The 15 Most Anticipated Movies at CinemaCon, and Our Trip to Las Vegas!

Sean and Amanda recap their recent trip to Las Vegas for CinemaCon and catch up on the latest news from around the industry, including some exclusive insight on the ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ sort-of sequel, which will reportedly be directed by David Fincher (0:45). Then, they are joined by Puck’s Matt Belloni to talk about their 15 most anticipated movies from CinemaCon (28:43). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Matthew Belloni Producers: Jon Jones and Marcelino Ortiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi everyone, it's Amy Poehler and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang. In preparation for that, I asked some of my friends to send in some videos and give me some advice.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Just be yourself and the guests will come.

• 0:13Speaker 02

  Don't be the celebrity that this is their like sixth thing they're doing.

• 0:16Speaker 03

  I love true crime and cooking podcasts. Is there any way you could combine the two?

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Well, everyone has an opinion and a podcast. So, join me for Good Hang. It's rough out there. We're just trying to lighten it up a little.

• 0:30Sean Fennessey?

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• 1:58Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy.

• 1:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 2:00Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture Conversation Show about CinemaCon and our trip to Las Vegas in a little bit. Matt Bellany from the Town Podcast will be joining Amanda and me for a home and home double podcast to talk about the annual theatrical trade show called CinemaCon, scuttlebutt behind the scenes in the movie industry, how things are going right now. Spoiler alert, not very good. Nevertheless, we did see some very exciting new trailers and previews of movies that are coming over the next 12, 24, 36, 48 months.

• 2:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Keep going.

• 2:31Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, 60 months.

• 2:32Amanda Dobbins?

  72. What's 3 divided by, I don't, 3, 3 times 12?

• 2:39Sean Fennessey?

  They don't seem as excited about the things this year, so they had to talk about things for the next decade. We'll talk about that with Matt soon.

• 2:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Only 36, only 36 months till The Beatles.

• 2:47Sean Fennessey?

  Only, no, 48, I think. No, 36, you're right.

• 2:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I just did the math, 12 times 3.

• 2:52Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I wanted to say thank you to you.

• 2:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, you're so welcome.

• 2:55Sean Fennessey?

  For filling in for me on the show while I was in Boston. Um, thanks to Yasi and, and Jomi and Jack and Jade and the whole, the entire, all of Gen Z.

• 3:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Sean Fennessey?

  And those Gen Z frauds, like Jomi. Um.

• 3:09Amanda Dobbins?

  No, he's, he's borderline and he's representing an important demographic, just as you are a cusp millennial, Gen X.

• 3:17Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not. I'm 1982, so I am, I am a millennial.

• 3:20Amanda Dobbins?

  But emotionally.

• 3:22Sean Fennessey?

  I am emotionally from the greatest generation and I am culturally from Gen X and I am literally from millennial.

• 3:30Amanda Dobbins?

  To honor those of us in the middle.

• 3:32Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:32Amanda Dobbins?

  You know?

• 3:32Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I, this is probably the longest I've ever been away from the podcast, not counting holidays.

• 3:38Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 3:39Sean Fennessey?

  And the birth of my child.

• 3:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, the birth of your child. Yeah.

• 3:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Um, so. It felt like a lot happened while I was gone in the news.

• 3:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you enjoy that or did you feel stressed all the time? Well, like you needed to call me up and yell about something.

• 3:51Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't feel that, no. I was, I was really busy. I wasn't on vacation. I was, I was in Boston. Thank you to the fine people of the city of Boston, who I've been known to show a lot of support to historically. They were amazing for the Live Rewatchables event that we did with Chris Ryan and Bill and Ryan Rusillo. Me, Chris, Bill and Ryan had never done a pod before.

• 4:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 4:11Sean Fennessey?

  So that was great. Rusillo absolutely cooked. He is the man.

• 4:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Have never met him. Still, I honestly never want to meet him. It's like, it is a real, don't, don't meet your heroes. Don't, you know, don't take away the magic.

• 4:24Sean Fennessey?

  He was.

• 4:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Incredible stuff. And I've only listened to his podcasts about movies, AKA Rewatchables, and/or his travelogues and history lessons.

• 4:36Sean Fennessey?

  There's so much more there. You know, just, just the time in the green room with him was enough for a great pod. To be honest, I know Craig can attest to that. We had a really good time in Boston. We also did the Rewatchables Film Festival where me, Bill and Chris talked before and after a handful of movies, heist movies, Boston movies. And we did it at the Coolidge Corner Theater, which is an absolutely awesome theater in Brookline that both Chris and Bill had a big personal relationship to, since they lived in Boston. Honestly, just amazing. People showing up for like a 10, 15 PM screening of Heat, staying until 1:45, haranguing Chris Ryan in the alleyway behind the theater afterwards. You know, I signed lots of physical media. People just showed out. It was really, it was a nice time. We had a good time.

• 5:16Amanda Dobbins?

  That's, you found your people.

• 5:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, they came to us. We demanded they come to us.

• 5:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen, not to, you know, gender is a construct. How many women in that screening?

• 5:25Sean Fennessey?

  I counted. There were one, two, two, two. There were, no, no.

• 5:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Sean Fennessey?

  There were plenty of women. There were, there were a number of women. There's some dob mob there.

• 5:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you so much. Love you dob mob. Were they, were they dob mob in the, like, I'm here with my, like, dirtbag partner?

• 5:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, they were dob mob in the way that Charlene is dob mob to Chris Scherless.

• 5:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 5:46Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a segue to my next conversation, which is RIP to Val Kilmer.

• 5:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Sean Fennessey?

  Legendary film star.

• 5:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Very sad.

• 5:52Sean Fennessey?

  One of the great movies. Stars of our youth, someone who we have talked about ad nauseam on this show and especially on the rewatchables. Some of his best movies have been featured on that show. He died sadly at 65 this week. Obviously had been dealing with a lot of physical maladies over the last five, 10 years. And so has not been as much in the spotlight, although quite memorably.

• 6:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Sean Fennessey?

  Your beloved Top Gun Maverick, where he has a crucial scene in that movie and gives a great performance opposite Tom Cruise. What's your, what's your lasting memory of Val? What's your favorite Val?

• 6:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It is Iceman, you know, and that is because it has become such a central part of. In my household, we watch it a lot, but also growing up and I watching the original Top Gun, Top Gun, which we love very much. And then in the same way that I thought Top Gun Maverick was like a very beautiful.

• 6:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Expansion of and meditation really on like Tom Cruise and movie stars and aging and time and all of that stuff. The way that they use that Kilmer character and performance. Is astonishing and like really moving and he gets an amazing performance out of Tom Cruise opposite him. Who led CinemaCon in a moment of silence for him.

• 7:04Sean Fennessey?

  He did.

• 7:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Which was like a little awkward, but very touching also. So, I mean, Iceman for sure. We were reminiscing about. Love at First Sight. Which definitely jumps out to me. Obviously like you'll talk about Heat. I really did like. His documentary that he, yes, Val that he participated in a few years ago because. It, it, it was done with his cooperation, you know, which always has its pluses and minuses. But he was a, a, a unique guy, a real, an actor, an artist and talking about. Or, you know, first of all, the way that he communicates in that movie is obviously.

• 7:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Affected by his illnesses over the last 10 to 15 years. So that's very interesting. But the way that he reflects on being a leading man in the nineties, what fit, what really didn't fit. Gave you a sense of him in a cool way.

• 8:03Sean Fennessey?

  It's interesting. He is someone who was a lockdown. Actual leading man, put him on the poster movie star.

• 8:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:11Sean Fennessey?

  For a significant portion of time in the 1990s and even going back to the mid eighties when he broke out with Real Genius and Top Secret and all of those comedies. But. He was often at his best playing number two. You know, in Heat, he's number two. In Tombstone, he's number two. In Top Gun, he's number two. He was a high, high, high, high level supporting player. And we always, you know, joke about Brad Pitt as the character actor in The Leaning Man's Body. I wouldn't say Val Kilmer was a character actor specifically because he had a kind of vallness to everything that he did, even when he transformed into Jim Morrison. But he was really good at supporting stars who maybe had less personality than he did. Um, I really, I, I loved watching him in movies, you know, all the way up to Maverick.

• 8:54Sean Fennessey?

  I loved watching him in those strange Francis Ford Coppola movies that he was making in the 2000s. You know, he's really, um, very talented actor, very eccentric person in a compelling way. Uh, rest in peace to the great Val Kilmer. Couple more quick things. Sundance announced while I was gone that it is moving to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. Next year will be the last year at Park City. Any thoughts?

• 9:17Amanda Dobbins?

  For people who like mountains, that's great news.

• 9:19Sean Fennessey?

  And so you're not one of those people?

• 9:21Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm not.

• 9:21Sean Fennessey?

  This might augur my return to Sundance.

• 9:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, probably not for me unless, I mean, we'll go for the show. It's, it's fine. I just, it's, it's very cold.

• 9:29Sean Fennessey?

  I'd like to say to the fine people of Colorado, um, I love your state. I hope you'll welcome me in the future. I've been many times. Maybe that's a long-term destination for me, you know?

• 9:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, you do talk about that a lot.

• 9:41Sean Fennessey?

  It's in play.

• 9:41Amanda Dobbins?

  That's fine for you. I'd prefer wine country for you.

• 9:44Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 9:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, if I'm coming to visit, which is, yeah. But I'm, but is the invitation even going to be extended? Not really sure.

• 9:50Sean Fennessey?

  Hard to say. Okay, this is actually the big news. This is the very, very big news. And before.

• 9:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, no, it's one of two. Okay.

• 9:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, it's one of two.

• 9:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, this is news. We have news and trailers.

• 10:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Yes, well, the, this is.

• 10:04Amanda Dobbins?

  How you doing? Status check 10 minutes in. How you feeling?

• 10:07Sean Fennessey?

  Let's break it down.

• 10:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 10:09Sean Fennessey?

  We were at CinemaCon together and this is every major movie studio, with the exception of one studio, presenting every single thing that it's going to be releasing really over the next couple of years, but specifically in the next 12 months. And on the second day while that is happening.

• 10:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Which also happens to be April 1st, also known as April Fool's Day.

• 10:29Sean Fennessey?

  We get word, I think originally via an exclusive from the Playlist, which is a reputable Hollywood news site, but by no means one of the like leading trades, that there is in fact going to be a quote unquote, what was described as a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino's ninth feature film that came out in 2019, that is legendary to us and that we love. And that that film is going to happen at Netflix, directed by David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth. Now, when I was in Boston, I got a, I heard a rumor that David Fincher was developing a sequel movie at Netflix that was going to star Brad Pitt.

• 11:13Sean Fennessey?

  This was not, this, I don't usually report on these kinds of things.

• 11:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 11:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's not really, I hear stuff all the time. There's no way for me to verify that. I don't have David Fincher's phone number. But I was like, that's interesting. And I spent some time with Chris talking about this rumor and I was like, is this a Fight Club sequel? Is it a Benjamin Button sequel? Is it the World War Z sequel that they had talked about doing? I did not hear anything about Quentin Tarantino when I heard this rumor. We never even thought it could be a Cliff Booth thing because it just seems weird. Come to find out, not only was it announced on April 1st and seemed fake, it is in fact the exact opposite. It is very real. It is borderline confirmed real. And I got word from someone who is in the Tarantino camp that is not Quentin, that day, that was like, it's so funny that everyone is so afraid to be wrong about this

• 11:58Sean Fennessey?

  because of the day when this was announced, because this is real. And I was sitting in my seat at CinemaCon when it, when it happened. Kind of like basically trying to play it cool.

• 12:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, I think.

• 12:11Sean Fennessey?

  And I think I've been trying to play it cool for like 72 hours.

• 12:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it was right before Warner Brothers.

• 12:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 12:16Amanda Dobbins?

  And so there was big Superman energy lurking. And yeah, you just kind of held up your phone to me without comment and just showed me like the tweet.

• 12:25Sean Fennessey?

  I think I was catatonic.

• 12:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, there was a lot going on, you know.

• 12:29Sean Fennessey?

  It was a big day.

• 12:30Amanda Dobbins?

  And we'll, and we'll talk more about like the environment, but yes. You were, and you also were protecting your heart, I think.

• 12:37Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's what it was.

• 12:37Amanda Dobbins?

  You're right. When you first got the news, you didn't say to me, you know, I heard a rumor about this. You just kind of held it up.

• 12:43Sean Fennessey?

  Someone was talking on stage. I didn't want to interrupt.

• 12:45Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I actually think it was still before.

• 12:47Sean Fennessey?

  Was it?

• 12:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Sean Fennessey?

  I thought we had already seen one battle after another sequence when this happened. Maybe I'm wrong. It doesn't matter.

• 12:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Maybe?

• 12:54Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it was mid presentation when I saw it.

• 12:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. I, that's fine because you're, you know, living this, this is the type of thing that you actually do remember detail for detail.

• 13:02Sean Fennessey?

  Good point.

• 13:03Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, anything.

• 13:03Sean Fennessey?

  Any meaningful interaction between us?

• 13:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely not. No.

• 13:06Sean Fennessey?

  In, in the garbage.

• 13:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And then you did about 15 minutes later, say to me, this person.

• 13:11Sean Fennessey?

  I'd heard this rumor.

• 13:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. No, no, no, no.

• 13:13Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that someone reached out?

• 13:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone in the camp was like, this is really funny because it actually is true. It's not just.

• 13:19Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 13:19Amanda Dobbins?

  And then we started getting texts from Ben and other people being like, is this for real? And then by that evening. Yeah.

• 13:28Sean Fennessey?

  Um, let's just say I've accumulated more information about what this is.

• 13:34Sean Fennessey?

  It definitely seems like this movie is happening. Now David Fincher's laundry list of movies that never made it to the big screen or to the Netflix streaming service is pretty long. He is one of the development kings and a lot of stuff has been scuttled over time. So, you know, this is not, I don't know if this is like a locked picture that is going into production in July, but it seems like it is.

• 13:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 13:52Sean Fennessey?

  Here's what I can say.

• 13:55Sean Fennessey?

  This probably should not be thought of as a sequel.

• 13:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 13:58Sean Fennessey?

