years ago, it's the guy whose entire career is about grief wearing a monster costume.

Fifty years. Five adaptations. And the one that's finally beating them all is the one that asked the simplest question: what if the bullies had smartphones? The answer, apparently, is that we'd all watch. We always do.

Sources: Collider, CBR, Parade, startefacts.com, comicbasics.com

The Street Fighter movie is in theaters today. I should probably be more excited than I am. Or less confused. One of the two.

I've been watching the reactions roll in all week, and they read like dispatch reports from two different screenings of two different films. One audience walked out of a movie. The other walked out of a group therapy session for people who miss the arcade.

The premise is this: it's 1993, the year Street Fighter II owned every arcade cabinet on the planet. Ryu and Ken — estranged fighters, played by Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo — get pulled back into the game when Chun-Li, played by Callina Liang, recruits them for the next World Warrior Tournament. There's a conspiracy hiding underneath the tournament. There is always a conspiracy hiding underneath the tournament.

The cast reads like someone filled out a fighting game roster by raiding a wrestling locker room and a character-actor convention at the same time. Roman Reigns as Akuma. Jason Momoa as Blanka. David Dastmalchian as M. Bison. 50 Cent as Balrog. Cody Rhodes as Guile. Orville Peck as Vega. The director is Kitao Sakurai, the man behind Bad Trip — which, now that I think about it, might be the most honest hiring decision a studio has ever made for a video game movie. A prank-movie director making a Street Fighter movie. Yes. That's exactly right.

And here's where it gets interesting, because the movie hasn't even had its opening weekend and it already has two completely different reputations.

Camp one: the fans. Premiere reactions leaned positive, and the praise is specific in a way that makes me trust it. The fight choreography honors the characters' actual signature moves — one critic got goosebumps over it. There are reportedly more than a hundred Easter eggs. The flashbacks are hand-drawn 2D animation by Titmouse, and people keep comparing them to the 1994 Street Fighter II animated movie like it's a compliment, which it absolutely is. ComicBook's Chris Killian called it "Bloodsport on horse steroids." One viewer called it a better successor to 1995's Mortal Kombat than either recent Mortal Kombat movie. Cody Rhodes, of all people, is being singled out as a scene-stealer. Liang's Chun-Li is a dream. The Ryu-Ken dynamic holds the whole thing together.

Camp two: the critics. Full reviews are starting to land, and they're lukewarm at best. One outlet called the film an opportunity squandered — it spends so long setting up the tournament that it forgets to deliver the knockout. Another gave it two stars. Bettors were forecasting a 43% Rotten Tomatoes score before reviews even dropped. IndieWire called it "a messy, maximalist reboot destined for cult status." The Hollywood Reporter went with "love letter to aging gamers." The recurring complaints: the story is thin, the jokes don't land, the dialogue is weak, and the ending feels less like an ending and more like a trailer for the sequel.

So which movie is real?

Here's my theory, and it costs nothing: they're both real, and they always were going to be. A Street Fighter movie is not a movie. It's a mirror. If you grew up feeding quarters into a cabinet and yelling at your friends, this is a love letter with a budget. If you didn't, it's a noisy two hours about attractive people arranging a tournament.

The box office tells you which audience showed up first. Tracking has it at $25–35 million from 3,500 theaters per Variety, with a No. 1 debut projected. The budget is somewhere between $82 and $120 million, and Paramount won't confirm the number, which is the studio equivalent of refusing to step on the scale. It doesn't face much competition this weekend. The real test isn't Friday. It's whether the second-weekend crowd trusts the gamers or the critics.

I keep thinking about the 1993 setting. It's not an accident. It's a confession. The movie is set in the last moment this franchise was simple — before the lore, before the reboots, before anyone needed a conspiracy under the tournament. Just quarters, joysticks, and the best two-player rivalry ever invented.

Maybe that's the review. Street Fighter didn't need to be good. It needed to be remembered.

Sources: ComingSoon, IndieWire, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Box Office Pro, ComicBook

There's a certain kind of movie announcement that makes me stop mid-scroll and just stare at my phone for a minute.

Amazon MGM Studios dropped the poster for The Beekeeper 2 yesterday and announced the first trailer lands today. Black and yellow. Jason Statham, stern, holding a weapon, surrounded by a swarm of bees. An R rating in the corner. It looks like a recruitment ad for an exterminator with a body count.

