CinemaCon and the Year Ahead in Movies; The Current State of Theatrical Horror; & Special Guest John Early

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0:35Welcome to Screen Talk, where we keep you up to date with the latest goings on in Hollywood. This is Ryan Latanzio in New York. Anne is out this week. She's going to be back next week as we prepare for the Cannes Film Festival. So for today's episode, we've got a few special guests, starting with IndieWire senior business reporter Brian Welk, who's going to share his thoughts from CinemaCon, which was last week. And we're going to check in on the current state of theatrical horror with our features writer, Alison Foreman, who's here to talk about Lee Cronin's The Mummy, which opened last week.

1:06Finally, we're going to have multi-hyphenate John Early on the podcast, the actor, writer, director behind Maddie's Secret, which is coming out for Magnolia Pictures this summer and was just premiered at the New Directors New Films Festival. He's also currently off-Broadway in New York on the Andre Gregory-directed Wallace Shawn written play, What We Did Before Our Moth Days. So first up, we've got Brian, who last week was at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas and has a sense of everything that's going on with the upcoming studio slates. Welcome to Screen Talk. Thank you so much for having me.

1:40Yes, my pleasure, and glad to have you back from Vegas. I obviously was not there, but I watched your coverage from afar. Tell us about some of the highlights of the standout footage that you saw, especially from things that we haven't seen any trailers for, such as, you know, I'm looking forward to Werewolf, the Robert Eggers movie. There's also Aaron Sorkin's Social Reckoning and Inuri 2's Digger. I'm going to start with Digger because I think that one just was the most jarring and most really eye-popping because this is the first movie in a while where Tom Cruise is not playing Tom Cruise. It's just really jarring to see him in the footage we saw, which was him with gray hair, lots of wrinkles, big kind of paunch belly.

2:27And he's just very over the top, but thick accent, but he's intense and very focused. So we saw kind of the opening sort of clip from the film. and and then we also saw kind of an extended trailer and everything just looks very exaggerated very big personalities it looks very satirical it looks like it's got a lot of you know kind of politics or or different sort of reference points he's playing like an oil man an oil billionaire oil tycoon whose latest job has basically you know started to create like a cataclysmic global event and he's talking with the president played by John Goodman who's trying to get him to figure this out and and solve this problem it looked wild Ingrid too I'm not always the biggest fan you know he's had some hits and misses but you know he definitely takes huge big swings and I'm very interested to see more of what Cruz does with this character someone compared it to mickey 17 that i talked to and for better or worse that might be you know not the best comp or whatever but you know it's another example of like no tour that warner brothers is working with you know in english taking kind of this big swing on the genre twist so i i think there's there's a lot of potential here and very curious to see more yeah but a comparison in mickey 17 doesn't necessarily bode well not that i i actually liked that movie but it obviously did pretty badly last year for warners um so then what about the social reckoning this is aaron sorkin's sequel to social network that has no involvement from david fincher yes and and the number of times that i heard from from sony reminding me that it's not a sequel but it's a they follow up or a companion piece or whatever buzzword you want to use in in place of that But this is the next Facebook movie from Sorkin.

4:32And I think the headline here is Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, which is a very different look than what Jesse Eisenberg was doing. A very different sort of performance, but it's still very much the Mark Zuckerberg we've come to know. he's got this very clipped sort of speech patterns and that i could tell strong has really been meticulous about about this and how this is going to look and we saw him kind of in these scenes where he's prepping for for speaking in front of congress or speaking in front of a you know other press conference um and he's being grilled by someone played by bill burr and um and then there's also a lot of other stuff with um jeremy allen white who's playing a reporter and then mikey madison who's the whistleblower in the film so i don't know if it has that same fincher coldness and and style that it has but this definitely looks like it i think it's going to turn a lot of heads jeremy strong of it all really really caught my eye and i think will yeah make make a lot of people excited once that trailer finally drops um and then finally werewolf you mentioned i mean that one this was a shorter tease and i wish i could say too much more about it but very similar in tone and in kind of look to nosferatu extremely dark extremely gothic the the classical literally dark you mean yeah yes The classical aspect ratio, you got things that are, you know, black and white and some moments and then color and others.

