What to Watch This Week

Nine years after Tom Cruise's Mummy buried Universal's Dark Universe before it had a second movie to bury, Lee Cronin has answered with a version so gory and so committed to splitting every other shot with a diopter that no one can accuse him of playing safe.

Cronin came off Evil Dead Rise, so the blood was never in doubt. What's surprising early reviews is how much of it actually works. A journalist's daughter vanishes in the desert; eight years later she's returned, and something came back with her. Natalie, the young actress at the center of it, keeps getting singled out in reviews. TMDB has the film at 7.5 with the vote count climbing by the hour. Horror Reddit keeps reaching for Fulci comparisons, which is a weirder compliment than it sounds. Critics are more split; one reviewer counted so many split diopter shots that the count itself became the review's running joke.

The 2017 Mummy was a committee movie. Cronin's is the opposite problem, if it's a problem at all. One director, making very specific choices, some of which you'll hate and the rest of which you'll remember.

Beef's first season ended the way a perfect short story ends, which is to say nothing about it asked for a sequel. Then Lee Sung Jin made one anyway, and Netflix just dropped it, and the thing is excellent.

Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan play the new escalating couple, with Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny rounding out the central quartet. The setting moves from strip mall to country club; the slow-unraveling chaos stays exactly the same. Reddit's review thread is sitting at a 91% upvote ratio with reviewers already calling Mulligan's performance the ceiling of the season. Meanwhile Malcolm in the Middle's revival added 8.1 million Hulu/Disney+ views in its first three days, the platform's biggest premiere of the year, which means both of this week's big back-catalog bets are working.

The case against legacy projects is that they exhaust the original's goodwill. These two are doing the opposite: getting people to rewatch what made the originals count.

Three weeks in, Project Hail Mary is still pulling $1.9M on a Wednesday. Super Mario Galaxy is still pulling $2.7M on the same day. That's the money-printing press running in a month nobody expected to matter.

Hail Mary's audience score now sits at 8.2 with the vote count past 1,400. Amazon MGM used CinemaCon to swear a "blood oath" to exhibitors for 15 theatrical releases a year, which is industry-speak for noticing that the Gosling space movie just made them look like geniuses. Exit 8 also opens wide this week, the English-language adaptation of the Japanese liminal-horror short, already dividing horror fans between "that's the whole point" and "nothing happens." The Mummy enters the mix tomorrow, which gives multiplexes something that hasn't happened since last spring: four genuine reasons to show up in the same weekend.

Meanwhile Cinema United's Michael O'Leary called an emergency CinemaCon meeting because AMC's Adam Aron endorsed Ellison at Paramount and the other exhibitors think he cut a side deal. The box office is healthy. The people running it, less so.

A week at CinemaCon used to mean panels about exhibition technology. This year it meant every dormant franchise signing a waiver and walking back into the ring.

Top Gun 3 is official with Cruise returning, Spaceballs got its sequel title (the deeply Mel Brooks-y Spaceballs: The New One), Spielberg debuted the Disclosure Day trailer with a "considerable, lengthy" original John Williams score, and Robert Eggers' Werwulf reportedly shocked the room with Aaron Taylor-Johnson's full-transformation scene. Amazon MGM confirmed a new World War Z. Avengers: Endgame is getting a theatrical re-release with new footage bridging it to Doomsday. The Street Fighter trailer broke the discussion board with 9,153 upvotes and nearly 1,900 comments in a day. Brady Corbet revealed his next project is a four-hour X-rated Western about American occult history starring Selena Gomez.

The next five years of theatrical slates were confirmed in a single week. Whether that's a sign of confidence or panic depends on which studio tanker you're riding.

The Pitt's season 2 finale aired this week, and the 9:00 P.M. episode thread hit 323 comments within hours of airing with an 87% upvote ratio. That's not a vocal minority. That's the entire room agreeing.

The show wrapped fifteen episodes with the same trick it pulled all year: the end of a shift feels both like a catastrophe and like nothing unusual, because that's what a night in an ER actually is. Noah Wyle's Walk of Fame star from last week now reads less like a career lap than a lifetime achievement nod for a guy who's currently at his peak. HBO has stayed quiet on a season 3 order, but an essay this week titled "Watching The Pitt at the End of an Era for HBO" caught 412 upvotes, which tells you how people are reading the silence.

A prestige era doesn't end with a whimper. It ends with the best medical drama in twenty years airing its best season.

NBC canceled Law & Order: Organized Crime after five seasons on Thursday and renewed SVU for a 28th season on Friday, which is as clear a signal about network procedural economics as anything that's aired this year.

Christopher Meloni's return was supposed to be the back half of a long reunion arc with Mariska Hargitay. Instead it became a standalone that Peacock eventually absorbed and then dropped. Mariska endures. She always does.

Game of Thrones: Aegon's Conquest got its title at CinemaCon, flagged for 2027 and beyond. HBO is not in a hurry, which may be the first time that sentence has been true about anything Thrones-adjacent.

FROM renewed for a fifth and final season at MGM+. Five years to end a show whose mystery box was always going to have to pay off. Now it has to.

World War Z sequel lands at Paramount. Brad Pitt not yet attached, which is the polite way of saying he will be or the movie won't matter.

Bob Odenkirk and David Cross announced a documentary where they hike Machu Picchu together, reflecting on thirty years as a comedy team. 20,000 upvotes on the announcement post, which is the kind of number you only see when Reddit actually wants the thing.

Euphoria season 3 pulled 8.5 million viewers in three days despite the 4/10 reviews, which either means HBO's marketing is a cheat code or Gen Z decided to hate-watch it through the end.

Reed Hastings exits the Netflix board after the WBD bid collapsed and the stock ripped anyway. Netflix just posted a massive earnings beat, so this is a victory lap, not a stumble.

The Caretaker (Sydney Sweeney, David Bruckner directing) landed at Universal. Hellraiser, The Night House, now this. Bruckner has the trust of the horror crowd. Sweeney keeps finding the right rooms to be in.

Michael (April 22) is Antoine Fuqua's Michael Jackson biopic, the first real stress test for music biopics after a year of middling returns. Jaafar Jackson plays his uncle. The Jackson estate cooperated. What that produces depends entirely on whether Fuqua's willing to say the hard parts out loud.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 debuts on NRG tracking with a $66M projected opening, nearly double the original's inflation-adjusted debut. Streep is back. Anne Hathaway, back. Emily Blunt, back. The audience asking for this is real and large.

Mortal Kombat II tickets are on sale for the May 6 release. Johnny Cage has been added. 4DX posters are circulating. The first movie made more than it deserved to; this one plans to do the same.