Monday, April 13
Angel Studios
Angel Studios will kick off the first day of CinemaCon studio presentations by unveiling their theatrical lineup alongside fellow independent studios Row K and StudioCanal.
Angel Studios is still a relative newcomer to CinemaCon. They made their conference debut in 2024 with a luncheon presentation that served as a well-deserved victory lap: Their Sound of Freedom gave us the Cinderella story of 2023, going head-to-head with major summer tentpoles over the Fourth of July weekend to eventually become one of the 10 highest domestic grossers of the year.
As an independent distribution outfit, several qualities set Angel Studios apart, among them a diverse array of genres, robust grassroots marketing, and a willingness to push films into wide release during competitive, high-traffic windows that outfits of their size tend to avoid. This year, Angel has staked a claim to the first weekend in May for director Andy Serkis’ animated retelling of George Orwell’s seminal novella of social critique, Animal Farm. Two months later comes Young Washington, a historical drama about George Washington’s early military career, coming to theaters, appropriately, on Fourth of July weekend.
Though the exact titles were still a mystery as of press time, we can make a few educated guesses about what else we might see in Angel’s presentation based on past slates. Expect a variety of different genres, ranging from historical drama and animation to documentaries, action/adventure, and live-action family titles. The casts of those films will likely boast some A-list name recognition; in Young Washington and Animal Farm alone, Seth Rogen, Ben Kingsley, Woody Harrelson, and Glenn Close are set to stand out on movie posters. And, finally, Angel Studios is not likely to shy away from holiday-adjacent release windows, where their films will compete with bigger titles, providing exhibitors with much-needed counterprogramming options that will allow them to connect with a wider swath of moviegoers during key periods on the calendar.
Sony Pictures
The big headline from Sony’s CinemaCon presentation last year was the Fab Four. Sam Mendes is directing a quartet of movies about the Beatles, with each film focusing on a different bandmember… and all will come out in April 2028. As that’s a long way off, we can’t expect to see much in the way of footage, but fingers are crossed that Sony will have something on hand to get exhibitors excited about four of Hollywood’s brightest young stars: Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, playing one of the most heralded rock bands of all time.
Stepping back to 2026 on the release calendar, hopefully Sony will have a few minutes to devote to their specialty divisions, anime distributor Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures Classics, which are an important part of the cinema ecosystem, particularly among art house theaters. But we all know one thought will prevail as exhibitors file into the Colosseum on opening night: I want pictures of Spider-Man!
Or, rather, Spider-Men, because Sony has a few on the calendar. First up is Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, closing out the summer—and hopefully driving ticket sales well into the typically slow autumn months—with a July 31 release. Holland’s first trio of Spider-Films ended with 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, a box office behemoth that gave us a genuine cultural moment when it brought previous Spidey actors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield into the current Spider-Man canon. Where do we go from here? No Way Home gave us such a satisfying ending to Peter Parker’s arc that it’s strange to think of his story starting up again. CinemaCon’s best moments come when a filmmaker who can really sell their vision takes the stage, communicating their point of view and infecting the audience with enthusiasm. We are optimistic that Brand New Day director Destin Daniel Cretton will fulfill the brief, answering “Why make another Spider-Man movie?” with something other than “Because they make money.”
Another Spider-Man trilogy comes to a close in June 2027 with the release of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, the long-awaited follow-up to 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse and 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse. The animation style (or, really, styles) of the Miles Morales Spider-Man trilogy is known to be incredibly labor intensive, so even before the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes temporarily halted voice recording work, there was an air of “Are they actually going to finish this thing?” about the film. Assurance that Beyond the Spider-Verse is on track for its release date would surely elicit a sigh of relief from exhibitors. Any new footage would just be the icing on the cake.
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