In a new interview with The New York Times, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said that, should the WBD acquisition go through, the streamer will commit to 45-day theatrical release windows for the legacy studio’s upcoming releases.
Sarandos insisted that Netflix has no intentions of disrupting “a theatrical distribution engine that is phenomenal and produces billions of dollars,” and that he believes there is value in the movie theater experience.
“I’m giving you a hard number,” Sarandos said. “If we’re going to be in the theatrical business, and we are, we’re competitive people — we want to win. I want to win opening weekend. I want to win box office.”
“I mean, like the town that Sinners is supposed to be set in does not have a movie theater there,” Sarandos reasoned. “For those folks, it’s certainly outmoded. You’re not going to get in the car and go to the next town to go see a movie.”
Deadline is among those reporting that this weekend there’s expectations that 28 Years Later will unseat Avatar from the box office.
It’s a four-day weekend for Hollywood and there’s hopes that the newest zombie flick will make more than 20 million. And you know what, the movie Primates didn’t do half bad last week so maybe in these cold January weeks we still love and have that affinity for horror.
Bone Temple releases Wednesday in the UK, France, Belgium and Indonesia, then in Australia/New Zealand, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Italy, Netherlands and Saudi Arabia on Thursday, followed by Japan, Poland and Spain on Friday. That’s a 98% offshore footprint, except Korea and Thailand…
James Cameron’s third sci-fi epic has added $65.6 million internationally and $86 million globally in its fourth weekend of release, bringing its overseas tally to $888 million and global total to $1.23 billion. Although a box office juggernaut, “Fire and Ash” is trailing the first two films, 2009’s “Avatar” and 2022’s “The Way of Water,” at this point in its run.
“Zootopia 2” has remained a box office force since Thanksgiving, with $30.8 million overseas and $40.9 million worldwide in its seventh weekend in theaters..
MORE.. Good jeans..
Lionsgate’s psychological thriller “The Housemaid” is about to surpass $200 million globally. The film has generated $25.5 million from 66 overseas territories, including a No. 1 bow in the United Kingdom with $23.7 million. So far, the R-rated film, adapted from Freida McFadden’s popular book and starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, has become a breakout hit with $98.3 million internationally and $192.5 million worldwide after four weekends of release.
On New Year’s Eve, Stranger Things: The Finale debuted simultaneously on the streamer and in roughly 600 cinemas — more than a third belonged to AMC, the country and world’s largest chain — before holding encore showings throughout New Year’s Day. At AMC alone, the theater giant said that The Finale earned $15 million from the $20 food and beverage credits purchased.
The total summation for all theaters showing may have been near $30 mil.. a true cultural moment..
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Netflix didn’t have to worry about reporting grosses for Stranger Things, since fans reserved a seat by purchasing a concession voucher directly from the theaters.
AMC and Cinemark Theatres both charged $20, plus fees in certain instances.
Regal Cinemas and several others charged $11, a reference to the name of the show’s lead character.
Earlier this week, the Duffers said on social media that 1.1 million vouchers had been sold. By New Year’s Day, Steve Buck’s leading research and exit polling firm EntTelligence showed admissions at 1.3 million…
Maybe not number one, that was Avatar.. but she bounced into a strong showing in the Housemaid…
The Housemaid opened to an estimated $18.9 million in the U.S., good enough for third place on the charts behind the animated, faith-based movie David ($22 million). The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants also opened to $16 million, making it a very healthy weekend overall. But back to the topic at hand, Feig’s latest broke through the noise and, against a reported $35 million budget, is well-positioned to become a theatrical hit.
There’s been so much of a veil of secrecy surrounding this new Steven Spielberg movie that even now, with the trailer finally revealed, it still feels like we’re not getting the full story of what this film is really about. That said, we definitely know more than we did before.
And apparently, this is officially a summer event movie.
The film is titled Disclosure Day, and it stars Emily Blunt as a Kansas City TV meteorologist. She’s joined by Josh O’Connor, who plays a passionate UFO whistleblower.
Here’s the official description:
“An uncanny exploration of an alien invasion as initially experienced by a meteorologist (Emily Blunt) and a passionate UFO whistleblower (Josh O’Connor) who want to share the truth with the world all at once.”
The movie hits theaters on June 12, 2026.
The trailer is genuinely cool—we’ll link it below—and after watching it, I think it’s fair to say this could end up being the most hyped movie of 2026. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be the best movie of the year… —or, on the other hand, it could turn out to be one of the best films Steven Spielberg has ever spearheaded.