  It should be thought of as more of a, a follow-up that is connected to, but not the same as. The example that was cited to me was think about how The Big Sleep, the Raymond Chandler adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart, is in the same world as Farewell, My Lovely, the 1975 Robert Mitchum movie. Because they play the same character in that movie.

• 14:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:19Sean Fennessey?

  But it's different actors, different directors, different time in the storyline. It's they're they're different. They're not really sequels. They are the Further Adventures of Philip Marlowe.

• 14:31Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's sort of extended cinematic universe?

• 14:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, in the parlance of our times. Yes. So this will be like the Further Adventures of Cliff Booth, is my understanding of it. The only other important information that I have learned, that I think is confirmed, is that the movie takes place in 1977.

• 14:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 14:50Sean Fennessey?

  Which is roughly eight years after the events of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so a different time in Cliff Booth's life.

• 14:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:57Sean Fennessey?

  Unclear if Rick Dalton will be returning in this story. You know, what's been reported in the trades is that this is basically a version of a restructuring, something of The Movie Critic, which is the movie that Quentin Tarantino was thinking about directing as his 10th and final film. That movie, over time, it seems like became more of a Cliff movie and less of what it had originally started out as. So I don't totally know what this is gonna be. I assume you're excited about this.

• 15:27Amanda Dobbins?

  It seems fine to me. It seems great. I don't have a lot of the anxiety that other people do about, I mean, sure, you know, we're gonna talk all about how quote unquote cinema's, you know, going into a trash can. But I, like most David Fincher movies, I really enjoyed The Killer.

• 15:43Sean Fennessey?

  I did too.

• 15:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I saw it on a theater screen, so that was fine for me. I don't have a physical media collection to worry about.

• 15:51Sean Fennessey?

  I'm concerned with that part.

• 15:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I know. You did bring this up within an hour. I'm just like, I will never have the 4K of this.

• 15:56Sean Fennessey?

  Mank and The Killer are not available on physical media.

• 15:58Amanda Dobbins?

  That is-

• 15:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's fucking bullshit.

• 16:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you think Fincher has like-

• 16:02Sean Fennessey?

  He doesn't care. No, he doesn't care.

• 16:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I know. That's why Fincher is my guy. I just-

• 16:06Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not saying he's not cool or even right. I am a loser. But it is something I want.

• 16:10Amanda Dobbins?

  So Fincher doing whatever the hell he wants and not caring is great with me.

• 16:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 16:16Amanda Dobbins?

  If it's okay with Quentin, if it's okay with Fincher. Sure, make a good movie starring Brad Pitt. Like, what do I care?

• 16:23Sean Fennessey?

  I'm pretty much in the same boat. I don't have the same Netflix anxiety that a lot of people do. The truth is, is that in all likelihood, we will be able to see it on a big screen. Not everyone in America will be able to. But you know what? Things are changing. The IMAX, Narnia, Greta Gerwig circumstance with Netflix could portend a shift.

• 16:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Meryl Streep is a lion? What's going on?

• 16:43Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. We can talk about that another time. That's, that's-

• 16:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Aslan is a lion?

• 16:48Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, yes.

• 16:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 16:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Chris mentioned this to us when we talked about it some time ago. Do you remember that?

• 16:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I have read this book, but not since I was like seven.

• 16:54Sean Fennessey?

  Um, so yeah, it seems like this movie is happening. We'll talk about it a lot more and some of that Netflix stuff next week, when I think we'll do maybe more of a like movies state of the union and where things are at right now. Cause it's, it's, it's connected to a larger discussion-

• 17:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Save the take.

• 17:09Sean Fennessey?

  We should have. I'll say, I'll save the take.

• 17:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Save it. It's not a good one, but save it.

• 17:13Sean Fennessey?

  The one I was disappointed to be in Boston for was the one battle after another trailer.

• 17:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, we discussed it here on the big picture.

• 17:17Sean Fennessey?

  You did. You did. You cited it ever so briefly, and I'm sure that the listeners of the show were absolutely contented with the, the way that you discussed it. Um-

• 17:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I said it was good.

• 17:27Sean Fennessey?

  Well done. Uh, there's more to say about one battle after another now that we've seen even more from the film at CinemaCon. So we can kind of table it until then. Needless to say, Paul Thomas Anderson, who cuts most of, if not all of his trailers, is arguably the greatest trailer cutter in the history of movies. And so that this one rocked. I have a lot of thoughts about what this movie could be and what's inspiring it. We'll get to it soon.

• 17:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Where were you when the trailer dropped?

• 17:53Sean Fennessey?

  Walking the streets of Boston with Bill and Chris.

• 17:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. So are, do you guys like pull over to the side of the sidewalk?

• 17:59Sean Fennessey?

  No. Bill is-

• 18:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Take me through it.

• 18:00Sean Fennessey?

  Bill was showing us various haunts-

• 18:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 18:03Sean Fennessey?

  That he had visited over time, explaining like oyster shacks and clothing stores that had popped up or that were great in 1997. And he was, he was going down memory lane.

• 18:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but he's also a PTA enthusiast-

• 18:16Sean Fennessey?

  He is. He is.

• 18:17Amanda Dobbins?

  And a trailer enthusiast. So you become aware that the trailer-

• 18:20Sean Fennessey?

  I waited till I got back to my room to watch it on a laptop. I didn't want to watch it on my phone.

• 18:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Well- I guess the trailer gods respect that.

• 18:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and I was home for one day between Las Vegas and Boston. And so in that one day, I think I watched the trailer on my large television five times.

• 18:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 18:39Sean Fennessey?

  So I've seen it a lot.

• 18:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Has your, did you watch that like with your daughter or was that after bedtime?

• 18:44Sean Fennessey?

  No, there's a lot of machine guns in that trailer.

• 18:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 18:46Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think that would be a good idea.

• 18:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I discovered that when I watched the teaser in my son's bedroom.

• 18:49Sean Fennessey?

  Jason Infinity.

• 18:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Sorry.

• 18:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's not, that's a little loud.

• 18:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Sean Fennessey?

  Couldn't be more excited. The Avengers Doomsday casting announcement?

• 18:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 18:58Sean Fennessey?

  I was on a plane when this happened.

• 18:59Amanda Dobbins?

  So I sort of became aware of this, but I just started seeing pictures of director's chairs.

• 19:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And I was like, what's going on here? And then it was just a bunch of people that were gonna, that had been in Marvel movies in the past and were gonna be in one again.

• 19:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Amanda Dobbins?

  And then I logged back out.

• 19:17Sean Fennessey?

  You pretty much summed it up. I mean, there's not really much to say. They just showed director's chairs over the course of several hours that featured the names of actors who would appear in the upcoming Avengers movie.

• 19:27Sean Fennessey?

  I think that this was the lowest I've felt about Marvel. I think that this was one of the most cynical, lame things that they've done. And I, we'll get to some of the Marvel stuff that we saw in Las Vegas.

• 19:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't see it.

• 19:42Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that's right.

• 19:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I left.

• 19:43Sean Fennessey?

  That's right, you weren't there for Disney. I can tell you, Matt and I can tell you all about it. It wasn't, it wasn't bad at all. I don't really have anything negative to say about it, but this was really sweaty and kind of desperate and weird to me.

• 19:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Sean Fennessey?

  And a little bit like, we don't have it. And it's because they know that they don't have it right now culturally, they don't have it. And a lot of the things that we saw over the last few days, there's like a domino effect potentially in play here if a couple of things miss where all of a sudden, what I suggested on the Black Panther pod where I was like, I don't know, man, they got like one more chance here before this becomes no longer the most important thing about movie going. So we'll see, we'll talk about Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts in a moment, too. The studio. This is a TV show.

• 20:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:25Sean Fennessey?

  You watch TV?

• 20:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I I've watched this show and I'm not caught up because this is this is the show in our household where we like actually watch it together.

• 20:34Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 20:34Amanda Dobbins?

  In my household is incredibly rare.

• 20:37Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 20:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Because we don't.

• 20:38Sean Fennessey?

  Is Zach not caught up on Emily in Paris?

• 20:40Amanda Dobbins?

  No, to his it's his loss, you know, there's a whole.

• 20:43Sean Fennessey?

  For sure.

• 20:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Lore piano plotline.

• 20:45Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you know about this?

• 20:46Sean Fennessey?

  Definitely.

• 20:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, do you know what Lore piano is?

• 20:48Sean Fennessey?

  I do, yeah.

• 20:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 20:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you own any Lore piano?

• 20:50Sean Fennessey?

  I absolutely not.

• 20:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I was gonna like you were really gonna just jump a level in my respect.

• 20:54Sean Fennessey?

  I would have owned in 2013.

• 20:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Really?

• 20:58Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 20:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 20:59Sean Fennessey?

  When I cared about that kind of thing.

• 21:00Amanda Dobbins?

  All right, well, I mean, then you would still have it and then I could be like, could I have it? And if you're not wearing it anymore.

• 21:06Sean Fennessey?

  Was it extant in 2013?

• 21:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 21:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I mean, I don't know the ownership structure at that time.

• 21:12Sean Fennessey?

  I put you on the Emily in Paris.

• 21:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Sorry.

• 21:14Sean Fennessey?

  That's not what I intended.

• 21:15Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, I just saw a goodie. We were talking about Marvel director there. It's like 25 minutes, you know, finally something I'm passionate about.

• 21:20Sean Fennessey?

  Seventy two seconds.

• 21:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, um, what, what were we actually? Oh, the studio, really good. Yeah.

• 21:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great TV show. Uh, I recorded an episode of the Prestige TV podcast with Joanna and Bill about it. I really, really like it. I also, I really like the episodes in the middle of the season quite a bit and I haven't watched past episode five. But for listeners of this show, if you are not familiar with it, you probably are, but if you're not, it's basically made for you. If you like this podcast, it is about the inner workings of a Hollywood studio and the executives who make movies and the daily emotional meltdown of IP and what we need to do to make money versus loving films and trying to get them made. I feel a little bit indicted by the show in a very nice way. I think people should watch it.

• 22:01Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a complete delight. Well made, great performances, you know, filmed on location.

• 22:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 22:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Like real, it's, it's just wonderful. Probably some Lore piano on that.

• 22:12Sean Fennessey?

  I would imagine the costuming is fantastic on the series. Couple of box office things. A Statham is back.

• 22:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Sean Fennessey?

  A Working Man was the number one movie at the box office last weekend. This weekend, we shall see. Not a good year at the box office. We'll get into that soon. Snow White bombed.

• 22:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Sean Fennessey?

  Rachel Zegler's political opinions were blamed for that in one of the lamest tarnishings of someone's reputation I've ever seen.

• 22:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Was really pathetic.

• 22:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, very sad. I haven't seen the Snow White film. My daughter has. She said, Dad, Snow White was beautiful.

• 22:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, she is. She is beautiful.

• 22:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think she meant the experience of Snow White.

• 22:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's right. That was also her review of Singing in the Rain. That was a beautiful movie.

• 22:52Sean Fennessey?

  Working on vocabulary, so adjectives, you know, it's developing skill.

• 22:57Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that that's a really great way to describe. I want her to have beautiful experiences.

• 23:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, she also felt that the evil queen was someone she didn't want to spend any time with.

• 23:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 23:08Sean Fennessey?

  And her favorite dwarf is grumpy.

• 23:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 23:16Sean Fennessey?

  Which I think checks out.

• 23:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, based on what's surrounding her in her everyday life, you know?

• 23:21Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, that's not very nice. Coyote versus Acne sold to Ketchup Entertainment for $50 million.

• 23:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen, Ketchup Entertainment brought us Goodrich.

• 23:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 23:29Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 23:30Sean Fennessey?

  What was the Robert Rodriguez, Ben Affleck film that they also brought us?

• 23:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I saw that in theaters.

• 23:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, what's that movie called?

• 23:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I don't remember.

• 23:38Sean Fennessey?

  The Revisionist.

• 23:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Something like that.

• 23:41Sean Fennessey?

  Reviver.

• 23:42Amanda Dobbins?

  So what? Okay.

• 23:43Sean Fennessey?

  Revolutions.

• 23:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Is it an insurance? No, the insurance is the accountant, sort of.

• 23:49Sean Fennessey?

  Don't even try.

• 23:50Amanda Dobbins?

  What was it about?

• 23:52Sean Fennessey?

  It's about a guy like imagining a kind of past and future for himself inside of this like technological corporate system. Doesn't matter, it's not important. We'll get to it one day.

• 24:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I mean, I did see it. We talked about it.

• 24:05Sean Fennessey?

  Hypnotic. Thank you to Craig Holback. The film is called Hypnotic. Also, the name of a absolutely disgusting liquor drink. It was released in the 2000s, hip hop themed. You remember?

• 24:17Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I never tried that one. Yes, no, I do that, but I didn't. I didn't try it.

• 24:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Uh, last thing, Jen Solke out at Amazon. This feels like it happened 300 years ago, especially she was not present at CinemaCon.

• 24:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Name was not mentioned.

• 24:28Sean Fennessey?

  She was oversaw all of film and television. Actually, if you listen to The Town, you can hear Matt Belloni talk about this in depth, her legacy as a filmmaker. We were talking about the Amazon film slates when we talked about The Handmaiden on 25 for 25. Because at that time, when she was not running the studio, they were making or acquiring a lot of really good movies. I would not say that Amazon MGM's movie output in the last six years, seven years, was really all that strong. Couple of hits here and there, couple of prestigious films, couple, you know, your women talkings, you know, your nickel boys, there still were some films that were quality, but they were few and far between. New Leadership, we'll see what they do. We're going to talk about their slate a little bit here and on the town later. Let's talk about our trip to Vegas very briefly before we bring in Matt to also discuss.

• 25:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, because Matt, Matt and Craig, producer Craig, you're back there. We're very supportive, you know, I, I came in and this was my first ever trip to Las Vegas and I said, I really need a mom's night out energy from the three bros. And you mostly delivered.

• 25:31Sean Fennessey?

  I, I was present.

• 25:32Amanda Dobbins?

  We didn't go to a club.

• 25:34Sean Fennessey?

  No, we went, we went to industry parties.

• 25:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 25:37Sean Fennessey?

  And you were, you were feted as the queen that you are.

• 25:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you. Yeah.

• 25:41Sean Fennessey?

  No, we had fun. We, we stayed at Caesar's Palace, which is where the convention is. And you, the one thing I want to discuss very briefly before Matt comes in is we walked the casino floor together.

