Tuesday, April 14
Neon
Neon continues to demonstrate a keen eye for acquisition. At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, the company secured North American rights to Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent; Oliver Laxe’s Jury Prize winner, Sirât; the animated feature Arco; and Fjord, an upcoming film from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. The Cannes pipeline has become central to Neon’s brand identity, with the distributor landing North American rights to every Palme d’Or winner from 2019 through 2025, including Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, and Anora. Heading into 2026, the indie studio is once again positioning itself at the center of the prestige conversation, pairing auteur-driven projects with big genre plays.
Joining CinemaCon during the State of the Industry presentation, Neon has four titles on the calendar at press time, along with undated projects acquired at Sundance and the aforementioned Fjord, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve. The folk-horror film Hokum, the third feature from Oddity director Damian McCarthy, is set for a May 1 release. Adam Scott stars as an author who travels to a remote area of Ireland to scatter his parent’s ashes at a haunted rental house. On May 22, I Love Boosters compiles a star-studded cast for Boots Riley’s crime comedy centering on a group of shoplifters.
Neon horror continues on June 19 with Leviticus, the feature debut of writer-director Adrian Chiarella. The queer coming-of-age horror film about two teenage boys battling a violent entity capable of assuming each other’s form was picked up quickly at Sundance in a seven-figure deal. An untitled horror film has also been dated for July 10, arriving in the same corridor the distributor previously leveraged in 2024 to breakout success with Longlegs. At the festival, Neon also boarded an untitled project from It Ends filmmaker Alexander Ullom.
Neon acquired the buzzy documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem at this year’s Sundance, which consists of 1974 cocktail party conversations with Harlem Renaissance figures. Originally conducted by actor and filmmaker William Greaves, the footage was restored and posthumously assembled by his son David. With the 79th Cannes Film Festival coming up in May, expectations are high that Neon will once again emerge with coveted titles for its fall slate.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. will present their 2026 CinemaCon slate alongside a pretty big elephant in the room: A potential acquisition of the storied studio, with offers from Netflix and Paramount still in the running as of press time.
Regardless of what the future holds for parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chairs and CEOs, have certainly earned a CinemaCon victory lap based on the fantastic critical and commercial performance of their 2025 slate, which kicked into high gear during last year’s CinemaCon with the release of A Minecraft Movie. As CinemaCon draws to a close this year, Warner Bros.’ The Mummy will be opening in theaters—the fourth release in what has the potential to be a strong year for the studio.
Among Warner Bros.’ 2026 slate, one film with something to prove is Mortal Kombat II, which was shifted from its earlier October 2025 release to May 2026 in the wake of positive reception to its first trailer. A strong showing for the film during CinemaCon could go a long way toward reviving the film’s marketing campaign, which will have to contend with consumer confusion as to whether or not the movie did, in fact, come out in October.
Midway through the summer, Warner Bros. is set to release one of its most highly anticipated films, director Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl, the follow-up to last year’s Superman and the second film from Warner Bros.’ DC Studios division. With moviegoers already somewhat familiar with Supergirl from her brief appearance in 2025’s Superman, Warner Bros. would do well to spend some time on Clayface, slated to open in October this year.
DC Studios is just one of Warner Bros.’ many ongoing franchises, a list that includes The Conjuring, the Godzilla and King Kong–starring Monsterverse, Minecraft, Evil Dead, and Dune, with the last of these getting its third theatrical installment smack in the middle of the 2026 holiday season. Though footage from upcoming titles The Conjuring: First Communion, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, and the still-untitled Minecraft, Evil Dead, and Dune installments would set the Colosseum floor abuzz, it’s Warner Bros.’ upcoming original titles that would most benefit from an early peek. These include live-action/animation hybrid Animal Friends, out this May, which has the added hurdle of being an R-rated comedy in an era when R-rated comedies struggle to break out more often than not. The list of creative talent behind Warner Bros.’ other 2026 offerings gives us a bevy of celebs who could, potentially, take the stage at Caesars, among them Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor (Flowervale Street); Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Digger); and from this September’s sequel to cult favorite Practical Magic, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.
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