Weekly Digest: 05.11.2026
Weekly Digest For Recent Film Industry News That Caught My Attention For The Week Of 05.11.2026
Introduction
This is your weekly digest for recent film industry news that caught my attention for the week of 05.11.2026.
Recent Film Industry News That Caught My Attention
The Cannes Film Festival kicks off this week, and while we do get some early-year genre films and blockbusters that break into the awards conversation, the first real murmurs of what Oscar season could look like usually begin at Cannes as international and American auteur films jockey for position to build early buzz. Of course, one studio has loomed especially large over the festival since 2019 with Neon. They have won the prestigious Palme d’Or (or golden palme) every single year since then (outside of the cancelled 2020 pandemic edition) and have basically turned Cannes into their personal playground for future awards contenders. Neon enters this year’s festival, which just so happens to have acclaimed director Park Chan-wook serving as Jury President (in a lineup that also includes names like Demi Moore and Chloe Zhao), once again favored to keep the streak alive. Personally though, as an A24 guy, I’m half-jokingly hoping somebody finally snaps the streak and gives Neon a little bit of a hubris check. That said, Neon absolutely delivered one of the best studio lineups of last year for me personally, with multiple films making my year-end favorites list, the most the studio has ever had in a single year from my perspective. They also managed to land two films in the Best Picture lineup for the first time ever. Still, Cannes has also been known to humble presumed contenders very quickly. Just look at Megalopolis two years ago or Alpha last year. So it’ll be fascinating to see how this year’s festival plays out, and once Cannes comes and goes and we have a better outlook on these potential awards hopefuls, I’ll finally have my initial 99th Oscar projections ready to go.
The Academy revealed brand new rules for awards consideration last week, which I decided to hold off on mentioning because more context on the changes was still coming in. There are some smaller tidbits such as the Makeup branch now having to attend at least one of the category’s “bake-off” presentations, voters being required to watch the VFX sizzle reels before voting in that category, and International Feature films now officially crediting the directors during the award presentation even though directors still won’t be formal Oscar winners in the category the way producers and directors are for Documentary and Animated Feature. The two biggest changes, however, are much more interesting. The first is that actors are now eligible to make the same acting category twice in either Lead or Supporting in the same year. That means there hypothetically could have been a world during the 2006 Oscar season where Leonardo DiCaprio not only got nominated for Blood Diamond in Lead Actor, but also managed to make the category for The Departed as well. The Academy allowing this makes me think this scenario has probably already happened during nomination voting multiple times over the years. The other major change is that international films will now be allowed to be submitted directly by their producers if the film was selected to represent its country but only if it won at an approved major film festival. So while this would have helped a film like, say, Anatomy of A Fall, the new rule still would not have helped movies like RRR or even Ran. The Academy’s heart is in the right place here and it is legitimate progress, but it still doesn’t fully solve the longstanding problem of too many acclaimed international films missing out on competing for the International Feature Oscar simply because they were never selected as their country’s official submission.
Ted Turner passed away at the age of 87, and I want to mention him because, for one, he was the boogeyman to a lot of WWE fans (like myself) in the nineties when WWE was able to build up this image of “Billionaire Ted” and WCW coming to shut the company down, even though WWE itself was run by a man who was already worth hundreds of millions and would eventually join the billionaire club himself. Two, Turner gave us twenty four hour news cycles, he was iconic in Atlanta Braves baseball as an owner of the team, he helped to save the species of Buffalo, and he was vital in the cable TV boomlet of the eighties and nineties. But we also have to thank Ted Turner for his commitment to preserving and presenting classic Hollywood films through his efforts of buying film libraries and giving us Turner Classic Movies, which miraculously still thrives today in a media world where golden age Hollywood films struggle to even get proper exposure. Granted, Turner also tried to lead the charge in colorizing these films back in the eighties, and many Hollywood veterans had to tell him to stop; but he alongside ex-wife Jane Fonda still played a huge role in creating generations of film fans, myself included, through TCM airing many of the greatest films of all time uncut and commercial-free. It’s something then rival station AMC eventually stopped being able to promise, and honestly that channel is barely recognizable now compared to what it once was. It went through the same kind of transformation TLC did over the years. But rest in peace to Ted Turner, and I thank him for helping create the chain of events that led me to discovering so many classic films growing up.
Melissa Barrera made some major waves this past week, and sadly I think she low-key made an ass out of herself if I can be frank. Barrera, of course, made headlines when she was kicked off Scream 7 after her pro-Palestine views seemingly got her blackballed by Paramount, who are now owned by the Ellisons and in turn handed the keys of the CBS News division to outspoken Zionist and right-wing figure Bari Weiss. (CBS News’ ratings have reportedly been in freefall since she took over, but I won’t go further on that.)
Barrera’s exit was followed by Jenna Ortega’s, and with that the direction of the franchise shifted away from the newer cast introduced in parts 5 and 6 toward a more nostalgia-driven legacy reboot with part 7. Of course, part 7 ended up receiving poor critical reviews alongside only decent audience scores, but the point is Barrera is clearly still bitter about having that franchise taken away from her. On one hand, I can’t really blame her. I personally wasn’t the biggest fan of Scream 5, 6, or even 7, but I do think she and Ortega were done dirty. I also fully support Barrera’s right to call out the suffering and destruction taking place in Gaza. You can abhor the October 7 attacks and still strongly oppose the actions of the Israeli government since then. However, Barrera did herself and her supporters a disservice in a recent Variety article where she claimed the box office numbers for Scream 7 were completely fabricated by the studio. There’s just no realistic way for studios to get away with that when financial reports and independent trade publications track those numbers closely, and for Barrera to get caught up in that kind of conspiratorial rhetoric is exactly the sort of thing she does not need out there publicly as she reportedly looks to launch her own production company. I also don’t think calling the Scream 7 cast “picket line crossers” was a good idea either, for the record. I support Melissa on a lot of issues, but she should absolutely look into some PR training if she’s going to keep burning bridges this aggressively in interviews.