• 25:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Sean Fennessey?

  You'd never, have you ever been in a casino?

• 25:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I guess not.

• 25:55Sean Fennessey?

  That's insane.

• 25:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I, you know, I'd never been to Vegas before. I've never been to Atlantic City.

• 26:00Sean Fennessey?

  So I tried to bully you in the casino.

• 26:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, you did bully me. Like you actually, you marched me to the ATM.

• 26:06Sean Fennessey?

  I did.

• 26:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And you made me withdraw.

• 26:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Cash. And then you were like.

• 26:09Sean Fennessey?

  I wasn't holding a gun, just for the record.

• 26:11Amanda Dobbins?

  But like, you did actually just like march me there. And then you stood over my shoulder and were like, that's not enough. Why are you being a coward? When I was withdrawing it. And also, obviously, the fee was like, you know, 45%.

• 26:24Sean Fennessey?

  It was very high.

• 26:24Amanda Dobbins?

  So I was really outraged by that, too. Craig was like, oh, I just brought $200 in cash to Vegas.

• 26:29Sean Fennessey?

  That is the move.

• 26:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Guys, I'd never been. No one told me, you know?

• 26:32Sean Fennessey?

  That's not true. I did tell you, but okay. I said, bring $200 to lose. That is what I told you before we went.

• 26:37Amanda Dobbins?

  And I said to you, which bore out, I don't want to lose $200. That's not fun to me. So you bullied me. You, you were like, we'll go, we'll play blackjack. Cause I like, do you know the, the basic rules of blackjack? Cause my grandmother's boyfriend taught me. But he did, George.

• 26:54Sean Fennessey?

  Very, very cool story. Thank you. Thank you, George. Thanks for everything you do.

• 26:57Amanda Dobbins?

  You said, we're gonna go. And then you made me withdraw cash. And then you walked the floor and you were like, well, tough news. The lowest minimum is $25. And we, you had really.

• 27:09Amanda Dobbins?

  You had said, maybe we'll find a 15, like maybe a 10. So 25, that's a 200 to 3. I'm not going to do the math. That's a big increase.

• 27:18Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm. The, the minimums have gone up significantly over the last 20 years.

• 27:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 27:22Sean Fennessey?

  There, once upon a time, there were $10 blackjack tables in Las Vegas.

• 27:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 27:25Sean Fennessey?

  They're long gone. I thought there might still be $20 tables. No $20 tables to be found. Only 25, 50 and 100 on that main center, center room in Caesars.

• 27:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And then I'll, I mean, I just full body panicked. That is really stressful to me. I didn't want to do it.

• 27:37Sean Fennessey?

  You would not sit. You would not take any money out. You would not play.

• 27:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I did take the money out.

• 27:41Sean Fennessey?

  You watched me play for 40 minutes and it was totally fine. It was totally fine. Nothing bad happened.

• 27:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I was really stressed out the whole time. And then I did take like a full hour after, like my, my heart rate didn't drop until halfway through the next presentation.

• 27:58Sean Fennessey?

  This is when we were joking the other day about how on the pod, I'm the neurotic one, but in real life, you're the neurotic one.

• 28:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen.

• 28:03Sean Fennessey?

  That was the most like a clear example of that I've seen in a while.

• 28:06Amanda Dobbins?

  I know what I want. I know what I don't want. I know what I am comfortable with. I know what I'm not, not comfortable with. And I just really, really didn't want to do that. And then.

• 28:16Sean Fennessey?

  Did you learn anything sitting there watching?

• 28:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Sort of, but it made me more stressed because the, you know, I do know the basic rules of blackjack, but then obviously I, like I'd never played with a dealer before and there are some of the casino rules. And then also with other players at the table, you have to sort of be aware of what's going on there. And I had no idea about that strategy. They speak very fast.

• 28:39Sean Fennessey?

  They do.

• 28:39Amanda Dobbins?

  So I, it did kind of feel like there was a whole language that I didn't know.

• 28:44Sean Fennessey?

  There is a very important communal aspect at the table because whatever cards you are receiving or impacting, obviously everybody else sitting at the table.

• 28:51Amanda Dobbins?

  So having to interact with others, but not knowing the language is like, is like my nightmare.

• 28:57Sean Fennessey?

  You're at a minimum table. It's a middle of the day. Everyone there is friendly. Actually, the guy sitting with us was, it was his first time in Vegas too.

• 29:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. But he had warmed up at Mandalay Bay and it was his 21st birthday trip. We had, it was a very nice dealer. I wish I remembered her name.

• 29:11Sean Fennessey?

  Temi, she was wonderful. She was from Los Angeles.

• 29:14Amanda Dobbins?

  We did a lot of LA talk and that like made me a little more comfortable. I do think it's both revealing and psychotic that like that situation is where you're most comfortable.

• 29:23Sean Fennessey?

  I felt so calm.

• 29:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. You were just, and you were great and you, you won $6 total, but I thought that you did it.

• 29:29Sean Fennessey?

  I basically punted all my earnings at the end.

• 29:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Great confidence. Um, yeah, that's, that's, that, that didn't work out.

• 29:35Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 29:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I, but you're very comfortable in that situation. And then me being like, let's go to the club. Let's go to a party and you're just like, you know, stone face.

• 29:46Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely not true. And Matt can confirm that I was game for everything.

• 29:49Amanda Dobbins?

  You were.

• 29:50Sean Fennessey?

  Let's, let's, let's take a quick break and we'll bring in Matt Bellamy to talk about the most exciting movies at CinemaCon, our time at a very special show.

• 29:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, my God.

• 29:59Sean Fennessey?

  And a lot more. This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

• 30:25Speaker 06

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• 30:56Speaker 07

  Now streaming on Paramount Plus. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for this. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser.

• 31:11Speaker 07

  And sharper than ever. Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything. Dexter Resurrection, new season now streaming on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.

• 31:26Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Matt Bellamy, host of The Town. What do you, what do you, what is your title at Puck?

• 31:31Speaker 07

  I'm a founding partner of Puck, which is a fancy way to say I was employee number one.

• 31:35Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, wow. Employee number one, amazing. Um, obviously, uh, you host an incredible show where you cover the inside stories of Hollywood. We were together in Las Vegas.

• 31:44Speaker 07

  It was special.

• 31:45Sean Fennessey?

  For multiple days at CinemaCon. You're not supposed to go to Vegas for more than 48 hours.

• 31:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:49Sean Fennessey?

  Matt and I at least broke that rule by roughly 24 hours, almost 48 hours.

• 31:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, and honestly, like, it wasn't bad.

• 31:56Sean Fennessey?

  It wasn't bad.

• 31:57Speaker 07

  Normally, I'm just like, get me the hell out of here. But I had a great. Great time. I think maybe because Amanda was there and it was your first time.

• 32:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 32:05Speaker 07

  And I sort of felt like I got to relive Vegas through your eyes. Craig was there at CinemaCon for his first time. It was like, we did fun stuff. We went to David Copperfield.

• 32:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, we got to talk about David Copperfield.

• 32:16Sean Fennessey?

  Let's talk about David Copperfield for a minute.

• 32:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Sean Fennessey?

  For the young children listening at home.

• 32:19Speaker 07

  First of all, this was my idea. You guys were unwitting or willing participants, but this was my idea. I've never seen him before. I love magic. I love Vegas. I thought it would be a cool, half ironic thing to do. And I think we ended up enjoying it, question mark?

• 32:38Amanda Dobbins?

  We had a fantastic time. I will also say you emailed us as soon as you found out we were gonna be at CinemaCon and said, "Do you want to go see David Copperfield?" And it was an instant yes from both of us. And in terms of like having a bit for the week, you know, anyone I spoke to, I would say, "Oh, it's my first week in my first time ever in Vegas, and I'm gonna go see David Copperfield." And everyone was like, "Perfect." You know, it really, you couldn't have scripted it better for me.

• 33:04Speaker 07

  And honestly, like, I was a little nervous, to be honest, because I started reading some, there's some Reddit activity about him. He'd been kind of quasi canceled and like, but not really. And maybe he lost a step. He is 68 years old. But we went, we, you know, there was magic. There was an alien at one point. There was a spaceship.

• 33:24Sean Fennessey?

  We had a front row seat. It was honestly, the first 30 minutes of the show, I was like, "This is actually legitimately good." It was typical Las Vegas illusionist work. You know, moving large objects, card tricks, popping balloons inside of balloons. There were like-

• 33:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Predicting numbers.

• 33:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, numbers.

• 33:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, reading people's heads. Again, another thing, for the first 30 minutes, you turned to me just with joy in your eyes. Vegas brings out your childlike wonder.

• 33:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I did. I think I said I would die for magic to you, which I would.

• 33:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And you just, you just kind of like a really excited golf clap, like kind of shrinking into yourself because you were so excited.

• 34:00Sean Fennessey?

  No, I'm like, man, I really like magic. I think it's fun to go see magic. The final 30 minutes with the alien, my take on it is, when Steven Spielberg does that, it's really cool and emotionally affecting. And when a magician in Las Vegas does it, it's fucking weird. It's kind of psychotic.

• 34:15Amanda Dobbins?

  It took, I mean, that it was just an unexpected turn.

• 34:18Speaker 07

  It does take a turn.

• 34:19Amanda Dobbins?

  It takes a real turn and for a while, I don't, listen, I don't want to spoil the show for anyone who is going to go to Las Vegas and see David Copperfield, but I do want people to understand that it is a, an animatronic alien.

• 34:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Highly reminiscent of Baby Yoda, but with teeth, right? And I think Baby Yoda doesn't have teeth.

• 34:40Sean Fennessey?

  Blue is the name of this alien, Blue 32.

• 34:41Amanda Dobbins?

  B L U.

• 34:42Speaker 07

  B L U, yes.

• 34:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, but about the same size as I understand Baby Yoda to be, based on never having seen that show, but seeing a lot of these.

• 34:50Speaker 07

  And a quasi surrogate for David Copperfield's absent father.

• 34:54Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 34:54Speaker 07

  We should say that.

• 34:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, that's why I make the Spielberg comparison. It is a deeply emotional backstory.

• 34:59Speaker 07

  Right.

• 34:59Sean Fennessey?

  That is maybe not as true as I had thought it was going to be when he first started telling the story mid show.

• 35:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, and not something that you expect in a magic show.

• 35:07Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 35:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but he is, David Copperfield is having an extended scripted conversation with a, a small blue Baby Yoda-esque alien that can, I think, move its arms and head.

• 35:19Speaker 07

  And, and tentacles, or his antenna.

• 35:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, and, right, and has like basically alien veneers, um, but also can't like walk, right? So then David Copperfield has to like carry him around the theater.

• 35:33Speaker 07

  And they embrace at one point.

• 35:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 35:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, a couple of times.

• 35:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. If this sounds creepy, it's because it is creepy. It was a good time, though.

• 35:40Speaker 07

  It's interspersed also with like quasi, uh, old footage of his father who was in the military and was stationed at Roswell.

• 35:48Amanda Dobbins?

  That was old footage because.

• 35:50Sean Fennessey?

  It clearly was not.

• 35:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, I know Matt afterwards was like, maybe.

• 35:53Speaker 07

  I thought maybe he was superimposed into old footage.

• 35:55Amanda Dobbins?

  You think he has that kind of V F H budget? Listen, I don't, based on what I saw of the various magic curtains that are all really grimy, I don't think they have the budget.

• 36:04Sean Fennessey?

  You guys are really spoiling David Copperfield for all the fans.

• 36:07Speaker 07

  He has an island, he has a compound in Vegas, he's been a successful magician for thirty something years now.

• 36:13Amanda Dobbins?

  He's putting that money elsewhere.

• 36:14Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 36:15Amanda Dobbins?

  But I did think that the actor who played his dad was very attractive.

• 36:18Speaker 07

  And looked like him.

• 36:19Sean Fennessey?

  He did.

• 36:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, I think they spent some time casting it appropriately.

• 36:22Sean Fennessey?

  When they first showed that image of his parents, I was like, God, his parents. Parents are hot.

• 36:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 36:26Sean Fennessey?

  This is unbelievable.

• 36:27Speaker 07

  I know.

• 36:27Sean Fennessey?

  How attractive these people are. Anyhow, nevertheless, we spoiled most of the David Copperfield Show in Las Vegas.

• 36:31Speaker 07

  Also, big spoiler also, he has great hair. I don't know what he's doing.

• 36:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 36:36Speaker 07

  Wig or dye job or he went to Turkey.

• 36:39Sean Fennessey?

  For a 68 year old man, there is a tremendous amount of hair on his head.

• 36:43Speaker 07

  It is a bouffant of hair.

• 36:46Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you for bringing us. We had a lot of fun.

• 36:47Amanda Dobbins?

  We had a lot of fun. No, it was perfect.

• 36:48Sean Fennessey?

  All week was a lot of fun. The CinemaCon in general, I think of it as two things. One, it is just like any old trade convention. It is like if you are a member of like Plumbers United and all the plumbers of the world come to Las Vegas for four days.

• 37:04Speaker 07

  Steak dinners.

• 37:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, eat mediocre food, hang out, have too many cocktails and sit through boring presentations. This is the same thing, but for movies, but also it's-

• 37:12Speaker 07

  Except Ana de Armas is there.

• 37:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a little bit of movie nerd prom where a lot of people you know from the business are there. A lot of celebrities are there and you get to see some stuff.

• 37:20Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't interact with the celebrities though. You don't. I mean, that's true.

• 37:24Speaker 07

  Ana de Armas was walking the casino floor at one point.

• 37:27Sean Fennessey?

  I saw her with my own two eyes.

• 37:28Speaker 07

  Very rare. That usually doesn't happen. They know like Leo DiCaprio.

• 37:32Sean Fennessey?

  He don't doubt it.

• 37:33Speaker 07

  He was probably back at his pool by 4pm.

• 37:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I remember a few years ago when I was there, I was, I saw Lupita walking into a hallway and I was like, good lord. Like just a strikingly beautiful person.

• 37:43Speaker 07

  And stuff in like private things, like someone offered, asked if I wanted to meet The Weeknd. I was like, I'm good.

• 37:48Sean Fennessey?