6:10And it's very atmospheric, very arthouse and kind of creepy body horror stuff where he's, you know, bulging out from his back, turning into the werewolf, all good things. but yeah very short tease from from this there was he wasn't on hand or whatever to talk about the film or anything like that didn't get as much but i i think you know it's opening like the same day as as nosferatu i think they're doing the same model the same release schedule so it will definitely appeal to that crowd if you like that film it only wrapped filming not very long ago so i'm sure he's still deep in the edit on that film switching gears over to franchise ip material We have Dune Part 3 from Warners, and we have Disney's Avengers Doomsday, the return of the Avengers, the return of Robert Downey Jr., the return of me trying to figure out if I'm going to see this one or not.

7:05But they're both opening on the same day, December 18th, and they're giving the IMAX theaters to Dune Part 3. But then Disney has come up with something called Infinity Vision. What the hell is that? And what is the plan for the fact that these two movies are opening the same day around the holidays? Is one of them going to move? I do not think one is going to move. I think if one was going to move, we would have seen it already. But the Infinity Vision thing that they announced literally before they showed the trailer seemed like a weird bit of corporate branding that I didn't fully understand until later when it kind of dawned on me.

7:40oh yeah they don't have IMAX screens that that you know Doom shot in IMAX so they get the privilege and that's going to be a big deal I mean it's not going to hurt the box office significantly by any stretch this is still an Avengers movie but it is a little weird that you know you don't have a movie like that in IMAX so it'll be in all these other PLF screens but this is Disney's way of kind of putting their stamp on it and trying to put their own branding on saying hey this stuff is meets our standards for picture and sound quality and maybe it's something that they would use down the road for other things you know say hey this is you're seeing this in infinity vision you're seeing this in the in the best quality thing and i think it's it would be a stretch to presume that theaters are going to adopt this and make it a big thing or that other audience members you know will will know hey i'm not seeing this unless it's going to be an infinity vision that someone will figure that out they know what imax means they know what imax looks like and that's a brand they care about will they care about infinity vision in the same way i'm not so sure but this is kind of their answer to, well, we don't have IMAX, but we are thinking about these premium formats.

9:08Are we looking at a Barbenheimer situation here? I mean, these are obviously, they're both going to be three hour movies. There's no way around it. So that's a very long day at the movies. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if they're going to have the same kind of kismet, uh, meme worthy reactions that, you know, that Barbenheimer got, you know, but it's, these are two big tent poles, you know, that with very similar audiences and, and fan bases. So I think it's just a matter of does one slightly take away from the upside of the other, uh, at least in that opening weekend. Um, and, and yeah, maybe not having IMAX will, will drag Avengers down just a little bit but um disney is certainly thinking about that and uh yeah i do think they'll probably both stick to their dates at this point perhaps we can call it avengers doones day i literally just thought of that so we did it obviously though i know you're so excited about the avengers trailer and all the details that were in it but you know it they showed it twice at CinemaCon and it definitely got the fanboys really stoked, really excited.

10:19It's all the things that people are going to want from this sort of mashup franchise with all these new characters. And I think it's going to do very, very well. But yeah, it's been a it's been a respite to have that Marvel out of the cultural conversation, out of the collective imagination. But those days are soon done and I will have to adjust. So obviously we are looking at Paramount absorbing Warner Brothers unless a few thousand Hollywood signatories have anything to do about it. And so obviously this must have been weighing over the event. What was the sentiment about that there? Is there anything that you learned about the merger?

10:59I mean, for one thing, you have David Ellison promising, saying, you have my word about this, about fealty to Windows. about 30 movies a year yeah he wanted to say i'm i want to look you in the eye and and let you know that this we're going to do this 30 movies a year and he also mentioned windows he said we're committing to a 45 day pvod window and 90 days for svod um but i'll back up and to your bigger question about just what the vibe was i mean it's very clear cinema united that hosts this was very clear about their intentions that they're still opposing this they're trying to block it and if they can't block it they want assurances in writing about those number of films they don't want david ellison saying hey we're going to give you 30 movies in the next year or two and then you know drastically scaling that back in the very near future i mean they can say that because right now they have so many movies in the pipeline both warner brothers and paramount they both kind of boasted about how many new movies they have this year compared to last year and the year before that they've really grown in their output and so i think there's a real sense that you know they, they want to be more assured and it's going to be tricky for them to, to get that.