Either way, I can’t wait to see more. Because based on what we’ve seen so far, this looks really promising.
Steven Spielberg is reportedly making a new movie, and if the rumors are true, it’s going to rock the world of UFO enthusiasts — or at least get their hopes way up. Of course, a lot of that could simply be marketing hype mixed with existential wish-casting. But if there’s anyone who could stir that kind of anticipation, it’s Spielberg. After all, this is the man behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — films that didn’t just entertain people, but quietly rewired how an entire generation thinks about alien contact.
The recent UK Telegraph article describing the project leans heavily into a familiar narrative within UFO culture. One story that always resurfaces is the alleged White House screening of E.T. for Ronald Reagan. Supposedly, when the film ended, Reagan stood up and said — maybe joking, maybe not — that there were people in the room who knew that everything they had just watched was true. Whether that moment actually happened exactly as described almost doesn’t matter anymore. It’s become part of the mythology.
The new Spielberg film itself is still wrapped in secrecy, but one detail from the article jumped out at me — and I had completely forgotten this — a significant portion of it was filmed in New Jersey. That immediately brings to mind the so-called New Jersey drone sightings that dominated headlines just a year ago and then vanished entirely. Not even below the fold — just gone. But if you talk to people in New Jersey, you’ll hear that the drones never really stopped. They’re reportedly still seen regularly. They’ve just become so common that no one talks about them anymore. Like planes in the sky.
That’s part of what makes this Telegraph article so fun, and what makes this Spielberg project so intriguing. There’s even a rumor floating around — clearly conspiracy-theory territory — that a real alien might “star” in the movie. Obviously, that’s not happening. For one thing, it would probably violate every Screen Actors Guild rule imaginable, not to mention require the creation of an entirely new galactic union chapter. Unless, of course, the alien is playing itself. Or themselves. Or itself. The grammar alone would be a nightmare.
THE TELEGRAPH MOCKS:
Tinfoil hat wearers have reacted with characteristic calmness and sagacity to the news that Spielberg is returning to his sci-fi roots with his new production, filming of which was completed in the summer. It is said to have had several working titles, including The Dish and Non-View, but is now reported to be called Disclosure.
The new name, if it is correct, would provide “evidence” for the conspiracists that Spielberg knows more than he is letting on – “disclosure” being a key term for the alien truthers. They hold that the American authorities have secret information about UFOs and extraterrestrial life and want it to be publicly revealed, in a process they term “disclosure”.
Chris Ramsay, a Montreal-based magician who has a YouTube channel devoted to UFO theories, went viral with a tweet in which he most clearly set out the conspiracists’ thinking about Spielberg’s new film. Like any good conspiracy theorist, he described his thesis as something “that’s so crazy it just might be brilliant”.
Still, the idea is entertaining. And beneath the humor is a more interesting possibility: that Spielberg, over decades of filmmaking, may have become acquainted with enough people in enough rooms to suspect that something is going on. That maybe Reagan wasn’t joking. That maybe E.T. wasn’t just a children’s movie, but a soft disclosure story told in the safest way possible.
Regardless of what ultimately comes of this new film — whenever it’s released, and whatever it ends up being called — the anticipation is already enormous. The marketing machine seems primed, the speculation is growing, and expectations are high. We have little doubt the movie will be good. And even if it isn’t…
Five Nights at Freddy’s Part 2 might not be a Christmas movie, but it’s absolutely the anti-Christmas movie for anyone trying to dodge holiday fluff right now.
And dodge it they did. The fanbase showed up hard and the movie unseated Zootopia 2, pulling in around $63 million domestic and over $100 million worldwide on opening. That’s a lot more than many people expected it to do heading into the post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas window. This movie is hot right now in that weird in-between space where people are kind of done with turkeys but not quite ready for carols.
Domestically, that’s the second-biggest horror opening of the year for Blumhouse–Atomic Monster, after The Conjuring: Last Rites at $84 million. Yesterday’s numbers were solid too, with a drop of about 33%, which is actually better than the 39% drop the first Five Nights at Freddy’s movie took. It’s always an open question whether a film like this can keep that kind of momentum going, but at least for this weekend, it has absolutely blown past a lot of expectations—and even outpaced its own predecessor.
So, Merry Christmas to Blumhouse and the whole gang at Freddy Fazbear’s.
If holiday joy isn’t your thing this year, there’s always a killer animatronic waiting for you in the dark.
People always say Blair Witch kicked things off, and sure, it definitely lit the fuse. But before that, we had Faces of Death being passed around like contraband in the ’90s. For better or worse, that was the “original” shared footage.. VHS tapes traded among teenagers who half-assumed it was all staged. Little did we realize there was some real footage mixed in with the fake.