  That would be an interesting podcast. We'll come back to The Weeknd. Anyhow, so it's this, across three days, all the major studios present all of their wares and they, you know, hope that the theatrical exhibitors will care and of course that they will because theatrical exhibition is in a very complicated, some might say dire state. Matt, why don't you give us a little bit of a sense of how things are going in the business relative to the experience?

• 38:12Speaker 07

  Not great is a good, good way to describe it. I mean, box office is in the shitter right now. It's like 12.4% down for the year, domestic. This was supposed to be the rebound year, survived till 25. Last year was not great, although it did rebound by the end of the year.

• 38:27Sean Fennessey?

  Last year was surprisingly decent.

• 38:28Speaker 07

  Yes, it came back. You know, there's just existential dread throughout and there always is at this convention as long- Long as I've been going, it's always been about how they're under threat. Streaming is killing their business. The collapsing windows are killing their business. Covid, all of it, everything is aligned against the theaters. And that is even more so now because as much as these studios are there to court these theater owners, they're also quietly undermining them. I mean, I did a panel with the head of Universal's distribution unit. And he was there saying, we are a theatrical first studio. We are there to, you know, put movies, we need to be profitable to put more money into movies.

• 39:09Speaker 07

  All of which is true, yet they are a pioneer of putting their movies on premium video on demand as early as three weeks after they're in theaters, which most people in the theater business believe is significantly hurting their business.

• 39:24Sean Fennessey?

  So that is, was basically the biggest topic of conversation this week. And I, I thought of something, I don't know if you've thought about this since it happened, but in 2017, Matt was actually on the big picture, talking about the movie War Machine on Netflix. Do you remember this?

• 39:37Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:37Sean Fennessey?

  It's a long time ago in our old office.

• 39:39Speaker 07

  Oh, man, yes.

• 39:40Sean Fennessey?

  You came on and we talked about the idea, what, really what windowing was and what it meant and what it meant for a studio like Netflix, which was just a streamer then, to make a movie like War Machine with Brad Pitt, who was one of the first major movie stars to basically make a streaming only movie. And we were saying like, for a company like Netflix, what makes sense in terms of when the movie should go? Listeners of the show can check that episode out. It's very weird. I think I interviewed David Michaud, the director of that movie. But back then, I don't know that I ever thought we would get to this place where after 17 days, a movie like Black Bag, which is a $50 million movie with movie stars directed by Steven Soderbergh, is available in your home. But for Universal, that's actually good business right now financially.

• 40:20Speaker 07

  Oh, it's great. It can be.

• 40:21Sean Fennessey?

  It can be.

• 40:21Speaker 07

  For a movie like Wicked, they, he said on my panel, they made over a hundred million dollars on Peabody. And that, they believe that they made that money and did not hurt the theater business in the process.

• 40:32Sean Fennessey?

  But they don't share any of that money with movie theaters.

• 40:35Speaker 07

  No, they have their own taxes on that. You have to pay the distributors for, but they keep more of the Peabody money than they do from the 50 50 or so split with the theaters. So. It's in the studio's interest to do these shorter windows. And in 2017, what we did not anticipate was COVID. COVID completely opened the door for these studios to say, yeah, you know, that 45 day, 90 day window we used to have that we've never liked, but you guys have been able to enforce on us? We're just not going to do that anymore. And here's the new model that we're going to all adhere to. And if you guys want it, great. If not, so what?

• 41:11Sean Fennessey?

  Just like speculate for me. It seems like half of the studios would be open to a 45 day window. Half would not because they'd be leaving a lot of money on the table.

• 41:21Speaker 07

  Well, Adam Aaron at AMC claimed in an interview that he has half the studios, three onboard for a 45 day window guarantee.

• 41:29Sean Fennessey?

  We can, we can.

• 41:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, we were speculating.

• 41:31Sean Fennessey?

  We can guess.

• 41:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, we know it's Disney. Obviously Disney already does that.

• 41:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 41:35Speaker 07

  It's probably Sony.

• 41:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 07

  Because Tom Rothman is a big theaters guy and they have a Netflix pay one deal.

• 41:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 41:43Speaker 07

  That pays them a billion or so dollars, dollars a year. So they can do that with the cushion of knowing that they've got this money out there.

• 41:51Sean Fennessey?

  And no streaming service that they need to feed.

• 41:52Speaker 07

  Right, exactly. They have no homegrown streaming service. They probably could make more, more money on, on P VOD, but he's, the third one, I don't know who it is and he wouldn't tell me when I asked.

• 42:03Sean Fennessey?

  My guess is it's Paramount, but that's just a guess.

• 42:05Speaker 07

  But how can they even make any commitments now? Because Paramount has been sold. The new regime is coming in.

• 42:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, yeah, they make a commitment to him and then they're doing whatever. Sure. You know, I'm sure it's.

• 42:15Speaker 07

  But the funny thing is that the guy who instituted the P VOD strategy at Universal is going to be running Paramount, Jeff Shell.

• 42:22Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 42:23Speaker 07

  So what's he going to do?

• 42:25Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good point.

• 42:26Speaker 07

  Implement his old strategy. So they're probably not in and Warner Brothers, I mean, they've got their, they've got serious cash concerns. Maybe they'd be onboard, I don't know.

• 42:36Sean Fennessey?

  I'd be very surprised if Universal, Warner Brothers or Amazon agreed to that. That, that just doesn't seem like it benefits them right now.

• 42:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Why would they? That's the sort, that is the fascinating thing. This was my first CinemaCon and the tension between. These, these two separate but conjoined industries that need each other. But also it is just the studios holding the theater owners hostage.

• 42:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and you know, and they're presenting and onstage being like, you're gonna love it. Here's, you know, everything that we're giving to you.

• 43:06Speaker 07

  In your theaters.

• 43:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 43:07Speaker 07

  We value your theaters.

• 43:09Amanda Dobbins?

  The theaters don't have any other choices, you know? It's just kind of like, this is what you're gonna show it, or I guess you're not gonna show it. But what else is gonna fill your?

• 43:16Speaker 07

  And that's what the theaters say when they are, when they start talking about why their business is so bad. They talk about volume and they believe that if the volume of Hollywood movies increased to back where it was pre-COVID, that their business will be fine, their business will be growing. Set aside the fact that attendance had been going down, down, down even before COVID. So it's not like they were a growing business, but they've raised prices. They've done all the concession stuff they've done and they have, you know, adds up the wazoo before they're, they are aware, ways that they can make money if people are showing up and it's just that there's not enough movies in their view.

• 43:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's the thing is, and that relates to the movies that were presented to us. They've been able to backstop by raising prices and creating more experiences inside of movie theaters. So I honestly think it's smart. I don't think it's a bad idea at all.

• 44:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 44:03Sean Fennessey?

  I think booze is a good idea.

• 44:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a great idea.

• 44:05Sean Fennessey?

  And it mostly works. And so the, the theatrical experience like to me is not really going anywhere anytime soon. It's just the scale may go significantly down. But a lot of these presentations, you know, some of these studios have like five, six, seven movies this year. I mean, going back to 10 years ago when they would have 12, 14, 18, 24.

• 44:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 44:24Sean Fennessey?

  So the, those theater owners are right. Like there's just fewer movies to present. There's fewer movies for us to talk about, to be excited about. And they're, they've made a lot of big bets and not a lot of middle bets because the middle bets are harder to market now. So. It would, I would say a very, very mixed bag in terms of what we saw. Like definitely a few things that would get the hardcore movie fans excited, a few things that would get the hardcore IP fans excited, but not the most rousing slate overall. Would you agree with that?

• 44:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely. Not a lot of sure bets in terms of butts in seats, which is everyone else at the convention's goal. A few things that we as movie nerds were really excited to see. A lot of movie stars that I was thrilled to see. Thank you all for coming.

• 45:11Sean Fennessey?

  Legit major heavyweight stars.

• 45:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, I heard a little, ooh.

• 45:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 07

  When like Glenn Powell came out, I was like, oh.

• 45:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you know, and I knew he was coming. He was announced because Glenn Powell works very hard and shows up at everything.

• 45:23Sean Fennessey?

  God bless Glenn Powell, but like Leo and Tom Cruise were there. You know what I mean? Like this is a major, major, major event still in the business.

• 45:30Amanda Dobbins?

  So, but there were a few things that we were excited about, worrying that the things that you and I are excited about as movie nerds and the things that seem like sure bets are, you know, do not overlap in the Venn diagram.

• 45:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, that's the thing, the, the, the big movies that I think the studios were presenting to us, the sort of the linchpin film, the most important film that they all had. I, I don't know if any of them, save maybe one, made any of our lists in terms of what we're anticipating.

• 45:56Speaker 07

  No, but, but I will say that the one, I don't know if we want to talk about the movies yet, but I actually am more interested in the Jurassic World movie now than I was before.

• 46:06Sean Fennessey?

  That's interesting.

• 46:07Speaker 07

  That trailer was good. It, it, it was scary.

• 46:09Sean Fennessey?

  My, my, my only problem with that movie is, which stars Scarlett Johansson and Marsha Lali, they were both there.

• 46:15Speaker 07

  They were.

• 46:16Sean Fennessey?

  Gareth Edwards, the director of Road One was there.

• 46:19Amanda Dobbins?

  That morning.

• 46:19Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 46:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but then he, well, we'll talk about him when he left.

• 46:24Sean Fennessey?

  This is another universal property. To me, every Fast and the Furious movie is the same and every Jurassic World movie is the same. And they're not necessarily bad. I think the Fast and Furious movies are much worse, but they're just, there's a big dinosaur, there's a dinosaur we've never heard of, there are children in peril, and then there's one plucky person who needs to save everyone and one dorky scientist. Like that's, it is, they are formulaic. It's probably going to be a better made movie because the director is really talented. The creator is like legitimately one of the best looking science fiction movies of the last 10 years. But I'm not like crawling out of my skin to see it.

• 46:54Amanda Dobbins?

  You just described every movie, though, like every heist movie, it's like a crew's gotta get together to steal. Like every rom com, are they gonna get together? Like, yes, they are. I don't mind the formula. In fact, sometimes I'm very comforted by it. So I'm with Matt. I was more excited by the trailer. I was open to it. I didn't think their banter worked that much, but that's.

• 47:11Speaker 07

  Oh, on stage, they were a little awkward.

• 47:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 07

  Yeah. And it was, it's always funny how it comes back to Scarlett being a badass and like demanding a lot.

• 47:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 47:19Speaker 07

  Like, there were multiple references to her contrast and like what she will and won't do. And I know she's famously as like, you know.

• 47:27Sean Fennessey?

  Hard charging.

• 47:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, she ended up suing Disney and all that stuff, but uh, they, I don't know that. Hopefully their chemistry in the movie is better.

• 47:35Amanda Dobbins?

  She looked, she looked exciting in the movie and like, so I'm open to it.

• 47:40Sean Fennessey?

  You know, that, so that's from Universal. Universal kinda had a double barrel. They had two of the biggest movies that they were pushing. Jurassic is in July, on July 4th weekend. Then they have Wicked Part Two. Actually, I had to leave before the Wicked Part Two presentation.

• 47:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I wasn't gonna say that on the podcast. I covered for you and I covered for you at the Universal party afterwards.

• 47:57Sean Fennessey?

  A dear friend lives in Las Vegas. We've known each other since fourth grade. I had to see the man. You know, that's, it's that simple.

• 48:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, Matt and I stayed. Cynthia and.

• 48:05Speaker 07

  We care about cinema.

• 48:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, you do.

• 48:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, Cynthia and Ari were there, but they did not sing.

• 48:10Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 48:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Which.

• 48:11Speaker 07

  They did hold hands.

• 48:13Amanda Dobbins?

  They, they held hands and they.

• 48:14Sean Fennessey?

  Did they save space?

• 48:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, they made even jokes about it. I think, you know, they, they're good at what they do.

• 48:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Amanda Dobbins?

  They, they sold what they needed to sell and then they showed a trailer, which like I thought looked fine.

• 48:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, the problem Universal has with Wicked Two is that it doesn't have that signature song.

• 48:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 07

  So the entire campaign for the first movie was built around that song, which is interesting because it's the last five minutes of the movie. So you're essentially giving that away.

• 48:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 48:39Speaker 07

  But they knew what they had. They knew everyone loves that song and it worked.

• 48:42Sean Fennessey?

  It worked.

• 48:42Speaker 07

  So what, what do they have this time? They have more Wizard of Oz stuff, which we saw, but they don't have that signature song. So it's ultimately, so that's, I think, why they didn't sing, because they didn't want people to be like, oh, well, that's not Defying Gravity.

• 48:55Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. Um, well, I'm not really excited about Wicked Part Two at all. So, um.

• 49:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Nor am I, but I, it'll make money.

• 49:03Sean Fennessey?

  It'll make money.

• 49:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Sean Fennessey?

  Other movies that were not hyping per se, but were hyped. We'll talk in depth on the town about the Superman presentation.

• 49:11Speaker 07

  Oh, I have thoughts.

• 49:12Sean Fennessey?

  Um, but Superman was obviously the centerpiece of the Warner Brothers presentation, which ultimately I thought was better than I was expecting on the whole in terms of the movies that they showed, but there was a lot of time devoted to Superman.

• 49:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe not a lot of time well spent in that presentation. Uh, this, the footage that we saw honestly dimmed my enthusiasm for the movie a little bit.

• 49:31Speaker 07

  Me too. I, I, I, but I will say that I talked to a lot of people. It was the one movie that, that sparked a lot of conversation. I think from my world, it's because there's so much riding on it, like the whole reinvention of the DC universe, the embattled heads of the studio sort of need this to work and DC of it all, but it's a weird mix. It's this weird mix of earnest Superman with silly dog with kind of the irreverent robots and there's like, there's a monster, there's a Godzilla monster in it that we don't know how much is going to be in the movie.

• 50:04Sean Fennessey?

  It just looked like a very overloaded premise and I, you know, James Gunn was there with Peter Safran and the cast and he talked about this desire to create like, um, you know, a more silver age feeling Superman, like your old fashioned style, hopeful Superman movie with lots of characters and a kind of shiny zaniness surrounding this, you know, embodiment of hope.

• 50:26Sean Fennessey?

  I, I'm, I'm a little nervous about it.