12:29But, um, at the same time, there were a lot of people I talked to who were like, you know, like, I think we're just ready to move on. If this is going to be the new normal, why are we opposing this and, and doing this? And, and I think David Ellison was, you know, received warmly on stage when he was there. And, um, you know, there was some good optimism about a few of the paramount titles that, that were there. Um, there's a Brad Pitt, David Ayer film that, um, looks like, you know, got a lot of excitement and, um, you know, and, and Warner Brothers slate looked very strong and they had a huge list full of projects that they also called a promise that they don't want to see these movies go away and disappear.

13:14Um, so this is their way of trying to get ahead of it a little bit and, and make sure that, you know, hey, Paramount keeps some of these around. Well, Warners had some positive news, which was some details about the specialty label that it announced not long before Sundance didn't acquire anything there. But first of all, we have a name and then we have a flagship project, right? Yes, it's called Clockwork. And their first movie is the new film from Sean Baker. And it is called Tiamo. And that is all they told us about it. Other than that, we know that he's writing, directing editing casting producing he they're letting him do everything and what we did know is that the the people who are behind clockwork are some of the same former neon executives who worked with him on an aura and what they want to do is quote socially relevant provocative and culturally relevant cinema resonant cinema and um you know that take that what that means at face value you know who knows if that means anything but this is definitely a specialized label and they made a big point of weaving off the presentation kind of with this new label and making a distinction about this so it is something they clearly believe in and and there was report in variety just last night that they gave him quite a big payday to to lure him in i guess that's what happens when you win four Oscars so you know you get a payday then it's one of those things that like I think you know you you look at how much money did we give Paul Thomas Anderson for for one battle after another he's never had a movie that has done anything close to that and there was a lot of hand-wringing about that and you could say the same thing about Sean Baker that you know hey you know his movies are very very small and you know does he really deserve this massive payday when the box office hasn't necessarily been there for for his movies and you know Warner Brothers at least and um and Mike and Pan they have now proven that they have that track record to be able to take that big swing and and make it a commercial title whatever it ends up being and we'll see you know there's a lot to to uh speculate on and probably a lot more you know that we won't know i think they didn't give a specific release date as far as i recall but um they uh they did say it would be in in 2027 so that's also very promising well if anyone can do it it's mike and pam so and we are definitely fans of sean baker so i'm very excited to see what he will achieve on a much bigger canvas uh and on that note brian thank you so much for coming on and catching us up on cinemacon thank you so much ryan

16:10next up on screen talk we are welcoming indie wire's features writer alison foreman and who is also indie wire genre movie maven and the great thing about having her on is that we're here to discuss the movie lee cronin's the mummy which i'm not saying ann wouldn't see this movie but i don't know that she would prioritize it and i don't know if i would prioritize it for her I'm saying Anne shouldn't see this movie. And I think that's for her well-being as well as the film. Yeah, I think you were exactly right about that. First of all, welcome to the podcast, Allie. Thank you. Thank you. I'm honored to be here.

16:45And the reason that I even saw the movie at all was on your recommendation because you said it was great. You know, it's one of those things where sometimes I think you can feel so confident that something was for you. that that really starts to let your mouth run away with you a little bit. I'm not sure that I totally stand by all of my recommendations, but I stand by that I loved it. I understand why it's very much splitting audiences, but what did you think overall? I know our chief film critic, David Ehrlich, hated it. I think he called it cruel and derivative, which, you know, fair enough.

17:21But what did you think? I'm not saying it's not those things. Certainly aspects of it are cruel and derivative, but I had a better time than he did. I will say that I couldn't help but somewhat feeling like this movie could have been called Lee Cronin's The Exorcist remake because you have a small child with sort of leprous, lesionous skin who is projectile vomiting and retching. She's crawling upside down on cabled ceilings and she's commanding her sibling or whatever to call her teacher the C-word. Some of that stuff was very familiar, but I was pretty into this supernatural detective story that's set in Cairo.