The funniest thing about this franchise is that absolutely nobody involved in it is laughing.

Think about it. Somewhere in a studio office, at some point in the last few years, a person stood up and said the words "secret society of government assassins called the Beekeepers" out loud. And nobody laughed. Everyone nodded. Millions of dollars changed hands. The first film made money. The second one is real.

That, more than anything, is why I love this franchise.

The original Beekeeper, for the uninitiated, had Statham as Adam Clay: a quiet beekeeper living a quiet life until his landlady gets scammed by a phishing operation, at which point he declares war on an entire criminal empire. David Ayer directed it with the straight face of a man filming a documentary about a real person. No winking. No nudging the audience. The premise is that beekeeping is a euphemism for being a government-sanctioned killer, and the movie treats this with the gravity of a UN resolution.

Now the sequel hits theaters January 15, 2027, with the trailer dropping today. Timo Tjahjanto is directing this time — the guy behind Nobody 2 — which means we're trading Ayer's earnest grit for Tjahjanto's gleefully creative violence. That's an upgrade, by the way. Ayer gave us the bee puns with a straight face. Tjahjanto will probably have Statham kill a man with a honey extractor and make it art.

The returning cast is Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Bobby Naderi, Jemma Redgrave, and Jeremy Irons, who is somehow in these movies, which delights me every time I remember it. Jeremy Irons. The man from The Lion King. Newcomers include Pom Klementieff, Yara Shahidi, and Adam Copeland — Edge, from wrestling, which means we are one step away from a beekeeper body-slamming someone into a beehive, and I need it.

And the plot. The Beekeeper organization has gone rogue. They're trying to take over the government. Clay has to fight the very group that made him.

Read that sentence again. The organization of secret government assassin-beekeepers has gone rogue and is attempting a coup, and the only man who can stop them is the one beekeeper who retired to keep actual bees. Footage shown at CinemaCon reportedly includes Statham attacking Irons' character with a Cybertruck, the Beekeepers kidnapping the president, Statham healing himself by covering himself in bees inside some kind of tube, and — this is my favorite — more bee puns. Tjahjanto has said he sees a Frank Castle, Punisher-like quality in Clay. He said that with a straight face too.

Here's what gets me. Hollywood spent a decade trying to build cinematic universes out of gods and wizards and multiverses, and the franchise that's quietly figured out the formula is about a man who keeps bees. The first film understood something the prestige franchises forgot: commitment to the bit is everything. You can have the dumbest premise on Earth, but if you treat it like it matters, the audience will meet you there. The Beekeeper 2 knows exactly what it is. It's doubling down. Bigger bees. Bigger conspiracy. Same deadpan Statham stare.

The trailer is out today. I'll be watching it. Not because I need another action franchise — I have plenty — but because somewhere out there is a group of filmmakers who looked at a man in a beekeeper suit and saw the Punisher, and I respect the commitment.

The hive stays. The sting continues. Something like that.

Sources: ComingSoon, JoBlo, The Future of the Force, Filmofilia

Starting at the beginning takes nerve. Most franchises treat their beginnings like an embarrassing yearbook photo — technically part of the story, but nobody wants to frame it.

Greta Gerwig framed it.

Yesterday at 2 p.m. Eastern, Netflix dropped the first trailer for Narnia: The Magician's Nephew, written and directed by Gerwig — her first film since Barbie handed her a billion dollars and a permanent seat at the table. It landed a day after the film's first poster, and it does something nobody has ever done before: it adapts the one Narnia book Hollywood never touched.

Quick orientation. The Magician's Nephew was the sixth book C.S. Lewis published, and the first one in the story's own timeline. The creation of Narnia itself. A cosmic lion singing a universe into existence. Gerwig has said that image — a world built out of music — is what hooked her as a kid.

A world built out of music. That sentence explains the trailer's big swing, because the trailer is cut to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." A song the band had never licensed to a film. Ever. Gerwig cleared it by screening an early cut for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page themselves. Not a licensing department. Not a lawyer. The director, rough cut in hand, asking rock royalty for permission.

It is the most rock-star move a filmmaker can make: recruiting actual rock stars to cosign your fantasy epic.

