SUPERGIRL pre-sales are keeping a surprising good pace after a better-than-expected start last week.
It’s now on track for a $60M-$77M opening weekend.
New update next Monday.
Harlem, 1972. You are invited to a party at the home of Duke Ellington.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM opens in select theaters October 16. Teaser trailer tomorrow.
GQ has dropped the first look at David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast, starring Brad Pitt. The film hits theaters September 25, 2026, and follows a former Army Special Forces soldier and his retired combat dog fighting to survive after a catastrophic plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness.
Ayer tells GQ that the script, written by Cameron Alexander, made him cry.
"Reading the script, it's like a tone poem, in a sense. It's so sparse—just a guy, a dog, mountains, and the calamities and triumphs that unfold, but what's fascinating about the script is they're constantly rescuing each other. It's not like a guy and his pet—they felt like co-equals in this story. Brad wanted to be No. 2 on the call sheet, and rightly so. There was just something profound in the script. It felt like a study in grief, in healing, and of the human heart. So I had to do it."
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE does not just have a box office problem.
It has a demographic problem.
The movie is opening around $31M domestic, which sounds ugly against a reported $170M-plus budget. That number is going to get treated like another easy “IP flop” headline, and sure, that is part of it.
But look at who actually showed up.
Early exit polling has the audience at 68% male, 57% over 35, and 36% over 45. Kids under 12 were reportedly only 4% of the crowd.
That is not a four-quadrant family movie.
That is dads, collectors, 80s kids, and people who still remember walking through the toy aisle when HE-MAN actually meant something in the culture.
I respect the attempt. Travis Knight clearly understood there was a real fantasy-adventure movie inside MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, and the people who wanted this thing have been waiting decades for Hollywood to take another swing.
But the problem is the audience this was built for does not behave like the audience Hollywood keeps pretending still exists.
Millennials and Gen X are not rushing out every weekend for nostalgia plays. A lot of them have kids, bills, streaming subscriptions, and no interest in dropping $70-$100 on a family theater trip unless the movie feels like an event for the whole house.
That is why something like TOY STORY 5, MINIONS, or MONSTERS can still make sense as a full family expense.
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE? THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU? Probably DISCLOSURE DAY too?
Those are older-audience IP plays being sold into a theatrical market increasingly powered by younger crowds.
Meanwhile BACKROOMS and OBSESSION are working because they are Gen Z coded without apology. They come from internet-native horror, creator culture, TikTok-era word of mouth, and an audience that still treats opening weekend like a social event.
That does not make one audience better than the other.
It means one audience is showing up right now, and the other is waiting for streaming.
Hollywood can call these movies flops all it wants.
But at some point the industry has to stop asking why nostalgia is not saving theatrical.
The people with nostalgia are at home checking the Prime Video date.
Idris Elba says James Bond doesn’t need to be “woke”
“Bond is big all over the world. And audiences won’t [all] go for a Black male, an African male, playing Bond. That’s not what they like in their culture. Period…
Bond is so unrealistic, so a hint of reality is good, but let’s not try and make it woke. I think you’ve got to be pure to what it is: escapism. Don’t try and answer the world’s taste. Just be Bond.”
(Source: https://t.co/2g3nvwZTg3)