• 50:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Well, I, I am allergic to the, the James Gunn formula, which is sort of zany quippiness with like animals and then a lot of sentimentality. And it definitely fits the formula and that formula has worked in many other movies.

• 50:45Sean Fennessey?

  For three straight Guardians movies.

• 50:46Amanda Dobbins?

  When it's applied to Superman is the thing that all of you super, you know, superhero fans can talk about.

• 50:52Speaker 07

  Chris Pratt sells that really well.

• 50:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, that's exactly what I said. He's so right for that James Gunn tone. Will David Cornswat be right for that?

• 51:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, or maybe that, maybe Rachel Brosnahan, who is better at that kind of stuff and was very fun and I'd love her.

• 51:08Sean Fennessey?

  I do too.

• 51:08Speaker 07

  Uh, but I don't know that Superman fits that.

• 51:12Sean Fennessey?

  We're going to find out. Um, let's talk about Sony. They presented.

• 51:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Sean Fennessey?

  Three film, four films that are coming out in three years. That was their big announcement, which we already knew, uh, that they're going to be.

• 51:23Speaker 07

  But they're coming out in the same month in three years.

• 51:25Sean Fennessey?

  Four Beatles movies.

• 51:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:27Sean Fennessey?

  It sounds like one per week.

• 51:30Speaker 07

  I would bet that. I would say they're gonna do one every Friday for a month. Now, they have not said that. It could be they all drop on the same day, which seems very bizarre for theaters because then you gotta choose. But even if these movies are sequential for a month, if the first one's a huge hit, the second one's gonna be competing with the first one for those theaters. And then after that, or if it's not a hit, then you've got a Horizon situation times four, where you've gotta put these movies in theaters after nobody wants to see them.

• 51:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's a huge gamble. Sam Mendes is the director. You'll talk a little bit more when we get into anticipated, how you feel about the casting of these movies.

• 52:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Sean Fennessey?

  Which of these do you think comes first in the pecking order? Which Beatle gets his first movie?

• 52:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I assume that they'll do it chron- I hope they'll do it chronologically, but maybe they won't. Maybe they'll release it. Yeah, one assumes. So you probably have to start with John or Paul, right? And also in terms of if you're trying to fight the, the problem that Matt is describing, you wanna bring someone in with John and Paul, and then you gotta close with the other. No disrespect to Ringo or George.

• 52:39Speaker 07

  We know which one is not first.

• 52:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Who is, who are, yeah.

• 52:42Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. It feels like Paul first, John last, right?

• 52:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I mean, I would think so.

• 52:46Speaker 07

  Oh, I don't know.

• 52:47Sean Fennessey?

  You think Paul last?

• 52:48Speaker 07

  There's speculation that they will tell the story of the Beatles sequentially, meaning the Paul story will be the first five, four or five years, rise to fame, that kind of thing. And then it, and then they, they bring the other stuff in so that, you know, John's movie is about his relationship with Yoko and his death ultimately. And then Ringo means like the aftermath and the breakup, so it's sort of told through his perspective. That's, that makes sense to me.

• 53:13Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 53:14Speaker 07

  Maybe they'll jump around, or maybe it'll be the same story, but just from different perspectives. I don't know.

• 53:19Amanda Dobbins?

  You could see it being Paul to start getting the band together, George disillusionment and breakup and resentment and all that stuff. No offense to George, but he was mad. And then, and, and, and then John. I mean, they'll all feature in all of them, right? So. John afterwards, death.

• 53:40Sean Fennessey?

  Do you have three years of podcasting in you about this? Actually, four, when you include the awards run. Like, this is gonna go through.

• 53:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I do.

• 53:46Sean Fennessey?

  March of 2029.

• 53:48Amanda Dobbins?

  You and I uniquely do, but I did also think to myself, I was like, I will be 43 years old when these movies come out. It's just, nobody wants it. Nobody wants to hear from a 43-year-old mom for five years straight about The Beatles.

• 54:02Speaker 07

  I just hope Paul is still alive, so he can promote it.

• 54:06Sean Fennessey?

  The other Sony announcements that were also big were that Sony, sorry, Spider-Man Beyond the Spider-Verse is coming in 2027, which is a long ways away from that last.

• 54:15Speaker 07

  That movie was supposed to come out last year.

• 54:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And that Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which is the new Tom Holland live-action Spider-Man movie, is coming next year, which is really soon. That's, that movie's supposed to come out July 24th, I think, next year. They haven't started filming. Tom Holland is in Greece making The Odyssey right now. That's not usually a good sign. We'll see what happens with that.

• 54:34Speaker 07

  Well, although they did it with Jurassic for this summer.

• 54:36Sean Fennessey?

  They did.

• 54:36Speaker 07

  They filmed that last summer, so maybe if Tom Holland goes directly from Odyssey to Spider-Man, they can pull it off.

• 54:43Sean Fennessey?

  Earning that paycheck. Lionsgate, not a ton of huge announcements. The biggest one was probably that.

• 54:48Speaker 07

  How dare you? Ballerina, are you kidding me?

• 54:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, we knew that was coming.

• 54:51Speaker 07

  I know, but the footage was good.

• 54:53Sean Fennessey?

  The fights were good. Was the footage good, or was the fight good?

• 54:56Speaker 07

  The footage was the fight. I mean, it was essentially a long fight scene. Now, I, I say this, and I don't know if we're stepping on our picks, but like, I say this as someone who has not ever watched a John Wick movie. So I'm not the best person to evaluate the spinoff, but I thought it was great.

• 55:13Sean Fennessey?

  The fight scene was very good that they showed. They used that fight scene to then also announce simultaneously, John Wick 5 is in development right now. I assume, it sounds like Keanu and Chad Stahelsky will come back, plus an animated John Wick prequel is happening.

• 55:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't understand that.

• 55:27Sean Fennessey?

  A spinoff of the Kane character from the last film is also going to happen with Donnie Yen, so.

• 55:34Speaker 07

  Plus, it looks like there's a lot more of Keanu in Ballerina than we may have initially thought.

• 55:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. My understanding is, is they had to reshoot a lot of that movie, so they added a lot of stuff. We shall see.

• 55:46Sean Fennessey?

  Paramount. Let's just, let's just table Paramount because we, we have some, they have a couple of big titles and we'll focus on those when we do our picks. The big movie out of Amazon was Masters of the Universe, which is a 2026 movie.

• 55:58Amanda Dobbins?

  That's, that's wow, to everyone else who showed up at the Amazon presentation.

• 56:02Speaker 07

  The disrespect to Ryan Gosling right there.

• 56:04Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'm trying to hold it.

• 56:05Amanda Dobbins?

  That's what I actually gasped, by the way.

• 56:09Sean Fennessey?

  I'm trying to hold it for both of your sakes and for my sake as well. Um, Masters of the, Masters of the Universe is of course He-Man, which five-year-old me was very emotionally invested in.

• 56:17Speaker 07

  And they very smartly included audio clips from the original TV cartoon of him saying, I have the power.

• 56:26Sean Fennessey?

  By the power of Greyskull, I am Nicholas Galacine. Um, I, I'm, I'm just gonna be totally honest with you guys. I'm in.

• 56:37Amanda Dobbins?

  That's good. That was for you. There was, so we mostly observed from the press section and also in the press section, there was a group of about 10 to 15, uh, mostly young men. Um, I, I didn't speak to them. They seemed to be about 25.

• 56:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And they were hooting and hollering for this movie and for the SpongeBob movie and for kinda all the fan IP stuff.

• 57:04Sean Fennessey?

  There was a generational divide in the press area.

• 57:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but this, this did seem to work for them.

• 57:09Sean Fennessey?

  It's Travis Knight, um, Phil Knight's son, who's directed a lot of like animated films. Honestly, his animated features are quite good. Um, we'll see. This is, this is.

• 57:16Speaker 07

  But he did a Transformers movie that you also liked.

• 57:18Sean Fennessey?

  Bumblebee is solid.

• 57:20Speaker 07

  I thought he, didn't he do?

• 57:22Sean Fennessey?

  He didn't do the most recent animated one. No, no.

• 57:24Speaker 07

  No, no, not animated. I thought he did the one with Anthony Ramos.

• 57:28Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, yes, Bumblebee. Yes.

• 57:29Speaker 07

  No, Bumblebee was the one with Hailee Steinfeld.

• 57:33Sean Fennessey?

  No, he didn't do, no, that was.

• 57:35Speaker 07

  The one Last Summer, that was actually pretty good.

• 57:37Sean Fennessey?

  I did like that one too, but that one is not him. That's the guy who directed Creed 2, whose name is Stephen Cable. Yeah, Stephen Cable. Thank you. Um. He, he's very good at directing things like Transformers, which sounds like a stupid thing to say. And this movie, I think, is for a very particular type of fan. But the thing that I thought looked cool about it was practical sets, practical costumes, they're like carving stuff. It's not, it wasn't a CGI green screen mess. Interesting experiment.

• 58:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Can we raise a set visit for you just to go, what would you like to see them carve?

• 58:11Sean Fennessey?

  Well, they're clearly carving Skeletor's face, which I'm just delighted about.

• 58:15Speaker 07

  I don't get it. Honestly, I don't get him. He looks like an 80s villain.

• 58:20Sean Fennessey?

  I'm a little dubious of him. I agree. Nicholas Galtzen, we will see.

• 58:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I've, I've never bought it. I mean, they showed a lot of footage of him working out. So he's trying.

• 58:27Speaker 07

  The ice video had him literally pumping iron.

• 58:30Amanda Dobbins?

  And he has definitely, you know, like expanded to fill the contours of like the He-Man costume. But like, I hope he's healthy.

• 58:36Sean Fennessey?

  Craig, what are your thoughts on that bulking?

• 58:38Speaker 01

  It's a little swollen. He needs some time to cut, in my opinion.

• 58:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Okay. In addition to that, we had a very brief presentation by Neon where they just showed two trailers to two upcoming movies.

• 58:50Speaker 07

  I actually didn't go to that one.

• 58:50Sean Fennessey?

  It was at the beginning of the Lionsgate presentation. So there-

• 58:54Speaker 07

  Oh, I, I showed up, I thought I saw all of Lionsgate, but I didn't, I didn't-

• 58:57Sean Fennessey?

  Their president of distribution came out at the very beginning Tuesday morning and showed the trailer for Life of Chuck, which is the new Mike Flanagan movie that won the Audience Award at TIFF last fall, and then also Together, which was probably the breakout at Sundance this year. Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who are a real life couple in a horror movie. I thought that trailer was really good. So-

• 59:16Speaker 07

  Love Dave Franco.

• 59:17Sean Fennessey?

  He's very funny. He, he made another appearance at CinemaCon. It was very funny. And then the last studio that we should talk about is Disney. They have, they had a lot of big movies. Some of them we'll talk about in our, in our most anticipated. The one that got the loudest cheers was Fantastic Four: First Steps, which is their big July Marvel tent pole. Things in Marvel Land are obviously very bad right now. Brave New World did very poorly. They've got Thunderbolts before Fantastic Four, which I thought looked pretty fun.

• 59:49Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 59:50Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 59:50Speaker 07

  I mean, I'm not, I'm not a Marvel person, so I, I look at these things and it's, it's a little bit of speaking a foreign language to me, but it looked like a Suicide Squad ripoff.

• 1:00:02Sean Fennessey?

  It, it is very Suicide Squad-y.

• 1:00:03Speaker 07

  And, and very Guardians, kind of bumbling, bumbling superheroes.

• 1:00:07Sean Fennessey?

  Not as much your flavor.

• 1:00:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Not my flavor. I, I did see that they pretended to lead Wyatt Russell in from the casino floor.

• 1:00:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:00:14Amanda Dobbins?

  That's funny.

• 1:00:15Sean Fennessey?

  He was fake drunk and had lost thousands of dollars at the, at the tables, even though he seems like an incredibly even-killed and nice guy.

• 1:00:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Sean Fennessey?

  Um, first steps made noise because we saw Silver Surfer, Julia Garner's Silver Surfer in the movie, and those 25-year-old men you're describing were very, very excited.

• 1:00:33Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:00:33Sean Fennessey?

  Very excited.

• 1:00:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I was at home at this point, um, because of childcare, but our group chat with the, the Ringer verse crew, really, like I saw a lot of mentions of Silver Surfer, just, just from afar.

• 1:00:46Speaker 07

  And that footage has not been made public yet?

• 1:00:47Sean Fennessey?

  It has not.

• 1:00:48Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:00:48Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and Silver Surfer, who is the herald for Galactus, the world-eating giant that is in the movie.

• 1:00:54Speaker 07

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:00:55Sean Fennessey?

  Is an important character. Uh, planets.

• 1:00:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:00:59Sean Fennessey?

  Galactus eats planets. So he will be the big threat. The movie has a very retrofuturistic style. I have been dubious of this from the first image that I saw. I'm still pretty dubious of it.

• 1:01:09Speaker 07

  I got an Incredibles vibe from it.

• 1:01:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think that's right. The Incredibles, I think, is very closely modeled on the original Fantastic Four, so I think that makes sense. Um, I think this movie's gonna be a big hit, so I'm not trying to like undermine that aspect of it.

• 1:01:22Speaker 07

  Disney clearly cares about it the most.

• 1:01:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:01:24Speaker 07

  Feige introduced it. Uh, you know, they, they have been putting, I think, their most important marketing stuff behind it. Uh, it looks more interesting than Thunderbolts to me.

• 1:01:35Sean Fennessey?

  It's definitely more high stakes.

• 1:01:37Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:37Sean Fennessey?

  I just, I have my doubts on the look and the storytelling style that they're going for, but that may just be personal taste.

• 1:01:43Speaker 07

  And in terms of actors, like Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby are, I think, a step above the Thunderbolts crew. No disrespect to Florence Pugh, but like, at least Pedro, Pedro Pascal, people think is a star.

• 1:01:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. This will be an interesting test of that theory. You know, this is not a Mandalorian helmet or a Last of Us situation. This is a real, like, he's gotta carry this movie as Mr. Fantastic.

• 1:02:04Amanda Dobbins?

  And he has materialists this summer, too, so he's really, he, he's. Going to be a human being with his face on camera.

• 1:02:11Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:02:11Amanda Dobbins?

  In two movies.

• 1:02:11Speaker 07

  And how much do we think the mustache will help or hurt that effort?