The casting reads like someone raiding the good china. Daniel Craig — James Bond, the most serious man to ever wear a tuxedo — plays Uncle Andrew, the meddling uncle whose magic rings kick the whole story in motion. There is something delicious about that. The man who spent fifteen years defusing world-ending plots is now the guy causing all the problems. Growth.

Emma Mackey plays Jadis, the future White Witch, and the trailer dresses her in reflective metallics — sparks, dark machinery, silver catching the light — a look that is already doing laps around fan conversations. Mackey has that sharp, watchful energy. Cold glamour instead of ice-queen cosplay feels exactly right for a creation story.

And then there is Aslan. Voiced by Meryl Streep. Sit with that for a second. The most decorated actor of her generation, voicing the lion that sings a world into being. You don't cast Meryl Streep to whisper. You cast her because the moment needs gravity, and she brings it the way weather brings rain.

Around them: David McKenna as Digory Kirke and Beatrice Campbell as Polly Plummer — the kids at the center of it all — with Carey Mulligan as Digory's mother and Ciarán Hinds, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Denise Gough, and Susan Wokoma rounding out the cast.

Now, the part that actually made me sit up. Netflix is treating this like a real movie. Theatrical release February 12, 2027, with IMAX previews starting February 10. And then — I checked the math twice — it doesn't reach Netflix until April 2. Forty-nine days of theaters-only. For a company built on "press play from your couch," a 49-day exclusive window is basically a cry for help. A very expensive, very confident cry for help, backed by a reported $280 million budget.

This is Netflix's biggest theatrical bet, and the logic is sound. Starting with the creation story instead of another trip through the wardrobe means no nostalgia to compete with and no beloved 2005 film to be measured against. Gerwig gets to build Narnia's entire visual language from nothing — which, fittingly, is exactly what the story is about.

She didn't pick the famous book. She picked the first one. The one about how it all starts.

There is a lesson in there somewhere. Probably about how the boldest thing a franchise machine can do is stop being a franchise machine.

A streamer that conquered the world by keeping you on the couch is now betting a reported $280 million that you'll leave the house for a singing lion. The irony, as they say, is free. The ticket isn't.

Sources: Consequence, Bustle, Radio Times, Filmofilia, ComingSoon.net, Softonic, Particle News.

There's a certain kind of movie announcement that makes me stop mid-scroll and just stare at my phone for a minute.

Amazon MGM Studios dropped the poster for The Beekeeper 2 yesterday and announced the first trailer lands today. Black and yellow. Jason Statham, stern, holding a weapon, surrounded by a swarm of bees. An R rating in the corner. It looks like a recruitment ad for an exterminator with a body count.

The funniest thing about this franchise is that absolutely nobody involved in it is laughing.

Think about it. Somewhere in a studio office, at some point in the last few years, a person stood up and said the words "secret society of government assassins called the Beekeepers" out loud. And nobody laughed. Everyone nodded. Millions of dollars changed hands. The first film made money. The second one is real.

That, more than anything, is why I love this franchise.

The original Beekeeper, for the uninitiated, had Statham as Adam Clay: a quiet beekeeper living a quiet life until his landlady gets scammed by a phishing operation, at which point he declares war on an entire criminal empire. David Ayer directed it with the straight face of a man filming a documentary about a real person. No winking. No nudging the audience. The premise is that beekeeping is a euphemism for being a government-sanctioned killer, and the movie treats this with the gravity of a UN resolution.

Now the sequel hits theaters January 15, 2027, with the trailer dropping today. Timo Tjahjanto is directing this time — the guy behind Nobody 2 — which means we're trading Ayer's earnest grit for Tjahjanto's gleefully creative violence. That's an upgrade, by the way. Ayer gave us the bee puns with a straight face. Tjahjanto will probably have Statham kill a man with a honey extractor and make it art.

The returning cast is Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Bobby Naderi, Jemma Redgrave, and Jeremy Irons, who is somehow in these movies, which delights me every time I remember it. Jeremy Irons. The man from The Lion King. Newcomers include Pom Klementieff, Yara Shahidi, and Adam Copeland — Edge, from wrestling, which means we are one step away from a beekeeper body-slamming someone into a beehive, and I need it.

And the plot. The Beekeeper organization has gone rogue. They're trying to take over the government. Clay has to fight the very group that made him.