17:54that's where she's played by, the detective's played by May Kalamawi. And this is kind of going into this demonology aspect that becomes the mythology of this story. And I think this is the aspect of the movie that you were really into as well, other than, of course, the gross-out horror. Right. I mean, I love things that are disgusting. So that's number one. Love something to be disgusting. But I do think there was a lot of it that I liked because it seemed like a more surprising reinvention of the mummy trope in a way that was very The Exorcist. I mean, right up to the opening, right? Like when I did that interview with Lee Cronin, he was talking about how proud he was of having the opening in Arabic.

18:30And for me, I was like, sure. But it was also very indicative of a lineage of kind of demonology rooted in ancient Egypt that's been really interesting, but really well explored on screen. I liked more that he was combining it with some of the Catholic demonology of transplanting it to Albuquerque. I liked the idea of transporting the whole story into more of a haunted house architecture. But I also have started to question a little bit because I did really like the movie. I did have a lot of fun. it's definitely longer than it needs to be. And I almost question if I was so pleasantly surprised after early rumors that the movie was bad, that it was a little bit more like I was comparatively relieved.

19:13Like I want to see it again because I'm not really sure how I feel about my own perspective on it. But I also want a lot of fun. I mean, I won't use nail clippers the same way, you know? Or think of formaldehyde the same way, maybe, or dentures or any of those things. Well, I mean, there was some bad word of mouth that came out of supposedly out of test screenings, but it turned out to be a bit of hearsay. And as you spoke to Lee Cronin, you got a little information about what really happened there. I was surprised he was as frank about it as he was. But there were early reports that because, you know, a code name for the film had come out that had then been changed, there were rumors that the movie was somehow in trouble because its title was changing, which seems like it wasn't true.

19:57And then shortly after that, there was a test screening where supposedly producer James Wan had to walk out to go to the bathroom, per Lee Cronin. And, you know, that became some idea that he'd like stormed out of the screening and been like, oh, it's a loss or whatever. So I think that kind of misinformation can make you really root for a film. And I think it did make me feel like Lee Cronin's The Mummy was kind of an underdog release. And I also feel a lot of empathy for anybody who's being propped up as a brand for something as big as Blumhouse by name, like the meme of Lee Cronin's The Mummy being a thing that really came out.

20:35I had a lot of empathy for that. I think this has been a tough press cycle. And I think, I don't know, I just had a good time. Like, I think that's, you know what I mean? At the end of it, I'm like, compared to what I was worried about, it wasn't a slog. No, I agree with you. And I think it succeeds at what it's trying to do. I also agree that 133 minutes for a horror movie like this is unforgivable. I mean, I'm thinking about, I think it was a year or two, two years ago. The first omen was around this kind of length as well. But that was sort of a different kind of movie. and I think it's maybe harder to sustain something this gross for that long.

21:11But, you know, it actually did fairly well. So this movie, over the opening weekend, it grossed$13 million domestic and actually$20 million worldwide. So, you know, collectively we're looking at$35 million, probably more since we collected the numbers on Sunday. But would you rank this as a success for an R-rated horror movie and for a Blumhouse movie? I mean, I think, yeah, by Blumhouse math, it's definitely a success. It's not a blowout success. it's what it needed to be. And I think that's probably about fair when you look at what happened with it critically. I mean, you look on Rotten Tomatoes, I think right now, and it's still doing pretty rough with critics, but I think it's got like a 75 % among audiences.

21:49And I do think in terms of this having mass appeal and actually drawing people in, I think it definitely achieved what it needed to achieve. The question to me is more, when they're not setting up something like this as the start of a franchise, what's next for the Blumhouse brand overall in terms of creating a sense of reliability with them? Because I think we saw a lot of ups and downs last year with, you know, Megan 2.0 and a lot of questions about sort of what really is the compelling core of the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise. So they're making a lot of swings that I think have kind of, you know, been dicey, but I feel like this one was a solid hit for them.

22:29And I think it was definitely a good showing for Lee Cronin. I mean, he was able to get people out there. And I think people really did associate him with Evil Dead Rise. And I think they're getting a much better understanding of who he is as a filmmaker. Although I acknowledge that, again, that stylistically, some people feel like he's not jumping out of that kind of Blumhouse malaise. And I definitely see that perspective, but I don't share it. Yeah. I mean, it certainly has that malaise-y sheen to it, doesn't it, that some of these Blumhouse movies do, that there's a certain gravitas to it that maybe some people feel like makes it less fun or something.

