Warner Bros. brought the biggest swing of the week to the Colosseum at Caesars Palace — and arguably the most star-studded afternoon any studio has delivered in years. Tom Cruise showed up. Denis Villeneuve showed up. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman showed up. The studio that won 2025 wasn’t coasting on momentum; it was pressing the gas.
The day opened with a broader industry context courtesy of Vista Group, whose message was a familiar one, now sharpened by current conditions: cinema has always found a way to survive, and the obstacles have never been greater. Affordability is among the most pressing. Yet the theatrical business endures — and on this particular afternoon, Warner Bros. made the case that it means to lead it.
Patton Oswalt, the comedian and devoted cinephile who saw 117 movies last year, hosted the presentation. He declared Warner Bros. the winner of 2025 before handing the floor to the people responsible.
Pam Abdy & Mike De Luca: A Studio Running Full Speed
Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca, Co-Chairs and CEOs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, took the stage together — two executives who, not long ago, had their jobs on the line. The reversal has been total. In 2025, they delivered eleven films and earned $4 billion at the global box office. Films like Sinners, Weapons, and One Battle After Another defined the year.
They are not slowing down. Fourteen films are planned for this year. Eighteen for next. Their message to exhibitors was simple and direct: they respect the audience and intend to keep swinging big, to own their failures, and to make more high-quality films that pull people out of their homes and back into theaters. That commitment, they promised, only deepens from here.
Jeffrey Goldstein, President of Global Theatrical Distribution at Warner Bros. Pictures, was also present, representing the studio’s full commitment to the theatrical partnership with exhibitors worldwide.
Warner Bros. Clockwork: A New Home for Bold Originals
One of the session’s most significant announcements was the launch of Warner Bros. Clockwork, a new specialty film label within the Warner Bros. umbrella dedicated to original, auteur-driven work. The first acquisition under the banner is Ti Amo! from Academy Award-winning director Sean Baker (Anora). Clockwork’s mandate, as Abdy and De Luca framed it, is to give ambitious, original voices a home at a major studio — a commitment to cinema as art alongside cinema as commerce.
The Upcoming Slate
Minecraft II
Jack Black appeared to announce that the world of blocks is getting a second chapter. Minecraft II is officially in development — a crowd-pleasing reveal from one of last year’s breakout franchise hits.
Remain
M. Night Shyamalan appeared via video to unveil his next film for Warner Bros.: Remain. The filmmaker known for tightly guarded premises kept the details close, offering little more than a tease — but the title and his presence were enough to generate real excitement.
Panic Carefully
Director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) followed with what may be one of the more formally striking films of the year. Panic Carefully, starring Julia Roberts and Elizabeth Olsen, is a paranoid thriller shot entirely in IMAX’s towering 1.43:1 ratio — a deliberate, full-frame choice that Esmail framed as essential to the film’s suffocating tension.
Panic Carefully — A paranoid thriller from Sam Esmail starring Julia Roberts and Elizabeth Olsen, filmed entirely in IMAX’s immersive full-frame format.
Ocean’s Eleven Prequel
Margot Robbie appeared to introduce a chapter in the Ocean’s saga no one saw coming: a prequel set not in Vegas, but at the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix — and centered not on Danny Ocean, but on his parents. Before Danny ever walked into a casino, two masterminds taught him everything he knows. Robbie stars alongside Bradley Cooper, who will also write and direct the film.
Ocean’s Eleven Prequel — Before Danny Ocean became a legend, his parents were already pulling off the impossible — an epic heist at the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix.
Bad Fairies
Cynthia Erivo was announced as the lead voice of Bad Fairies, an animated musical from Warner Bros. Pictures Animation that follows a rebellious gang of fairies shaking up their magical world. Erivo voices Jayne Staplegun, a trailblazer whose defiant streak ignites a revolution — with original songs by the Six: The Musical duo Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss.
Bad Fairies — An animated musical comedy about a delightfully subversive fairy named Jayne Staplegun, whose rebellious spirit sparks an all-out magical uprising.