• 1:02:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Is he a human as a Fantastic Four?

• 1:02:16Sean Fennessey?

  He is a human. He's been affected by materials in space who have that have transformed him into a man who can stretch his arms and legs and body.

• 1:02:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, but he's still.

• 1:02:24Speaker 07

  And mustache.

• 1:02:25Sean Fennessey?

  And mustache.

• 1:02:26Amanda Dobbins?

  But so he's like a mutant.

• 1:02:27Sean Fennessey?

  He's not a mutant.

• 1:02:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:02:29Sean Fennessey?

  We'll discuss that later.

• 1:02:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Are you a comic book person?

• 1:02:31Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:02:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I don't know. You seem to know that he was a human being.

• 1:02:34Speaker 07

  I mean, I know the basics of like the Marvel business and I know I know just enough about all the movies to.

• 1:02:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:02:41Sean Fennessey?

  You have a child that is older than your children.

• 1:02:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm not anti. Like, I see the ones that are popular. I like the, you know, the, the, the big, like Joker, I thought was great. And I see some of the Marvel standalones, Guardians, I thought was really fun, but like, I don't know the lore.

• 1:02:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:02:57Speaker 07

  Like, that, that just went right over my head.

• 1:02:59Sean Fennessey?

  I, this movie, in theory, you don't have to know the lore for because they're introducing all these characters for the first time. That's another reason why. It's fairly important. Other quick Disney stuff that we saw, you know, obviously a lot of kids fair that we won't spend too much time on, but Zootopia 2 is a pretty big movie. I'm curious if it will have a similar Moana effect because that's a movie that was pretty popular when it was released, but has had an incredible lifespan on Disney Plus and a lot of kids have seen it in the, it's gotta be, is it seven or eight years since, since Zootopia?

• 1:03:27Speaker 07

  I believe that was 2015.

• 1:03:29Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, 10 years.

• 1:03:30Amanda Dobbins?

  2016.

• 1:03:31Sean Fennessey?

  2016, so nine years since the original film. It's been two, over two decades since Lilo and Stitch came out.

• 1:03:37Speaker 07

  That's the one I don't understand. Craig is like, this is gonna be huge. Everyone loves this.

• 1:03:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I think so as well.

• 1:03:42Speaker 07

  It is not for my generation. I think it looks stupid. I think that Stitch looks like inane.

• 1:03:48Sean Fennessey?

  I am.

• 1:03:48Speaker 07

  Why do people love this?

• 1:03:49Sean Fennessey?

  I'm in a private, basically movie fantasy league and most of the people, and this, this league includes producers, writers, directors, podcasters, the whole, the whole nine, people who like spend all their time thinking about this stuff, most of us took Lilo and Stitch because we think this is gonna be a big, big hit.

• 1:04:06Speaker 07

  You know, in our draft on the town, Lucas took it and I was not interested in taking it at all. I think he's probably gonna win on that one.

• 1:04:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's just, it's this similar thing to Inside Out to me where young millennials. And Gen Z grew up with this movie.

• 1:04:20Speaker 07

  I did not, I did not.

• 1:04:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Even older millennials, I think I saw it in theaters.

• 1:04:24Sean Fennessey?

  Did you?

• 1:04:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:04:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Like on the end. I also just want to say David Copperfield's animatronic alien, not unlike the real life Lilo.

• 1:04:31Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:04:32Sean Fennessey?

  Good point.

• 1:04:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Or is it Stitch?

• 1:04:33Sean Fennessey?

  Stitch.

• 1:04:34Speaker 07

  No, it's Stitch.

• 1:04:36Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Freaky Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan showed their faces.

• 1:04:40Speaker 07

  Franchise that has passed me by. That is not relevant to me at all.

• 1:04:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I, this was the, the one thing I saw where I was like, oh, I wish I'd stayed to see, to see them in person.

• 1:04:49Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I think this movie is going to work in theaters. I think people are going to see it. I do. I think that there's a real untapped female market for this movie that's going to do very well.

• 1:04:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Speaker 07

  You, you're probably right. Um, the Disney certainly thinks so. They, they, I, people I've talked to there said this is going to work. I don't know. The, is the Lohan Renaissance real? It's one thing to watch a Christmas movie on Netflix. It's another to go to theaters.

• 1:05:12Sean Fennessey?

  Weirdly, Jamie Lee Curtis has gotten more famous since the original Freaky Friday.

• 1:05:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, she won an Oscar.

• 1:05:18Sean Fennessey?

  She won an Oscar. She's like kind of the, the grand dame of Hollywood right now. It's very weird.

• 1:05:22Speaker 07

  Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday.

• 1:05:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I do also think this is like for my generation, but then also people younger.

• 1:05:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:05:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Than me, it almost has like.

• 1:05:32Sean Fennessey?

  This is a huge movie for my wife. Yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 07

  And, and you get the sense that Jamie Lee Curtis is doing this as a favor to Lindsay Lohan.

• 1:05:39Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, she's been steadily making that Netflix comeback for the last few years. Those movies have done very well for Netflix. The Irish Wishes of the World. I know you love that one. Um.

• 1:05:48Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, that's, that's garbage Christmas. I think, hmm.

• 1:05:51Speaker 07

  But what did you?

• 1:05:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Or do we make it garbage women?

• 1:05:53Sean Fennessey?

  Garbage St. Patrick's Day.

• 1:05:54Speaker 07

  What did you think of the actual footage they showed?

• 1:05:56Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it was bad.

• 1:05:57Speaker 07

  I thought it was painful.

• 1:05:58Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it looked really bad. Um, I think the movie.

• 1:06:00Speaker 07

  The worst kind of body switching humor and like, it's just bad.

• 1:06:03Sean Fennessey?

  Very awkward, not very, the, the original film is like pretty slick. Actually, it's pretty well made. This one did not look good. I think movies like that, the switch from film to digital has really hurt them. They just look cheaper. They look like more disposable.

• 1:06:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:06:15Sean Fennessey?

  Um, you don't, that's not always true. Like when you're watching a David Fincher movie on digital, you're like, oh, there's a real artist who knows how to use this. When you just shift. A cheapish comedy into that format, you can tell and you can feel it and it feels less than. But we'll see.

• 1:06:29Speaker 07

  You can blurb that. Sean fantasy Freakier Friday is not David Fincher.

• 1:06:35Sean Fennessey?

  You're welcome, Disney. A24 and Apple did not present. We did see one Apple movie, which is being distributed by Warner Brothers. We'll get to that momentarily. Any other notes quickly?

• 1:06:44Speaker 07

  And Eddie Q was there. We don't have to talk about it on this pod.

• 1:06:46Sean Fennessey?

  Eddie Q is there. You can give us more insight into that on the town. Anticipated.

• 1:06:52Sean Fennessey?

  Matt, you've got your number four is my number five. Let's just talk about it now.

• 1:06:55Speaker 07

  Oh, we're going to our list.

• 1:06:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, let's go to our list. We each chose five. I want to talk about this one first because it's in close succession with Disney. It's Avatar Fire and Ash. This is the third Avatar film, the first since The Way of Water, which made over a billion dollars. And once again, two billion dollars was nominated for Best Picture. James Cameron was doubted. He again proved the universe wrong, that he is in fact in total control. Even I, a certified James Cameron religious believer was like third one. It's been, it's only been a few years since the last one. I honestly thought the footage was amazing.

• 1:07:30Speaker 07

  It was great.

• 1:07:30Sean Fennessey?

  And.

• 1:07:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you have to, did they give you 3D glasses to put on?

• 1:07:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, we had 3D glasses for two different presentations.

• 1:07:37Speaker 07

  It's the same style. You see everything. It's like spatial, like when they're flying around. You're seeing people falling off the creatures. Like it's all there.

• 1:07:46Sean Fennessey?

  It was, they introduced two new Na'vi characters, the Ash people and the Wind Traders.

• 1:07:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 1:07:53Sean Fennessey?

  This is clearly like a, an intersectional war.

• 1:07:58Sean Fennessey?

  It's just the actual filmmaking that he is doing. There's just not anything else that looks even close to this.

• 1:08:03Speaker 07

  It's kind of amazing. Like 15 years into the 3D revolution where you could actually have stuff in 3D for narrative features. No one else is doing it like this.

• 1:08:12Sean Fennessey?

  He's the only person who makes it look like that.

• 1:08:13Speaker 07

  How, how is that possible?

• 1:08:15Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. It's very strange. Obviously these movies cost an incredible amount of money and they've developed these extraordinary technologies. And some people just don't like the Avatar story. Like there's no, I'm not gonna convince people.

• 1:08:22Speaker 07

  That was my one criticism of the footage. Like I don't know how many new people they're bringing into the tent.

• 1:08:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:08:28Speaker 07

  With this movie.

• 1:08:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 07

  And I was a little confused by the new character. It almost looked like Zoe Saldana wearing a costume or something.

• 1:08:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Speaker 07

  Her character, but. It looked great and there is a new visual palette to them. The, the last one was very much underwater and had all those creatures. This one does have fire and it's like a more earthy tone to it.

• 1:08:48Sean Fennessey?

  It's reds and browns and yeah. It honestly looked amazing.

• 1:08:50Amanda Dobbins?

  They're always really good. We go, we're just like, wow, can't believe you did that. Happily spent three and a half hours and.

• 1:08:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, you're not worried this one's supposed to be longer than the last one?

• 1:08:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I just, I, we were very worried about too. And then it made literally $2 billion. And then, you know, it makes the money, then we never talk about them until the next one.

• 1:09:07Sean Fennessey?

  It's interesting for this one to come three years later. That's pretty fast in the James Cameron timeline over the last 25 years.

• 1:09:13Speaker 07

  Although it was supposed to be two, I think they delayed it a year.

• 1:09:16Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right. And honestly, whether or not four and five happened, which is planned and suggested, but if this, let's say this movie makes 1.2 billion dollars, which would still be an incredible success, but would not come close to the first two movies. Is there a fourth movie? I don't know.

• 1:09:30Speaker 07

  Oh, I think there is, but the question is whether Cameron directs it.

• 1:09:34Sean Fennessey?

  Directs it, yeah. We'll see, he's getting up there. Um, okay. Amanda, what's your number five?

• 1:09:39Amanda Dobbins?

  My number five is really very comparable to Avatar Fire and Ash.

• 1:09:44Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, it's Megan 2.0. This worked for me. This was part, this is a Universal movie. And so it was part of the Universal presentation, which involved a live orchestra. And so I think I was probably the only person in the room who was fully on board with all the aspects of this, but they did have like 30 Megan's come out on stage and dance to Oops, I Did It Again, the Britney Spears song that is a part of the trailer, while the orchestra played Oops, I Did It Again. And, and I said, yes. I said, I am a 40 year old woman here watching these people gyrate kind of creepily, kind of funnily to one of the most important songs of my generation. Then Craig and I met two of the Megan's at the party.

• 1:10:29Speaker 07

  And I forced you to take a picture of them.

• 1:10:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, we did. And it's a good photo. I put it on Instagram.

• 1:10:32Speaker 07

  Oh, you did? Oh, I have to like that.

• 1:10:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were, um, those two Megan's were committed to the bit. Uh, I don't know. I thought the first one was funny. I chuckled at the trailer. Alison Williams is like in on the joke and I think that works.

• 1:10:46Speaker 07

  But, but it. Is a tried and tested formula for a sequel. There you know, that robot.

• 1:10:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Sean Fennessey?

  Make the villain the hero. It's T2.

• 1:10:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:10:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's Terminator 2. I said this on a podcast three months ago and I was mocked and I will not be mocked now. It's they're doing T2.

• 1:11:00Speaker 07

  Yeah. Uh, it's just, is that new villain as interesting as the T1000?

• 1:11:07Sean Fennessey?

  We, well, that's a high bar, speaking of James Cameron. Um, probably not that high, but this is a June movie. Um, I thought it looked fun too.

• 1:11:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay. So I already gave your four, what your number five, you, you wanna, you wanna lay out again for Ballerina, you know?

• 1:11:21Speaker 07

  I, I thought it looked cool.

• 1:11:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 07

  I mean, so sue me. I think On It Armored is kicking ass for two hours is worth, worth paying for.

• 1:11:30Speaker 07

  I'm, I'm, the problem I have is that I have not seen the others, so I should probably spend the next two months doing that.

• 1:11:37Sean Fennessey?

  Were you gonna see Ballerina?

• 1:11:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Sean Fennessey?

  Just for the pod or were you gonna see it with your heart?

• 1:11:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I'll see it with the half my heart.

• 1:11:43Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm. You know who's gonna see it?

• 1:11:44Amanda Dobbins?

  You're.

• 1:11:45Sean Fennessey?

  Craig.

• 1:11:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I was gonna say, I was like, your daughter, I mean, that's called Ballerina. I was like, I have some notes.

• 1:11:49Speaker 07

  No, On It Armored is Craig's favorite, but, but, uh, I think your knowledge of some of the production troubles is tainting your view.

• 1:11:57Sean Fennessey?

  I think you're right. I think you're right.

• 1:11:59Speaker 07

  And I try to put that aside because I, I mean, we both know that many great movies have had troubled paths to the screen.

• 1:12:05Sean Fennessey?

  They honestly, what they did and the, at least the rumor that Chad Stahelsky, who has directed all of the John Wick movies, came in to do some fight choreography and amp up the action sequences. That's only good. I mean, he's just amazing at that. I would say in the, in the extended universe of IP franchises that have come along in the last 25 years, John Wick is in a fairly holy place. It's really, really good. If this movie isn't good, it taints that a little bit, but if it is, I'll celebrate it.

• 1:12:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I like her as an action star also. She was the best part of No Time To Die. We were.

• 1:12:39Speaker 07

  Oh, really?

• 1:12:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, don't, you don't think so?

• 1:12:42Speaker 07

  I thought she was fine, but that whole segment where he goes to Mexico was a little bizarre. Like, they could have cut that out of the movie.

• 1:12:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally, but also.

• 1:12:50Sean Fennessey?

  I think it would have been a way less fun movie without that part.

• 1:12:52Speaker 07

  Maybe, yeah.

• 1:12:53Sean Fennessey?

  It would have been very serious, and it felt like they were like, oh shit, we need something fun to happen here.

