Unlike ComicCon, which is geared towards fans, CinemaCon targets cinemas.
Studios use the annual 4-day gathering to showcase their upcoming movie slates. The content that brings customers to the cinema comes from Hollywood. The better the movies, the more traffic cinemas can expect, the more money they will make.
As such, studios use CinemaCon to reveal footage and trailers for movies that cinemas will show over the next 12 months, aiming to excite owners. In that regard, CinemaCon is just as relevant to the public because it also gives us an idea of what our cinema-going calendar looks like.
If you noticed a sudden spike in the number of brand-new trailers on YouTube, CinemaCon is to blame. Studios debuted that footage at CinemaCon before eventually releasing the trailers online for the rest of the world to see.
Predictably, Avengers: Doomsday is still the talk of the town. Ignore the fake trailers flooding the internet. We know what the CinemaCon crowd saw because articles describing the footage are everywhere, and they sound like a dream come true.
Sadly, Disney has yet to release the trailer to the public, which is clever because the descriptions alone have raised public anticipation to new heights. Don’t forget that Doomsday is still seven months away.
Many films stumble because they release their trailers too early, so by the time they finally come out, the buzz has already died down. With Doomsday, Disney is better off hiding the trailer until June or July. In the meantime, the descriptions are enough to keep us sated.
Meanwhile, we finally have a release date for Spiderman: Beyond The Spiderverse. In case you forgot, Across The Spider-Verse ended on a massive cliffhanger. The third film should have premiered in March 2024, but it was delayed indefinitely.
We had so little news for so long that Miles Morales fans began to wonder whether Beyond the Spider-Verse would ever air. Some people theorized that the Shameik Moore (Miles Morales)/ Hailee Steinfeld (Gwen Stacy) drama had derailed the project.
Moore made some creepy comments about Steinfeld on social media when she announced her engagement. The speculation online was that Moore had confused fiction with reality (In the animated film, Gwen Stacey is Miles Morales’s love interest). But it looks like things are back on track.
Beyond the Spider-Verse is slated for release on June 18, 2027. Sony Pictures is making an R-rated animated Bloodborne, which is mildly disappointing. I would have loved to see the video game’s eldritch horrors recreated in live-action.
I mean, the game is already animated. An animated adaptation does not bring anything new to the table. Also, does anyone remember those horrible Netflix animated adaptations of The Witcher?
Tom Cruise has joined forces with Alejandro Inarritu (Birdman, The Revenant) to bring us Digger. Cruise plays an elderly oil tycoon tasked with saving the world from destruction, and I can’t tell you how amazing it feels to see the actor in an original property.
Cruise has been stuck in the Mission Impossible universe for far too long. Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day does not feel particularly special, not to me. But everyone else disagrees, probably because Spielberg has not made a summer blockbuster of this ilk in a long time.
I am more interested in the director’s next project, which is supposedly a Western. I don’t know if Spielberg has ever played in that genre before. Whalefall was CinemaCon’s biggest surprise.
Attendees were treated to a nail-biting clip in which a whale swallows a man whole. The novel (authored by Daniel Kraus) that inspired the adaptation has been praised for maintaining scientific accuracy while explaining what it would mean for a human to survive inside a whale.
The protagonist in question is a scuba diver who has one hour to escape the whale’s stomach before he runs out of oxygen, which should give you an idea of why CinemaCon attendees reacted so strongly to Whalefall. CinemCon gave us plenty of reasons to be hopeful. Now, 2026 needs to actually deliver on those promises.
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