It seems Hollywood is not prepared to let theatrical moviegoing die after all.
CinemaCon 2026, four days of intensive presentation of movies released this year and in production now for next year, made clear that the business of going to a movie theater — buying a ticket and sitting with strangers in a dark room — has come back with the passion of religion.
Even Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos showed up for goodness sake.
We’ve written a lot on this site about the first quarter of 2026, with hit movies like “Project Hail Mary” and “Super Mario Galaxy Movie” sending the box office total over $1.77 billion to levels not seen since before COVID. And we have also written about the interesting twist that Gen. Z is the fastest growing demographic showing up to go to movies. You know – the young’uns.
I’ve got good news for those guys: Hollywood is making a lot of movies for you.
The pivot is remarkable. It has been at least six years, since the advent of COVID, that declining attendance, a flood of investment in streaming, the erasure and then tightening of theatrical windows and the decline of movie production overall spurred many to think: It’s over. Movies were nice for 100 years or so, and now people simply prefer to stay home or watch unremarkable crap on their phones.
But nothing ever stays the same, does it?
OK, so as the Hollywood studios find their way back to theatrical presentations, here are my takeaways: Warner Bros. remains strong across all its genres, though its future is unpredictable; Universal clings like mad to Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg, and perhaps that will be enough since both are prolific and epic in their talent; Amazon is like a toddler, finding its way into the shaky first steps of becoming a real grown-up studio; Paramount has vast work ahead, with its heart in the right place but its slate weak and oh-so-manospherish.
And if you’re curious, the movie I am most excited about that I saw at CinemaCon is called “I Play Rocky.” (More on this.)
1. Amazon-MGM Studios presented a full slate this year, hard on the heels of its brilliant box office success, “Project Hail Mary,” now at over $500 million worldwide. Ryan Gosling and directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller showed up to thank exhibitors for the incredible ride. That trailer was my favorite at CinemaCon last year and darned if they didn’t have my favorite this year: “I Play Rocky.” This is a small character drama about the making of the classic Sylvester Stallone movie, “Rocky.” In the trailer, lead actor Anthony Ippolito is absolutely captivating as the stubborn, young, aspiring actor who writes himself a part because he can’t land a role; refuses to take a big payday when the script hits and the studio wants to cast a star; and then rides the movie all the way to Best Picture in 1976 – before many of you were born.
Like “Project Hail Mary,” this movie has heart and a hopeful message. It has no space aliens, but I still can’t wait to see the full film.
Also I wouldn’t sleep on Michael B. Jordan’s remake of “The Thomas Crown Affair,” which he directs, produces and stars, along with Adria Arjona, and looked exciting.
2. “Digger” was the movie on everyone’s lips. Alejandro G. Iñárritu brought a clip and some guy named Tom Cruise to the convention that simply stunned. We knew very little about this movie previously, so the revelation here is this looks to be an quirky, thrilling, funny and dark adventure with an incredible cast and shades of Wes Anderson and David Leitch. Cruise’s character, an eccentric octogenarian bazillionaire, lives out in icy remote wilderness with his oil riches, which somehow seems to threaten the end of the world and then has to save it.
3. Too much violence for its own sake and killing for thrills. That said, if you’re into that (and I’m not so much) cue the whole New Line slate, from “Evil Dead” to “Mortal Kombat” sequels, to “Street Fighter” coming from Paramount.
4. Women have more or less disappeared. I write about this every year, and it’s not any better this time. Women are half the population. They make many buying decisions in families. But they are missing from our movie screens. There seems to be a longstanding pattern of token women in overwhelmingly male casts, and token projects that consider the proposition that women may be interesting people in their own right, but generally it’s a man-fest out there. And yes, I saw “Practical Magic 2” with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman is coming from Warner, and so is “Devil Wears Prada 2,” from Disney. Sequels from massive titles that are decades old do not count.
Shout-out to Universal for repeating my own mantra about lamenting the end of love stories on the big screen; the studio made a stab at a rom-com with “One Night Only” by director Will Gluck, starring Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro, but it’s hard to tell if that works. Please try again, Universal, if it doesn’t.
5. The best thing by far about Paramount’s presentation was the opening reel by director Jon M. Chu, taking viewers not only through the archives of the studio’s incredible movie gems but across the actual production of its current movies featuring Teyana Taylor, Mark Wahlberg huddling with director Pete Berg, horses riding at full gallop through the iconic gates of the studio, and then – Tom Cruise at magic hour sitting casually at the top of the Paramount water tower. A drone shot pulls up into the sky, showing the L.A. skyline with the words: “Long live the movies.”
The slate itself was weak, but Paramount is still a studio in rebuild mode so we will grade them on a curve. This year they’ve got: “Scary Movie,” “Jackass,” “Paw Patrol – The Dino Movie,” and “Angry Birds 3,” among others. And in development lots of video game franchises, including “Call of Duty” by action director Pete Berg and Taylor Sheridan, which could be cool.
More substantively, their other movies feature a lot of rugged white guys defying the odds: Brad Pitt protecting his dog in the American wilderness in David Ayer’s “Heart of the Beast”; David Corenswet as an underdog football player in “Mr. Irrelevant: the John Tuggle Story”; and lots in development in that general direction, including a new “Top Gun Maverick” with Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer.
I found it interesting that Viola Davis did not show up to promote “Children of Blood and Bone,” an African saga with an impressive cast of Black and African actors that felt like a redux of 2022’s “The Woman King,” which I loved but disappointed at the box office.
6. Disney brought its three-ring circus to CinemaCon. When Kevin Feige showed the trailer for “Avengers: Doomsday,” with every star from the Marvel universe and Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. in person, the crowd roared so loud they decided to play it a second time.
The movie that really knocked the audience back on their heels was watching an underwater diver (Austin Abrams) get viscerally swallowed by a whale (I thought the guy next to me would faint) in “Whalefall,” and I am feeling tingly about Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine” starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. Malkovich is in a dingy third world airport and tells a couple of young women: “We came down here to destabilize your democracy and it’s going great. Your country’s gonna get fucked.”
I’m in.