We got a slew of interesting new movies announced to be in production this past week, including the follow-up to one of my favorite films from 2024, Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes. However, it will apparently be a more self-contained story that moves away from the original idea of building a new trilogy, perhaps in response to the previous film having good box office, critical, and audience scores, but not quite reaching the heights of the prior trilogy’s numbers. We’ll also be seeing a new Hocus Pocus film with the entire trio of Sanderson sisters in Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy poised to return. This third film will actually get a theatrical release unlike the second film’s straight-to-streaming debut, and as someone who considers the 1993 original one of my favorite films from that year and grew up watching it every Halloween season, the sequel was much more middling for me and I can’t pretend I have great faith this third one will be any better.
Nintendo also finally announced that they and Illumination plan to release an animated Star Fox film, likely with Glen Campbell returning to the role he voiced in the latest Mario animated film; I just hope this is an actual movie with actual character arcs unlike the Mario slop fests.
Regal Cinemas have come out with a new version of their iconic rollercoaster ride intro package that plays either right before their trailers begin or when the movie is about to start. A lot of people’s first experience with the theatrical experience tends to be AMC theatres, but when I moved to the states the local theatre close by for hot new releases was a Regal Cinema that had 20 screens, which blew my mind coming from my toddler days in Puerto Rico when the biggest nearby theatre to me had only two or three screens.
My parents took me to that theatre a lot growing up (which now happens to be replaced by an AMC theatre), and the classic Regal popcorn intro would always play. It’s the closest you’ll ever see me having the experience of a roller coaster because I don’t do them. Amazingly, they kept that very same intro around that I watched as a kid in the nineties all the way up to when I was a full-grown man in the mid-2010s, when they finally made a much more modern version of it, and here they are now with yet another new version.
As someone whose closest theatre to him is a multi-screen Regal theatre, I’ll take these any day over their failed attempt to capture the magic AMC did with their Nicole Kidman intro through that cringe movie quotes package that didn’t even last a year.
This Past Weekend At The Box Office
Mortal Kombat II (you can read my review here) barely failed to dethrone The Devil Wears Prada 2 from the top spot, but it’s on track to be a very respectable box office success. The movie has earned the best critical scores a Mortal Kombat film has ever received with a 47 on Metacritic and, as I write this, a 65% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the first film in the franchise to achieve a “fresh” score on RT. As for the audience scores, they’ve been okay but nothing mind-blowing either with a 3.1 on Letterboxd, 7.0 on IMDb, 90% recommending it on the Popcornmeter, and a B CinemaScore. These numbers are actually not that dramatically higher than the 2021 film, but it seems a chunk of critics felt as I did and viewed this sequel as a notable step up from its predecessor, enough to land in the mostly positive territory. With the critical reviews being just positive enough and the nice box office, a third part in this continuity for the franchise is absolutely plausible.
The Sheep Detectives has also enjoyed a nice showing for a British family film, with strong critical reviews (72 on Metacritic and a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes) alongside very good audience scores like a 3.8 on Letterboxd, 7.7 on IMDb, 96% recommending it on the Popcornmeter, and an A- CinemaScore. I still haven’t seen this one as of writing, but I’m hoping to check it off my list before the end of the week.
This Next Weekend At The Box Office
With the industry mostly focused on the middle stretch of the Cannes Film Festival this upcoming weekend, the box office will generally be quiet when it comes to new releases. But we are getting a few small films that have garnered my attention.
We do have a new Guy Ritchie film, In The Grey, which thankfully looks like one of his more fun efforts, but the movie will likely struggle at the box office. Black Bear Pictures, who are brand spanking new to distributing films they themselves produced, have taken up the film’s rights, and I’ve seen almost no marketing for it.
There’s also a brand new Blumhouse horror flick arriving this weekend with Obsession, a movie that has reportedly been gaining strong word of mouth among critics who’ve seen it. My favorite tidbit regarding the making of the film is that its director, Curry Barker, is in fact not related to horror icon Clive Barker.
We’re also getting a thriller in Is God Is, a film adaptation of a play in which two young women seek revenge on their own father for his act of violence against their mother.
What Else Is On My Mind
I hope all mothers out there had a great Mother’s Day weekend. I spoke in the previous podcast episode about how surreal this year’s was for me, given my current wife had started to give up hope that she’d ever become a mom, so I know how precious the opportunity for motherhood is to those who get to experience it.
The NBA and NHL playoffs have each entered the second round, and with both of my teams (the Heat and the Lightning) eliminated from contention, I find myself just enjoying the ride as a neutral observer. I’d get a kick out of seeing the New York Knicks go all the way, but I don’t know if they can beat the Pistons, Spurs, or Thunder. Maybe they can pull off an upset in the conference finals, but the NBA Finals themselves feel like a tall order. As for the NHL, after years of underperforming in the playoffs, the big question for me is whether the Avalanche can get back to the Final as the Presidents’ Trophy curse hangs over them. The Eastern Conference, at the very least, must be breathing a sigh of relief that no Florida team will be winning their side of the bracket for the first time since 2019.