• 1:12:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. I was like, why isn't the movie more like that? Why don't we cut Robbie Malick out of this, you know? But that's, that's my opinion.

• 1:13:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, my number four is The Running Man. This was one of the big presentations at Paramount, and seemingly is an important movie for them. It's coming out in November. It's directed by Edgar Wright, starring Glenn Powell. It is an adaptation of Stephen King's story, which was once an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

• 1:13:19Speaker 07

  Famously. You, you, you, if you've never seen the original?

• 1:13:22Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen it. I like it fine.

• 1:13:24Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:13:24Sean Fennessey?

  It is, it is not in my, like, upper echelon of Arnold, nor do I think he's well cast in it.

• 1:13:29Speaker 07

  That is Richard Dawson blasphemy.

• 1:13:32Sean Fennessey?

  It, it, it's in his Hall of Fame. It's on his Mount Rushmore. Dawson is hilarious and great in that movie. Taking over for Richard Dawson as the host of the game show is Coleman Domingo, who is also there, who is, um...

• 1:13:42Speaker 07

  I think a good pick.

• 1:13:43Amanda Dobbins?

  He was great. I mean, he was great on stage also.

• 1:13:46Sean Fennessey?

  He was great on stage. He looks great in the trailer. I thought this trailer was excellent. Edgar Wright, obviously born to do crazy action sequences that have a kind of winking sensibility.

• 1:13:57Sean Fennessey?

  You know, this is a big one for Glenn Powell, too.

• 1:13:59Speaker 07

  Do you think this is a serious action movie? Or do you think it is a winking action movie? Because I couldn't quite tell from the trailer.

• 1:14:07Sean Fennessey?

  I think ultimately the former, but with a lot of the latter mixed in. I think because the stakes are really high and there's a lot of really grisly death in the movie.

• 1:14:15Speaker 07

  Right. I was surprised by how gory it was.

• 1:14:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it looks like it's gonna be very gory. Maybe too, a little too gory for you?

• 1:14:20Amanda Dobbins?

  It's just, his winking gun thing is a little, I like, I let it slide in John Wick because there's so much other, but I, it's, I'm bummed out by it.

• 1:14:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's, it's gonna be very, very violent, but...

• 1:14:31Speaker 07

  Craig was super into this. Like, this is, and he doesn't even know the original.

• 1:14:34Sean Fennessey?

  I'm in the, I'm in the tank for Edgar. I really like his movies, but I thought it looked, even by his standards, like, really kinetic and fast-moving and exciting, so I'm all in on that one. I do know the original, Matt.

• 1:14:43Speaker 07

  That's why I was excited. You do? I won't let you slander me on this show. Oh, I didn't know you knew the original. Yeah, we did the rewatchables on it. Oh, okay. Yeah. I I apologize.

• 1:14:51Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it looks way different and more exciting than the original, right, Craig?

• 1:14:55Speaker 07

  It does, yes.

• 1:14:56Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay.

• 1:14:57Speaker 07

  And he's and Greg is is officially a Glenn Powell fan.

• 1:15:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes. And he's, you know, he is slowly maturing into what we always thought could happen.

• 1:15:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 1:15:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Hold it. I I believe in my stack.

• 1:15:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we never sell. We never sell Glenn. Uh, number four, Amanda.

• 1:15:13Amanda Dobbins?

  After the hunt. Luca Guadagnino back after you all disrespected him. That's fine. Uh, he was in the room. Iowa Debré was in the room. Andrew Garfield was in the room, wearing a new piece of jewelry, but I could see it from it was not the pendant, but it was a a gold chain that I could see from the back of the press.

• 1:15:32Sean Fennessey?

  The David Yurman store at the Forum.

• 1:15:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I hope so. Yeah, well, I hope he has a sponsorship. Come on, he's doing good work.

• 1:15:37Sean Fennessey?

  Good point.

• 1:15:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, Julia Roberts, the star of the movie, was not in attendance.

• 1:15:41Sean Fennessey?

  She was not.

• 1:15:41Amanda Dobbins?

  But she was in the trailer and she does her signature Julia laugh while, um, wearing clothes that were uh, alarmingly similar to what I was wearing at the time of the presentation, which is just like the pants were not the same, but like way too close for comfort. Obviously, she looks much better in them than I do. Uh, listen, I, you know, I'm in on this. My one of my favorite. Listen, I love him.

• 1:16:03Speaker 07

  Okay, but the movie, the actual movie, doesn't it look like a poor man's tar?

• 1:16:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, sure, but like I would.

• 1:16:10Sean Fennessey?

  That sounds like one of the best movies of 2025.

• 1:16:12Speaker 07

  I know. Okay, but it the politics of it seem weird. It's like, it's a little tired. Oh, political correctness gone amok. And who's really, you know, the victim here? And I just, it you gotta really nail that to pull that off.

• 1:16:24Sean Fennessey?

  So it was a blacklist script that was written at a time when campus culture, cancel culture, that those things had a different energy than they have, say, right now. Um, I'll just say from like a filmmaking perspective, I think it's the only movie that we saw aside from the PTA movie that was shot on film.

• 1:16:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Sean Fennessey?

  And you could tell watching it. It just looked different on that big screen. Obviously, Luca is incredibly talented filmmaker. Politically, whether it hits or not, it's kind of important to the movie's success.

• 1:16:52Speaker 07

  It's the whole movie.

• 1:16:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's 90% of the movie. The other half is Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield. So, and I would agree. So I'm, I'm open to it. It's fine. I'm, I'm excited.

• 1:17:04Speaker 07

  Open mind, but I was a little, I was a little bit of an eye roller at some of the, it's also has a little bit of vibe of Disclosure. Remember that movie, the Demi Moore, where it's like,

• 1:17:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure do.

• 1:17:15Speaker 07

  Oh, we're gonna do the sexual harassment movie, but we're gonna make it about the woman as the harasser.

• 1:17:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 07

  You get a little bit of that here.

• 1:17:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll have to wait and find out. Um, that is an Amazon MGM movie, right?

• 1:17:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:17:27Sean Fennessey?

  And that's coming out in October. Uh, I'm, I'm cheating on my number three. Um, I've, I've chosen two films.

• 1:17:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:17:34Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, one of those films is an honorable mention from Matt. I'm, I'm very, very, very cautiously getting interested in Deliver Me From Nowhere. Now, I hate biopics. I hate music biopics.

• 1:17:48Speaker 07

  Oh, really?

• 1:17:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Uh, because I think they like just boil everything down to the barest essentials and have no nuance about what an artist's life is like. And I don't like them. Um, I do like hearing great songs loud in a movie theater. Everybody else does too. This is very soon after A Complete Unknown for this movie to come along. Bruce Springsteen obviously walked the path that Bob Dylan carved in the American post-folk movement. Um, this movie stars Jeremy Allen White. It's directed by Scott Cooper, whose movies I don't always love, to be honest with you. It's about a very specific time in Bruce Springsteen's career when he was getting ready to write and record the album Nebraska. Jeremy Strong also stars as John Landau, his manager slash guru.

• 1:18:31Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I would like for this movie to be great. I was like, literally in real time, like from one second to another, it was like, oh, no, oh, yes, oh, no, oh, yes.

• 1:18:45Speaker 07

  The performances were cool.

• 1:18:46Sean Fennessey?

  It looked like, he looked right.

• 1:18:50Speaker 07

  Hmm, that was my big problem with the footage.

• 1:18:52Sean Fennessey?

  On stage, when they're showing him with E Street, I thought he looked right.

• 1:18:54Speaker 07

  Yes, but, but offstage, they don't even make any effort.

• 1:18:59Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah, physically look like him.

• 1:19:01Speaker 07

  Physically look, and, and I know that shouldn't matter. And it's not a caricature, but it kinda did matter to me. I was like, oh, that's the guy from the bear.

• 1:19:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 07

  Like, it's, it's so weird. Like, you wouldn't, you would almost not even know it was a Springsteen thing until the music kicks in. And like, I don't know, that, that part of it was weird to me.

• 1:19:18Sean Fennessey?

  I know. I, I'm one, that actually makes me more interested in the movie, that it's not just like, you know, glory days for three hours. Like, that's actually not what I wanna see, but that is probably what most people would want to see. Anyway, I'm pairing that with Roof Man, which is just, I have a movie that I have no expectations for a box office.

• 1:19:35Speaker 07

  That was the Channing Tatum.

• 1:19:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Channing Tatum stars as a, um, a man who robs McDonald'ses and is a family man who gets sent to prison and then-

• 1:19:43Speaker 07

  But he's got a heart of gold.

• 1:19:44Sean Fennessey?

  He's got a heart of gold.

• 1:19:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, very straight down the middle. If this movie was not directed by Derek Seinfrance, I probably wouldn't be excited about it, but I love Place Beyond the Pines. This is a very specific kind of thing that he knows how to do about sad guys trying to get reconnected with their families. This is his whole thing. Uh-

• 1:19:59Amanda Dobbins?

  It looked good. It looked fun. Channing Tatum was there.

• 1:20:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:20:02Speaker 07

  I think that is the best version of Channing Tatum, is the sort of hunky loser type, like kind of a lunk.

• 1:20:07Sean Fennessey?

  Agree.

• 1:20:08Speaker 07

  And that's what he's doing.

• 1:20:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Second best. Well, I mean, I guess hunky loser, I mean, he is a hunky loser in that too.

• 1:20:14Sean Fennessey?

  In Magic Mike, yeah. That's what he does well. He's like, presents as a stupid guy, but then by the end you're like, that guy's pretty smart. And that's like his whole MO. But anyway, I thought that looked very charming. Um, Amanda, what is your number three?

• 1:20:25Amanda Dobbins?

  The Venetian Scheme.

• 1:20:27Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 1:20:27Amanda Dobbins?

  You know what? Like I said, we were-

• 1:20:30Sean Fennessey?

  Mad really negging your list.

• 1:20:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Excuse me. This is our podcast.

• 1:20:34Speaker 07

  I know. I'm a guest. I'm wearing out my welcome. There's a reason why I haven't been on since 2017.

• 1:20:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I put on my town hat when I did my town prep and I'm ready, okay? This is a pro Wes Anderson podcast.

• 1:20:47Speaker 07

  All right. I will, I will defer to you.

• 1:20:49Amanda Dobbins?

  He means a lot to me. I chuckled during the trailer, which I really don't even think we need a trailer for.

• 1:20:54Speaker 07

  Were you chuckling at the dialogue, or were you noticing something in the background that was perfectly a jar and was, probably cost $10,000 from some specialty shop in Manhattan?

• 1:21:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I was 17 years old when I saw The Royal Tenenbaums, okay? Like, I, you'll never get me away from it. It's, it's important to me. I like spy movies. I, I like parodies of spy movies. It's, it's great. I'm excited.

• 1:21:17Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it looked good too.

• 1:21:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:21:18Sean Fennessey?

  I'm obviously in.

• 1:21:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I know it's, you know, I, I know what I'm doing when I put The Venetian Scheme on this list.

• 1:21:24Sean Fennessey?

  Matt, I'm gonna have to ask you to hold your three and your two because they're gonna come up on our list very shortly.

• 1:21:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Three, two, and one. Listen, we're all lined where it matters. I was just having a little fun in the...

• 1:21:34Sean Fennessey?

  I'll do my number two and then we can all collaborate on the final three.

• 1:21:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:21:37Sean Fennessey?

  My number two is Weapons. I wouldn't say that this was the movie that had the most hay made about it. It's an interesting one. It was supposed to come out in January, and when the bride moved and one battle after another moved on the Warner Brothers schedule, this is the movie that got moved into that August window.

• 1:21:51Speaker 07

  They like it. They think it's good.

• 1:21:53Sean Fennessey?

  So it's Zach Craigers, his first movie since Barbarian. I love Barbarian. I love Zach. The footage that they showed, I thought was like electric. I thought this was a really, really good horror movie trailer with a great premise, which I'm not gonna spoil anything. I'll just say that in a small town, in a classroom one night, or a class one day, an entire class disappears. All the kids leave their house in the middle of the night and they're gone. Julia Garner is the teacher of this class. Josh Brolin is a parent in the community. It's a really good cast, deeply unnerving.

• 1:22:25Amanda Dobbins?

  It was a great, it was a great trailer and also so great that I said aloud to you, I will never see that because it looks incredibly upsetting.

• 1:22:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So Craigers was there earlier that week presenting his future Resident Evil movie that he's doing for Sony. The fact that this movie got moved into a summer window, this is basically the long legs slot. This is kinda where Long Legs came out last year, that early August look. Could probably be a similar sort of situation. I'm very excited about this movie.

• 1:22:52Speaker 07

  Great. I'm not a horror person. I know Zach Craigers got $20 million for Resident Evil, so he, they, they have seen this and they think this is gonna be a hit. So I, I'm going to agree with you with the caveat that it's just not for me.

• 1:23:11Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I would say... There are three movies that are the intersections of our anticipation and excitement and that I think represent ultimately like maybe what Hollywood, if they tried a little harder, could be more regularly. Um, so three different versions of a certain kind of a movie.

• 1:23:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, we, Sean and I made our lists and so we were divvying them up. So you're, there's one movie that's not on my list, but it would be if we weren't divvying them up. So we can, we can save it.

• 1:23:43Sean Fennessey?

  Your two and one would be on my list if you weren't taking it.

• 1:23:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Also, you and I have the same two and one. They're just, so would you like to say anything to me? Would you like to apologize?

• 1:23:50Speaker 07

  No, I, I, I think that we both have our Venn diagram crosses in subtle ways, one of them being Tom Cruise.

• 1:23:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Speaker 07

  The other being Ryan Gosling.

• 1:23:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:24:00Sean Fennessey?

  Let's talk about Ryan Gosling first. Um, the big surprise I felt of the entire week was that Amazon MGM opened their presentation with basically like a six minute reel.

• 1:24:12Speaker 07

  Cold open too.

• 1:24:13Sean Fennessey?

  Cold open.

• 1:24:14Speaker 07

  No announcements, nothing.

• 1:24:15Sean Fennessey?

  Which no other studio did this whole week of Project Hail Mary, which is a Andy Weir novel. He's the same novelist who wrote The Martian. Somewhat similar story about a man alone in space trying to solve a problem.