23:03I don't know. Well, it's, yeah, it's a weird thing because I think we've done a lot of zany goosebumps concepts, but they've also been, you know, they've been plagued by a color grading trend that they really lead into for a couple of years that I don't think has been consistently true in their films over the last couple of years. But I think there was a time when sort of the look of a Blumhouse film became synonymous with a bad thing. And that is still something that I think they're fighting a little bit. And you're always going to have individual auteurs kind of trying to punch past that, at least for right now.

23:34What I appreciate about this movie is that it did use what is a public domain material now, basically, to situate an entirely new story that isn't resembling the canonical storytelling we've come to know at this point from mummy movies, even something jaunty or like the Brendan Fraser movies. Those are very recognizably classical kind of mummy stories. And in this movie, you don't have someone who's covered in bandages walking around. It's very, like I said, it's very Linda Blair-esque, right? Yeah. No, they did a good job steering away from the Hanna-Barbera Scooby-Doo of it all. We were mercifully allowed to skip the stiff elbows and the groaning for the most part.

24:16You also, earlier this year, you put together a kind of quarterly report of what the first few months of horror are looking like in 2026. How do you feel like the health of genre movies is looking overall right now compared to, I don't know, say the same time last year? We've been having a pretty frank reckoning with supersaturation over the last two years. I think there's been a lot of push in genre after all the success pre-COVID of us having this major renaissance for the art form of everybody feeling like it's being taken so much more seriously. but horror also works from a box office perspective because it's cheap and because it's supposed to kind of be shocking and draw people in and I think yeah we're getting a lot of it I think there's been so much that's getting released straight on streaming there's been so much that's been hitting theaters consistently that it's been a fine year for the genre it's just not the same safe bet that it would have been maybe two or three years ago if you were telling me that you were going to create a new label right now for an indie film studio and you wanted to create a sense of perspective on genre, I would tell you to diversify outside of horror because I think there's a lot more interesting stuff happening in stoner comedies and even in like the family adventure space.

25:33Like we're seeing more and more Gen Z audiences go to movie theaters not to see R-rated releases. They're going to see family-friendly films. And that's an interesting kind of pivot. So I think, you know, genre filmmaking is anything that's hyper stylized. It doesn't have to just be fear. But again, like it's not been a bad time. It's just that we're sort of keeping an eye on it. And that being said, I was also pleasantly surprised with how much I liked so much that came out in Q1. I thought Sam Raimi killed it with Send Help. I thought that was a really, really pleasant endorsement of him as a filmmaker, that he continues to have a really strong perspective and honestly it's not just the evil dead association probably a good sign for somebody like lee cronin because sam raimi has consistently delivered on that same type of cat and mouse sort of slasher tension that is really rooted in horror comedy which is a lot of what the mummy was doing and so there is a really big audience for that you know send help did really well so i think it's just a matter of kind of seeing where the rest of the year takes us but overall it's been kind of you know we're treading water but not in a bad way oh So what are some of the horror movies that you feel like we should keep an eye out for the rest of the spring and into the early summer?

26:45Ooh, okay. Well, it's been an interesting start to the year in terms of a lot of things delivering in terms of quality, but not necessarily breaking out with everything on the financial side that we expected. I think a lot about what's going to happen with 28 years later, though that's not coming out this summer at all. my number one thing that I'm most excited to see is probably Neon's Hokum from Damian McCarthy he's an incredibly talented Irish filmmaker we're continuing to see a remarkable amount of success out of Ireland as sort of this incredible epicenter for craft among other things both in production design, costume design a lot of great puppeteers in Ireland I'm always saying this so really exciting, again we're really repping with him and Lee Croner, we're really repping the Irish filmmakers today I've got to see Obsession which is Focus picked that up out of Toronto last year.