Disturbing when you think about it, right?
Now we’ve moved from VHS to online, and the style has followed. Man Finds Tape is coming to theaters and digital platforms from Magnet Releasing and stars William Magnuson as Lucas, the operator of a YouTube channel called “Man Finds Tape.” The movie basically examines the way we share this stuff as a society, and how we consume found footage, viral clips, and disturbing imagery… it wraps that idea in an eerie mystery told through different formats.
And honestly, that’s our real life now. We’re constantly finding things, posting them, and watching social media platforms race to either boost them or pull them down. As this is written, just last night in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a bus ran over a person, and yes, there was footage online, on a pretty big social site. The victim was thankfully blurred out, but the comments underneath were less than appealing, to put it mildly. So it’s not just “man finds tape” anymore; it’s everyone live-streaming horrors in real time.
When something awful happens, our instinct now is to search. We look up the footage, the location, the angles, the aftermath. We want to know everything. I’m not sure what that says about us, but it’s definitely something horror is starting to chew on.
Peter Hall told Fangoria there are a lot of rabbit holes on the internet, and they wanted to tell a story about someone exploring one of those viral rabbit holes. Paul Gandersman pointed out that for a long time, if you saw bizarre footage, you needed proof that it was real. Now it’s flipped: people automatically assume it’s fake, and you have to prove that it actually happened.
With AI and all the new tools out there, that tracks. We’re much less willing to accept anything at face value. Show September 11th footage to some kids today with no context, and the first reaction might honestly be, “Is that AI?”
The film itself sounds pretty interesting. The filmmakers said they worked from a fairly tight script, but there was room for improvisation. They gave the actors permission to find new dialogue or fresh moments in a scene, as long as what they were doing stayed within the structure of the movie. That’s actually pretty cool.. improv in a found-footage style can make the performances feel more natural, and it can open doors to character beats you’d never get in a locked-down script.
The movie also leans heavily into religion. The filmmakers grew up around Catholicism, with some Judaism mixed in, and there’s a character who plays a reverend who actually grew up in an evangelical community in real life. That kind of background colors the whole atmosphere of the film and religious imagery mixed with found footage and internet horror is fertile ground.
From the trailer alone, some of the imagery looks like it might be difficult for certain viewers. It leans into that “too real” feeling, where the production value is working against your comfort level by mimicking reality a little too closely. Viewer discretion is obviously advised. But it’s always interesting when horror goes beyond jump scares and actually comments on culture itself.
We have said before: horror is at its best when it digs deep into the moment we’re living in—our politics, our tech, our habits, and holds up a warped mirror. It lets the monster tell us something about ourselves.
So in Man Finds Tape, who’s the monster? Whatever’s lurking on the recordings… or the people who keep hitting play?
Today’s the big day! You can now buy tickets for the finale of Stranger Things in a theater.. I foresee this being a major cultural event..
We’ve got a grand total of two theaters in Pennsylvania running the Season 5 finale… yep, just two that I could find. One out in Warrington and another all the way over in Clarion, near Pittsburgh.
Now, maybe this is some kind of strategic move, spreading out the love to suburban and university towns rather than just the big cities. Or maybe it’s not strategic at all, and it just comes down to which theater chains decided to jump on board. Either way, I’m not complaining because I’ve got my ticket in hand. As an example it appears that there’s only two theaters in Pennsylvania showing it, one being a suburb of Philadelphia and the other being Clarion. Clarion smart because there’s University there maybe that’s the goal. Not sure if it’s strategic or just by accident where the theaters were chosen..
My plan? Well, I’m turning off the entire digital world from 8 p.m. on New Year’s Eve until I’m back from the theater on New Year’s Day. That means no social media, no Twitter, no Facebook, no updating my site.. nothing. I’m going full digital hibernation mode because I do not want a single spoiler before I see that finale on the big screen.
And sure, some folks might say going to a theater for a TV show is a bad idea. They’ll say you’ll be surrounded by loud, obnoxious people. But come on, if you’re heading out to see Stranger Things in a theater, you’re probably just as much of a fan as everyone else in the room. We’ll all be there to laugh, cry, cheer, and maybe even dress up like a Demogorgon or two. It’s going to be a shared experience, and honestly, that’s the fun of it.
So good luck if you’re hunting for tickets. It’s limited, it’s special, and if you do find a seat next to me, just give me a little elbow room and don’t throw popcorn.. unless it’s at a really scary part.