Read that sentence again. The organization of secret government assassin-beekeepers has gone rogue and is attempting a coup, and the only man who can stop them is the one beekeeper who retired to keep actual bees. Footage shown at CinemaCon reportedly includes Statham attacking Irons' character with a Cybertruck, the Beekeepers kidnapping the president, Statham healing himself by covering himself in bees inside some kind of tube, and — this is my favorite — more bee puns. Tjahjanto has said he sees a Frank Castle, Punisher-like quality in Clay. He said that with a straight face too.

Here's what gets me. Hollywood spent a decade trying to build cinematic universes out of gods and wizards and multiverses, and the franchise that's quietly figured out the formula is about a man who keeps bees. The first film understood something the prestige franchises forgot: commitment to the bit is everything. You can have the dumbest premise on Earth, but if you treat it like it matters, the audience will meet you there. The Beekeeper 2 knows exactly what it is. It's doubling down. Bigger bees. Bigger conspiracy. Same deadpan Statham stare.

The trailer is out today. I'll be watching it. Not because I need another action franchise — I have plenty — but because somewhere out there is a group of filmmakers who looked at a man in a beekeeper suit and saw the Punisher, and I respect the commitment.

The hive stays. The sting continues. Something like that.

Sources: ComingSoon, JoBlo, The Future of the Force, Filmofilia

There's a sound a room full of people makes when you tell them the thing they love is ending.

It isn't a gasp. It's a boo. A real one. Not the polite kind. The kind usually reserved for referees and villains.

That was the Marvel panel at New York Comic Con. Marvel confirmed that Daredevil: Born Again ends with Season 3, and three thousand people answered the way people answer when something they actually liked gets taken away. They booed.

Charlie Cox was standing right there. He did what any man does when the room turns on the news instead of him. He deadpanned. Then he said he imagined the Save Daredevil campaign would be gearing up for round two, and that nobody wants to invite the wrath of the Save Daredevil people.

He's not wrong. That campaign worked once. The first show got cancelled by Netflix after three seasons, the fans made enough noise to bend the timeline, and the character came back. Now history is doing that thing it does. Same show. Same three seasons. Same ending. Different streamer.

The consolation prize was real, at least. Cox shared the stage with Krysten Ritter and Finn Jones, and Marvel confirmed the Defenders reunion for the final season, with Mike Colter back as Luke Cage too. Season 3 is due on Disney+ in 2027. Eight episodes. One last run for the Devil of Hell's Kitchen.

And then, in the same weekend, Marvel did something genuinely smart.

VisionQuest premieres tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight. Tuesday, October 13, at 9 p.m. ET on Disney+. Marvel bumped it up a day, which means by the time you read this, the first two episodes are either out or hours away.

The show is the final chapter of the trilogy that started with WandaVision and ran through Agatha All Along. Paul Bettany is back as Vision, the rebuilt White Vision, the one who flew off with his memories restored and nowhere to put them. James Spader returns as Ultron. Terry Matalas, the man behind Star Trek: Picard's third season, is running the show.

The release schedule is unusual, and I mean that as a compliment. Two episodes tonight: "No Strings" and "Theseus." Two more on October 20: "Reboot" and "Malware." Two more on October 27: "Firewall" and "Deadlock." Then one at a time. "Immolation" on November 3. The finale, "Forever," on November 10.

Marvel also used the panel to announce Zodiac, a new live-action spy thriller coming to Disney+ in 2028. Between that and the VisionQuest rollout, the message is clear. The TV side of the MCU is getting smaller, weirder, and more deliberate. Fewer shows. Stranger swings.

Which brings me to the strangest swing of the weekend, and it didn't come from Marvel at all.

Over at the R.L. Stine on Tubi panel on Sunday, Tubi announced a live-action movie adaptation of The Babysitter, Stine's 1989 teen thriller series. It follows sixteen-year-old Jenny, who takes a babysitting job to pay for a prestigious writing program, even though a prowler is terrorizing girls across town. Then the threatening phone calls start. Then a dangerous fugitive surfaces. Then Jenny starts suspecting everyone.

Trevor Calverley is directing. Jem Garrard, who wrote and directed the Pumpkinhead movies for Tubi, wrote the screenplay. It's planned for a 2027 premiere. It is the fourth Stine project in Tubi's ongoing partnership, after Pumpkinhead, Pumpkinhead 2, and the upcoming Afraid of Clowns.