27:36I really know nothing about that one other than I hear that how they got an R rating is hard to fathom. So that's very intriguing. And then the one that I've talked about on the podcast a lot is Leviticus, which Neon will release on June 19th. That one I can't recommend highly enough. I'm very excited about Obsession in particular because I do feel anything that sort of comes out of the Midnight Madness section at TIFF, I'm always pretty fond of. Shout out Peter Koplowski, who continues to be a real G, real tastemaker. But I've also just really liked all of the marketing around Obsession. I feel like it's been really interesting to play with.

28:17I love wish fulfillment horror. I really love anything that kind of has that monkey paw feeling of you got exactly what you asked for, but it was not what you actually wanted. and I know there's something about that that this it's especially spooky in the era of kind of like algorithmic thinking you know what I mean like we live in a time now where whole tech companies are being shaped off of the concept of vibe coding but like you can just describe something that you want and Google will be like yeah I'll just tell the computer to do it and it'll do it exactly the way I asked and it's like as a horror fan I'm like exactly the way you asked so I'm very I'm very excited about Obsession.

28:55I feel like Curry Barker is really, really cool. And he's also, you know, got that YouTube past. I'm so fascinated by so many of these filmmakers coming up out of YouTube and the reality of how that's shaping indie film, particularly for horror, because horror is cheap, and it's an easy thing to give that DIY sheen. So for him to have that cool background and then to get this really big cinematic moment is really exciting. Well, on that note, thank you, Allie, for coming on the podcast today. Thank you so much, Ryan.

29:26Finally, on today's episode, I spoke to comedian multi-hyphenate John Early last week on the heels of his feature directing debut, Maddie's Secret, which premiered at MoMA at Film and Lincoln Center's New Directors New Films Festival. He writes, directs, and stars in the film as a food stylist and influencer who is revealed to have an eating disorder, which turns out to be a soul shattering combination in this hilarious and heartfelt movie where he plays the title character who is a woman, and he plays this character straight rather than in some sort of drag or as a campy performance. This movie is out for Magnolia Pictures theatrically in June.

30:02You may know John Early already from his collaborations with Kate Berlant, roles in the film Stress Positions in Eternity most recently, and on the series The After Party and my personal favorite Search Party. But he's also on stage right now in the play What We Did Before Our Moth Days from the powerhouse duo behind My Dinner with Andre, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn.

30:51Well, it's akin to the kind of sphincter opening and releasing.

31:04It's really magical, actually. I mean, I'm sorry to start with the joke because it is actually a sacred experience. The play is very sacred to me. But, you know, Andre Gregory, like specifically when he works with Wally, their process is, the key ingredient is time. Like there's, like it really is, it's very like they don't really intervene. They just kind of let the play happen. They let the process like unfold very naturally. There's not a lot of discussion. You just do the play and we rehearsed for like a year and a half. And that has not stopped as we've done the play. Like, in fact, it's just gotten deeper.

31:44We never froze anything. The goal was never to freeze it. The goal was always to like just kind of show up every day and like say the sacred text and see what kind of emerges every time. And so I think you should come back because it really is amazing how much the performances have like deepened and like become more layered and their whole thing is slow cooking, you know. I looked at the script and it's really just monologues. And then you and Maria Dizia, Josh Hamilton, Hope Davis, trio of world-class actors. The four of you are just on stage in chairs. So how do you build the character out of that?

32:25What was so cool about this process was like, they're really, I really mean it when I say there's almost no discussion. Like you just show up. You just come to rehearsal and we have like a lovely little conversation about our days and what we ate. And then we just start the play. And over the course of a year and a half, certain behaviors start to emerge and certain kind of characters start to emerge. But never through any sort of blunt force. I mean, Wallace Shawn's writing is so distinct. There is such a distinct kind of cadence and there's such a literary quality. quality, there's a kind of deceptive clarity or simplicity to it, but it's actually very profound and complex.

33:10But it's so his voice, you know? And I think the way the characters are truly created is that we have our own personalities, me, Hope, Josh, Maria. We have our own life experiences, our own personalities, our own ways that we talk. Saying Wallace Shawn's text, which is not the way that we talk naturally in our real lives, it like shapes you, you know, it like having to, when you have to naturalize someone else's very distinct way of speaking and make it sound like you, a character comes from that like interaction between you and the, and the text. I don't think that happens with all writing. I, but I think especially with his writing, that is so his voice.