Margie Claus
Melissa McCarthy is Margie Claus — and when Santa goes missing on Christmas Eve, it falls to his wife to assemble a rag-tag team of long-retired reindeer and find him before Christmas morning.
Margie Claus — When Santa disappears on Christmas Eve, his resourceful wife Margie takes charge to rescue him and save the holiday.
Shiver
Keanu Reeves is coming to Warner Bros. in a film directed by Tim Miller (Deadpool). Shiver is a sci-fi time-loop thriller set in the Caribbean Sea, following a smuggler who finds himself surrounded by bodies, hostile mercenaries, and hungry sharks — forced to relive the nightmare until he can break the cycle.
Shiver — A ne’er-do-well smuggler trapped in a deadly time loop must fight off mercenaries and sharks to survive a job gone catastrophically wrong in the Caribbean.
Godzilla x Kong: Supernova
The Monsterverse continues with Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, the next chapter in the franchise built for the biggest screens possible.
Godzilla x Kong: Supernova — The world’s mightiest titans face a cataclysmic new threat in the next chapter of the Monsterverse, built for IMAX.
An Untitled Nancy Meyers Comedy
After eleven years away from the director’s chair, Nancy Meyers is back — and she is bringing a stellar ensemble with her. Her untitled new comedy for Warner Bros. stars Kieran Culkin, Penélope Cruz, Jude Law, and Owen Wilson, set inside the world of filmmaking itself: a filmmaker and producer, once romantic and creative partners, reunite to make a new film together — and navigate everything that comes with it.
Untitled Nancy Meyers Comedy — Two estranged creative partners reunite on a high-stakes production, reigniting old sparks and old complications in the world of moviemaking.
The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum
The return to Middle-earth is taking shape. Warner Bros. announced new cast for The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Andy Serkis, who also reprises his iconic role as Gollum. Jamie Dornan joins the cast as Strider — the alias of a young Aragorn — alongside returning legends Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Elijah Wood as Frodo.
The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum — Before the Fellowship was formed, Gandalf and a young Aragorn hunted the creature carrying the One Ring across Middle-earth.
The Digger — Tom Cruise & Alejandro González Iñárritu
The afternoon’s most unexpected and electric moment belonged to Tom Cruise and director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who arrived on stage together to speak directly to the theater owners in the room — with gratitude and without reservation.
Cruise made clear immediately what this appearance meant: he is here for exhibitors. For the people who run the theaters. The partnership between moviemakers and the theaters that show their films was, for him, the subject of the entire address.
The film is called The Digger. Cruise plays a character named Digger Rockwell — a role he described as representing forty years of accumulated craft brought to bear on a single performance. The idea for the film came nine years ago. Two years later, conversations with Iñárritu began. By Iñárritu’s own account, he was not prepared for what Cruise had in mind.
Iñárritu described it as a true high-wire act — unlike anything he has made before. He had to learn an entirely new way of working to make this movie. Cruise, he said, was his fearless collaborator throughout. The film was shot in VistaVision.
Cruise described the film’s meaning with characteristic directness: “The film is about all of us. Humanity. The uncontrollable need to control things.” And more quietly: it did not set out to change the world, but to change the way we see it.
The first footage confirmed a tone that surprised the room. The Digger, for all its scale and ambition, is a comedy — a comedy, as Iñárritu put it, of catastrophic proportions.
The Digger — Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, a man whose desperate need to control an uncontrollable world sends everything into spectacular, deeply human chaos.
The End of Oak Street
Director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) returned with his most ambitious film yet, produced through Bad Robot. The End of Oak Street stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor in a story where the entire suburban street they call home has been mysteriously transported — lifted from its foundations and dropped somewhere else entirely. The trailer confirmed that whatever is out there in that unknown landscape, it has teeth. And claws. And scales.
The End of Oak Street — A suburban family discovers their entire street has been mysteriously relocated to a dangerous, unknown world teeming with ancient threats.