• 1:24:28Speaker 07

  Regular guy, yeah.

• 1:24:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Ryan Gosling. I'll try not to spoil too much about it. People who have read this book swear by this book. They love this book. The movie is directed by Lord Miller. Gosling is the star along with Sandra Kuhler. You may remember from Anatomy of a Fall. And what I, what I said on X.com is it looks like a movie movie. This felt like a movie from like 2002, from 1987. It was like, it's a big scale story, but very simple. And in watching the trailer, you were just like, I'm just so interested in what happens next, which is very rare these days. I feel like especially us, we're so cynical about every movie that comes along. And they sold the shit out of this movie.

• 1:25:06Amanda Dobbins?

  This was electric to me. I will say, so Amazon presented on Wednesday night and I had had two cocktails and rapping succession right before the 8pm presentation.

• 1:25:16Speaker 07

  They knew what they were doing. They, they, they did the nighttime thing.

• 1:25:19Sean Fennessey?

  This is the latest presentation ever, I think at CinemaCon, I was told.

• 1:25:22Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, and I think, and I had, I had titrated just right. And then I sat down and they played this trailer that, I mean, the whole room was like, oh, you know, so excited. And then Gosling walked out and that is when I like fully gasped. So they happened. This movie is not coming out until March 2026.

• 1:25:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's gonna be one year.

• 1:25:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, and they moved it, right?

• 1:25:40Sean Fennessey?

  I don't remember what the original plan was.

• 1:25:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. The, the most shocking thing to me about this movie was when it said Lord and Miller. Because, I, I mean, I've never seen, I would not think that they would even want to do a movie like this. Maybe this is their version of Solo that they didn't get to make.

• 1:25:58Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think there's something to that. I mean, they did do the 21 Jump Street movies, which are live action, obviously.

• 1:26:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03Sean Fennessey?

  They're best known, I think, for the animated movies, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatball, Spider-Verse.

• 1:26:07Speaker 07

  But those, those are comedies. This is not a comedy.

• 1:26:10Sean Fennessey?

  It clearly has comic elements, though, maybe even more so than what they showed us, I would say.

• 1:26:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, cuz they're playing up how big it is.

• 1:26:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Um, and you know, they said that all, like, basically none of the VFX were finished, but they showed us one sequence in space that looked incredible and very sophisticated visually and like done. Like, I turned to you and we were watching it, and I was like, is this movie done? Like, why do we have to wait a year to see this movie? Sounds like they have a lot more work to do, but it's very exciting. Obviously, Amazon is incredibly excited about it. It's the kind of movie that, like, movies need movies like that to do well.

• 1:26:39Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I am definitely rooting for this movie. I hope that Lord and Miller, like, get more movies like this. It would be great if comedy filmmakers turned into blockbuster filmmakers.

• 1:26:49Sean Fennessey?

  Agree. Um, let's talk next about Tom.

• 1:26:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:26:53Sean Fennessey?

  So, Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning is your number one. It's Matt's number two.

• 1:26:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, by the way, Project Hail Mary was my number one.

• 1:27:00Sean Fennessey?

  That was your number one.

• 1:27:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Sean Fennessey?

  Um, this is the eighth Mission Impossible film.

• 1:27:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:05Sean Fennessey?

  Could be the last one.

• 1:27:07Speaker 07

  Come on.

• 1:27:08Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Christopher McQuarrie was presented by Tom Cruise with the Director of the Year Award at CinemaCon, which, as we know, is one of the most important awards in all of Hollywood.

• 1:27:14Speaker 07

  In all of Hollywood, perhaps the world.

• 1:27:17Sean Fennessey?

  He did give literally like a 12-minute speech.

• 1:27:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Reading off.

• 1:27:20Speaker 07

  Very awkward.

• 1:27:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, reading off of cue cards.

• 1:27:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Speaker 07

  Why? Someone clearly told Tom that he needs to come to CinemaCon because he needs to present to McQuarrie.

• 1:27:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:27:31Speaker 07

  And that resonated with him. Oh, I can do that. I'll go.

• 1:27:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:27:35Speaker 07

  Because I'm going for him and he's my collaborator. But like, nobody else got their award. Like, remember last year they gave Kevin Costner a fake award onstage? And he was teary and thanked everyone.

• 1:27:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:27:45Speaker 07

  Like, I think some.

• 1:27:45Sean Fennessey?

  They did give Jim Brooks his award.

• 1:27:47Speaker 07

  They did, you're right. And what was his, like, the Cinema Verite award or some made-up thing?

• 1:27:51Sean Fennessey?

  Again, extremely important.

• 1:27:52Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:27:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:27:53Speaker 07

  But, like. It was a long speech about Chris McCrory, who nobody cares about. I wanted to hear Tom Cruise talk about Mission Impossible.

• 1:28:02Sean Fennessey?

  He glanced at moments from his career, but it was the same five or six. You know, you hear the Sherry Lancing, you know, supported me since taps. Like, he has a couple of things he returns to. But the truth is, is that like McCrory literally is the most important director in his life in the last 20 years. They made the most movies together. He's the first person he calls when one of his movies is going sideways. And he's now been directing him in what I think are these genuinely great Mission Impossible movies. If this is in fact, the last one, I would say what they showed us was pretty close to what we've seen before. There were a couple of new wrinkles, a couple of new sequences, but it's a loaded cast. Couple of more people, who, who were the two people who were added? One was, uh, oh my God, what's Ron from Parks and Recreation's name?

• 1:28:43Speaker 07

  Oh, Nick Offerman.

• 1:28:44Sean Fennessey?

  Nick Offerman was featured. There was one other guy who was like in a room, wearing a general's uniform that I was like, oh, him too?

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  Milk Chick from Severance is in it.

• 1:28:54Sean Fennessey?

  Well, Tremel Tillman was in it, but yeah, there was someone, Tremel Tillman from Severance, which was exciting. But there was one other person whose name is escaping me. But aside from that, like, it doesn't even matter. It's just like, it's gonna be a Mission Impossible movie.

• 1:29:04Speaker 07

  Well, and they also interspersed clips, as they did in the previous trailer, from old Mission Impossible movies.

• 1:29:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:29:09Speaker 07

  They're trying to endgame this.

• 1:29:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think specifically the first one and showing us like the arc. Cause there's a lot of stuff of the knock list sequence, breaking into the CIA and kind of cutting back and forth to that. But, um, I, you know.

• 1:29:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I, I get emotional every time I see him say, I need you to trust me one last time. You know, like, okay.

• 1:29:29Speaker 07

  It's a great line.

• 1:29:30Amanda Dobbins?

  And it was, the, the whole week, sort of, this was the Thursday morning presentation, which was the last day. And we all knew Tom Cruise was gonna come out, but they waited until the last 20 minutes. And I just like, you know, and I stayed an extra day to see Tom. It's all built to going to see Tom imperil himself for our, our, our benefit and entertainment. And I can't wait.

• 1:29:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, I will say, and we may maybe say this for the town, but like, the presentation wasn't great.

• 1:29:57Sean Fennessey?

  It was okay.

• 1:29:57Speaker 07

  And like, compared to past CinemaCon moments with Tom Cruise, I was there for Fallout, where they showed the plane stunt and like, just really blew everyone away, the, the, you know, motorcycle thing. This one doesn't seem to have that moment.

• 1:30:12Sean Fennessey?

  They didn't give us that. I wonder if they gave away the game too much by showing us the other, the new plane stunt, early in the making of, even before the trailer, and now we saw it in the trailer, and then we see it again. So if the, the, the two, uh, red and yellow planes, the sort of red Baron plane fight, um, if that is the big sequence, then we've already seen it. I'd be surprised if there wasn't something else, though, that they're holding back.

• 1:30:32Speaker 07

  There was a, a quick flash of him jumping into the water from a, like, speeding boat.

• 1:30:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, that was cool.

• 1:30:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that was cool.

• 1:30:39Speaker 07

  That was very cool. Clearly, he would have died in real life, but most of the time he would have.

• 1:30:43Sean Fennessey?

  It might be the aircraft carrier that we saw. That might be the thing that.

• 1:30:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's right. Oh, yeah. Well, there, there's a whole water.

• 1:30:48Speaker 07

  There's a submarine. They added submarines into the first one. I mean, that's the fascinating thing about this movie is, how much have they pivoted since the last one didn't do that well? Because these were supposed to be one long story. I mean, the end of the last one is, Esa Morales, like, he's still the villain.

• 1:31:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:31:05Speaker 07

  The whole thing is about that internet. What's it called? The?

• 1:31:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean.

• 1:31:10Sean Fennessey?

  The Entity.

• 1:31:10Speaker 07

  The Entity. Yeah. Is that still gonna be it?

• 1:31:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And the cruciform key. Yeah. And he does, the cruciform key is shown in the trailer. He like grabs it and then he dives off to, I don't know, find it at the bottom of the ocean.

• 1:31:21Sean Fennessey?

  I think this is just a fascinating moment for Cruise, this movie in particular, because, you know, his next movie is with Inaritu next year. Is this, like, is there gonna be a break in franchise filmmaking for him? Will he go to a different phase or not? It's possible. If this movie does really well, I think it will have this kind of dual effect of, I could say that I'll table this sort of thing for now, and focus on other kinds of movies, which people like you and I have been begging him to make for 10 years. Or, if it works, does Paramount need him to make nine ASAP? We'll see.

• 1:31:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I don't believe this is the last Mission Impossible. I just don't. It's like, fiscally irresponsible to not do that. Like, you can't, you have to have it in, maybe it won't happen right away.

• 1:32:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04Speaker 07

  But.

• 1:32:04Sean Fennessey?

  People will want it.

• 1:32:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Okay, number one. Uh, this is my number one. This is Matt's number three. Where would this be for you?

• 1:32:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Definitely number two.

• 1:32:15Sean Fennessey?

  We saw an extended sequence from one battle after another. It feels like a moment shortly after the moment in the trailer where Leo is trying to make a connection with the revolutionaries over the phone and he's forgotten the password. What this told me without ruining anything for anybody is that this is, while it is a big, heavy movie with lots of set pieces and locations, that it's basically a weird, zany comedy and the tone is very fast and funny and a little goofy.

• 1:32:46Speaker 07

  Absurdist.

• 1:32:47Sean Fennessey?

  Absurdist.

• 1:32:48Speaker 07

  Like the way, almost the way that Boogie Nights was absurdist.

• 1:32:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:32:51Speaker 07

  Where they're, they all believe they're in the most serious movie that they've ever been in, but we, we see through that.

• 1:32:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Um, I don't want to ruin it for anybody, but this basically, not that I needed any confirmation on my excitement, but I was like, we're good. This is gonna be good. I know this is gonna be good.

• 1:33:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. You referenced Wolf of Wall Street to me in terms of like the, the tone of the Leo performance of, that it's big and a lot going on, but also it's funny.

• 1:33:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:33:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Sean Fennessey?

  So this is a huge gamble. Obviously there's been, you've been writing about what's been going on at Warner Brothers over the last few months and the, the bets that Pam and Mike are making. Um, I will say they, they lifted the Sinners embargo, uh, this morning, two weeks early because

• 1:33:31Speaker 07

  Oh, really?

• 1:33:32Sean Fennessey?

  They premiered it last night and everybody came out screaming, it's great. I did see it a few weeks ago. It is great. I don't, I'm very curious to see how that movie performs, but there's a world where maybe this movie does a little bit better than they thought. They also showed us some of the bride, which I thought was gonna be like a fiasco based on some of the reporting. I thought it looked kinda cool.

• 1:33:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, we turned to each other and we were like, yeah, again, we're wearing our big picture hats right now, Matt. Please, you know.

• 1:33:53Speaker 07

  No, no, I, listen, I thought

• 1:33:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Congratulations to Jessie Buckley, by the way.

• 1:33:57Speaker 07

  It did look different. The bride certainly looks different. The thing that was interesting about One Battle After Another to me is that it feels bigger than the initial trailer. When I saw that first trailer, I was like, how did this movie cost $150 million? Like, what, what are they doing here?

• 1:34:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:34:12Speaker 07

  It can't just be Leo. But then this, this footage they showed, there were helicopters, there were multiple battle sequences, there were things

• 1:34:20Sean Fennessey?

  The Sean Penn military element is clearly a big part of that budget that you're talking about.

• 1:34:24Speaker 07

  And that, to me at least, both creatively, I was more interested in this. I thought it looked better to me. And I think from a studio perspective, like you, you get it a little bit more.

• 1:34:34Sean Fennessey?

  It might be easier for them to sell than we, than we're thinking because it's PTA.

• 1:34:38Speaker 07

  And it was funny. I mean, this is a Lebowski-esque performance from Leo, it looks like.

• 1:34:43Sean Fennessey?

  It does.

• 1:34:44Speaker 07

  That sounds good to me.

• 1:34:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And he was there. He was.

• 1:34:47Sean Fennessey?

  He was there. We'll talk about that on The Town. Should we go to our episode of The Town, Amanda? You want to do that right now?

• 1:34:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, great.

• 1:34:53Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Matt, thank you so much for, uh, coming on the show today.

• 1:34:56Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. I look forward to being back in 2031.

• 1:35:00Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, yeah, I don't know. We should definitely try to do CinemaCon again sometime soon. Um, for the rest of our conversation about the presentations and what to expect from movies in the next 12 months, go listen to The Town as soon as possible. Hopefully, we're double posting. Thanks to Jon Jones for filling in as producer today. Thanks to Matt and Craig Holbeck. Next week on the show, we were gonna do best movies of the year, but I think we're gonna pivot a little bit.

• 1:35:24Amanda Dobbins?

  A little bit on the ground.

• 1:35:25Sean Fennessey?

  It's a little, it's a little thin on the ground. Well put. Um, we are gonna talk about a Minecraft movie, speaking of Warner Brothers, and we'll have like a little bit of a movie State of the Union, because there's a lot of shifting tides at the moment that we need to sort through. And we will recommend some of the best movies that we've seen, right? I've, I've been catching up on some stuff.

• 1:35:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I added one to the list.

• 1:35:43Sean Fennessey?

  You did?

• 1:35:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:35:44Amanda Dobbins?

  One.

• 1:35:45Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, all right, guys. Thank you. See you soon.

• 1:36:06Sean Fennessey?

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