Let me say that again, slowly, so it lands properly. Tubi. The free app. The one with the ads. It now has a functioning horror pipeline built out of R.L. Stine adaptations, and it is announcing them at Comic Con like a real studio.

I have spent years watching the streaming wars. The expensive apps keep cancelling the shows people love. The free app keeps making the horror movies people will actually watch.

So here's the state of things. The most beloved show gets cancelled. The robot gets a second chance. And the free app with the ads is quietly having the best spooky season in the business.

If that sounds backwards to you, congratulations. You've been paying attention.

Sources: Marvel Studios / Disney+ schedule via JustJared, Inverse, Nerdist, and ComicBook.com; Deadline and Bleeding Cool for Daredevil: Born Again; The Hollywood Reporter via MovieWeb and Dark Horizons, plus Film Factual, for R.L. Stine's The Babysitter.

There is a particular kind of silence that only happens when Hollywood makes a movie about the thing everyone is already doing.

It happened this weekend. Aaron Sorkin, the man who turned typing into an Olympic event, released The Social Reckoning — his follow-up to The Social Network, the 2010 film everyone pretended to understand and nobody actually rewatched. This time Sorkin wrote and directed it himself. Jeremy Strong stepped in as Mark Zuckerberg, replacing Jesse Eisenberg. Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White came along. A $30 million budget. Sony rolled it out nationwide.

It opened to $5.5 million in North America. About $9 million worldwide.

Let that sit for a moment. Nine million dollars. Globally. For a movie about the most-used website in human history. That's roughly the revenue of a moderately popular lemonade stand with good foot traffic.

Meanwhile, a demon wearing Jessica Chastain's face made $27.5 million. In America alone. Because of course it did. We don't go to the movies to see the thing we stared at all day on our phones. We go to see something with teeth.

Now, to be fair to Sorkin — and I do try to be fair, it's one of my worst habits — the people who actually saw The Social Reckoning say it's not the grim, self-important lecture the trailers made it look like. Analyst Scott Mendelson, writing on Substack, called it lighter, funnier, and "just plain more enjoyable" than expected. The reviews were mixed-to-negative, audiences gave it a B-minus CinemaScore, which is the cinematic equivalent of a shrug.

But here's the part nobody wants to say out loud: no marketing campaign could have saved this. Not because the movie is bad — I haven't seen it, and neither have you, and that's rather the point — but because the subject itself is the problem.

Think about it. The original Social Network came out in 2010. Facebook was still a place you visited. It was a destination. There was mystery in it. Now it's infrastructure. It's the plumbing of modern life. Making a sequel about it is like making a tense thriller about the water company. Yes, Aaron, we know the water is important. We still don't want to watch the pipes.

And audiences proved it. They picked the mom-demon movie. Other Mommy — Rob Savage's little $19 million horror flick about a girl whose mother is slowly replaced by something unspeakable — took $45.1 million worldwide this weekend. A D-plus CinemaScore, which for horror just means people were scared and mad about it. It will have short legs. It doesn't matter. It won.

There's poetry in the numbers. A movie about fictional evil: $27.5 million. A movie about real evil: $5.5 million. Turns out when given the choice between a demon and Zuckerberg, America chose the demon. Again.

Sony had the good-news side of the weekend too, if we're keeping score. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil pulled $40 million out of China, pushed its worldwide total to $320 million, and is now officially the biggest Resident Evil movie ever made — passing Afterlife's $295 million and The Final Chapter's $314 million. Zombies, it turns out, travel better than deposition transcripts.

As Rentrak's Paul Dergarabedian put it: "October is a time when studios take chances and it doesn't always work out."

He's being polite. What October really is, is the month where the truth comes out. Studios spend all summer feeding you spectacle, and then October arrives and asks: what do you actually want?

The answer, this year: demons. Zombies. Anything with teeth. Anything but us.

We don't want to pay fifteen dollars to watch a dramatization of our own screen time. We already get that for free, every day, on the app the movie is about. There's something almost beautiful in that — Hollywood spent $30 million making a mirror, and the audience took one look and walked into the horror movie instead.

Maybe that's the real reckoning. Not Zuckerberg's. Ours.

Sources: ABC News, Scott Mendelson (Substack), AsiaOne, The Times of India.