New Line Cinema: Nobody Knows Horror Like New Line
New Line Cinema arrived with a full horror showcase. As their own banner put it: nobody knows horror like New Line.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
Lee Cronin, the director behind Evil Dead Rise, takes on a new mythology with Lee Cronin’s The Mummy — a supernatural horror film about a family devastated when their daughter vanishes in the desert, only to have her returned to them years later in ways that shatter any hope of reunion. Produced by James Wan and Jason Blum.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy — Eight years after a girl vanishes without a trace in the desert, her return to a broken family becomes something far worse than grief.
Evil Dead Wrath
The Evil Dead universe continues to expand. Evil Dead Wrath, directed by Frances Galluppi and set for 2028, was announced as the next entry in the franchise, with Lee Cronin and Bruce Campbell executive producing alongside Sam Raimi.
Evil Dead Burn
The more immediate entry is Evil Dead Burn, which screened an absolutely gnarly first trailer at CinemaCon — featuring the kind of gore New Line and the Evil Dead universe have perfected over four decades. Sam Raimi produces under the Ghost House Pictures banner, with Bruce Campbell and Lee Cronin serving as executive producers.
Evil Dead Burn — The Evil Dead legacy blazes on with a new family, a new terror, and the franchise’s signature brand of visceral, relentless horror.
Mortal Kombat II
The fighters are back. A scene from Mortal Kombat II was shown on the Colosseum screens, putting Johnny Cage front and center as he squares off in a confrontation with Shao Kahn — a sequence that had the audience in its grip from the first frame.
Mortal Kombat II — The tournament escalates as Earth’s champions face their most powerful enemies yet in a brutal, high-stakes battle for the fate of two worlds.
WB Pictures Animation: The Cat in the Hat
Warner Bros. Pictures Animation announced its very first theatrical feature: The Cat in the Hat. The presentation embraced its own chaos — Thing 1 and Thing 2 ran on stage, and every single person in the Colosseum received a blue wig for what became a massive, gloriously silly group selfie.
The first trailer revealed an imaginative world: when the Cat arrives, the kids are transported to a place made entirely of their own memories — a concept that promises to be as visually dazzling as it is emotionally rich.
The Cat in the Hat — When the Cat arrives and whisks two kids into a world built from their own memories, the adventure is as wild as the imagination itself.
DC Studios
Peter Safran, Co-Chairman and CEO of DC Studios, took the stage to map the expanding DC Universe coming to theaters.
Man of Tomorrow
The Superman sequel has a title: Man of Tomorrow. David Corenswet returns as Clark Kent alongside Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor — and the dynamic between them is central to everything. Cameras roll next month.
Corenswet offered a hint at the dynamic: “Try saving the world with your sworn enemy.” Hoult added that audiences can expect “a new villain and an unlikely alliance” at the heart of the story. James Gunn described it as equally a Lex Luthor movie and a Superman movie, with both characters forced to cooperate against a much, much bigger threat.
Man of Tomorrow — Superman and Lex Luthor are forced into an uneasy alliance as a threat emerges that neither could face alone.
Clayface
Director James Watkins (The Woman in Black) is bringing one of DC’s most distinctive and unsettling characters to life. Clayface was presented as a horror-thriller first and a superhero film second — with a focus on character, on transformation, and on the terrifying ambiguity of a man whose face, and identity, are made of clay. The teaser confirmed the film will go to dark places.
Clayface — A body horror thriller following the DC villain Matt Hagen, a man whose malleable, unstable form makes him as dangerous to himself as to everyone around him.
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow
The Supergirl presentation was the DC segment’s emotional centerpiece. Director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) appeared alongside Milly Alcock, who plays Kara Zor-El, and Jason Momoa, who joins the DCU as Lobo — a role Momoa described as a childhood dream come true.
Gillespie made clear the film’s ambition from the start: the entire movie takes place off-planet. He spoke about the challenges Alcock embraced — five languages her character needed to learn, action sequences that evolved throughout production. Momoa had just fifteen days of shooting, but those days included, by all accounts, a bike and a massive fireball.
Alcock, when asked what she will remember most from the experience, answered simply: “Everything.” She reflected on what it means to be the first Supergirl that many young girls will get to meet — a complex female hero, designed to be seen on a big screen, with the kind of sound that fills a theater.
The footage confirmed the film’s scale and strangeness. A sequence aboard what can only be described as a space bus — equal parts Mos Eisley Cantina and deep-space heist — establishes Kara in a world of alien pirates, a dying dog, and a moral core that cuts right to the bone. The line that lingered: “He sees the good in everyone. I see the truth.”
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow — Kara Zor-El, adrift in the cosmos on her 21st birthday, is drawn into a quest for vengeance across an alien landscape she was never meant to survive.
Practical Magic 2
Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman walked out together, and the Colosseum went with them completely.
The story of how Practical Magic 2 came to exist is, by both women’s telling, not a studio decision — it’s a matter of fans simply refusing to let the story go. The Owen sisters are back. Sally and Gillian are returning to a home they once shared, their past finally catching up with them, their destinies and family pulling them forward. Bullock’s Sally is single, with a black cat. Kidman’s Gillian has kids.
Remarkably, the production rebuilt the original house on the cliff — and was able to film in a real first floor rather than a sound stage. Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing both return, and Kidman described working with the same cast and crew again as a genuine gift.
Kidman captured the spirit of the reunion: “Midnight margaritas, jumping off the roof, and our past catching up with us.”
The teaser trailer ran. The room was not ready.
Practical Magic 2 — The Owen sisters reunite at the house on the cliff, as old magic, buried secrets, and the destinies they once ran from come rushing back together.
The Great Beyond
J.J. Abrams returning to original filmmaking is a story unto itself — his first original feature since Super 8 in 2011, and his first time in the director’s chair since The Rise of Skywalker. He spoke about why: “At a certain point, I really felt like I needed to get back to telling original stories — to that sense of wonder we once had as kids, and to protecting that.”
The Great Beyond stars Glen Powell, Jenna Ortega, Samuel L. Jackson, and Emma Mackey in a film Abrams described as refusing to be contained by any single genre — not just a thriller, not just a mystery, not just science fiction. The footage shown suggested extensive, immersive world-building. A scene confirmed the stakes, the chemistry, and an entry point into something genuinely new.
The Great Beyond — A mystery unlike any other — J.J. Abrams’ original film sends its characters across the threshold of the known world and into something they were never meant to find.
Dune: Part Three
The presentation’s closing act belonged to Denis Villeneuve’s trilogy finale, and the director treated the theater owners in the room as he always does: with total seriousness, and total respect for the experience he is asking them to provide.
Denis Villeneuve took the stage alongside Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and Jason Momoa — preceded by dozens of Fremen, some suspended from the ceiling on wires. It was an entrance worthy of the film it introduced.
Villeneuve described the tonal arc of his trilogy with precision: the first film was meditative, the second was a war film. This one is a thriller — and more emotional than either of its predecessors. Seventeen years have passed in the story’s timeline. Paul Atreides’ dreams have come true, and they have become a nightmare. What remains is the question of how he protects those he loves as he becomes something darker than he ever intended.
Seven minutes of opening footage screened for the audience — a love story between Channi and Paul playing out against the full weight of everything Paul has done and become. The room felt it.
Dune: Part Three — Seventeen years into Paul Atreides’ reign, his worst vision has come to pass — and the man who was once a dreamer must now reckon with the empire he built and the people it has cost him.
The Bottom Line
Warner Bros. did not present a slate. They presented a manifesto. From the launch of Warner Bros. Clockwork to the revelation of The Digger, from the resurrection of the Owen sisters to the closing of the Atreides saga, the studio made an argument — case by case, star by star — that the theatrical experience is worth fighting for. Not because the business demands it, but because the stories do.
The exhibitors in the room got something rare on Tuesday: a studio that looked them in the eye and said, we are here for you. Tom Cruise said it plainly. The slate said it louder.
Reporting from CinemaCon 2026, Caesars Palace / The Dolby Colosseum, Las Vegas.
