What to Watch This Week

Antoine Fuqua's Michael Jackson biopic opened Wednesday with $12.5M+ in Thursday previews, a Verified Hot popcornmeter, an A- preview CinemaScore that Cinemascore itself went out of its way to call "not final," and a $90M domestic projection that would put it second only to Project Hail Mary's $80.5M for the biggest opening of 2026. In Germany it's tracking 6.7% ahead of Bohemian Rhapsody. Universal paid about $75M for international rights, and the film cleared $18.5M on its first international day, a record opening for a musical biopic across most territories.

The reviews are the reviews you get when a film costs $200M, runs 127 minutes, depicts its subject as a secular saint, and casts a blood relative as the lead. Jaafar Jackson gets the concert footage right in a way that multiple reviewers describe as spiritually unsettling, and almost everything that happens when nobody's holding a microphone is pitched somewhere between hagiography and Walk Hard sincerity. Mike Myers plays an executive. Miles Teller, whose production company is behind the film, cast himself as himself. Roughly 30% of the shot material reportedly got cut, which means Lionsgate has a second Michael movie ready whenever it wants one.

None of which will stop it from clearing $100M this weekend. The fans who wanted this want it regardless of craft, and the people who'd never buy a ticket weren't buying one anyway. The interesting number isn't the opening. It's the legs. Biopic audiences drop fast, and Lionsgate needs $150M domestic just to break even on a film where Universal already took the international upside.

Netflix dropped the animated Stranger Things spinoff this week and the Reddit consensus is that it looks like a Telltale cutscene someone forgot to finish. A 3/10 review was the top r/television post on premiere day, describing the series as "a transparent attempt to preserve Stranger Things in pixels rather than amber." That's a generous reading. The less generous one is that Netflix needed content to fill the hole left by the Witcher collapse and a failed WB bid, and Stranger Things was the only franchise it could actually mass-produce.

The kids are back. Hawkins is back. It's winter 1985. What isn't back is the reason anyone cared in the first place, which was watching actual humans react to the sublet-from-hell. Animation is not a lesser medium. This particular animation is a lesser product.

Beef S2, meanwhile, is still trending, mostly for the revelation that Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan wore earwigs during their scenes to listen to music between takes. Netflix reportedly spent a fortune in post editing out the visible devices. That's the kind of bill you eat when your lead performances are the reason people showed up. Tales from '85 doesn't have that problem.

Six weeks in, Project Hail Mary is still pulling $1.67M on a Wednesday for a $290.89M domestic total. Super Mario Galaxy is doing $1.8M on the same Wednesday. Michael lands now, Devil Wears Prada 2 next weekend, Mortal Kombat II the week after. The people who called April 2026 a dead month for theatrical have had that opinion surgically removed. Exhibitors haven't had this many sustained weekday earners in the same window since 2019, and the Gosling space movie gets the ribbon for it.

The movie Warner Bros. shelved for a tax write-off dropped its trailer this week from Ketchup Entertainment, the distributor that bought it outright, under the tagline "the movie the ACME corporation doesn't want you to see." That is the cleanest piece of marketing jiu-jitsu of the year, and 25 million views across Ketchup's socials in 24 hours suggests the internet agrees.

Wile E. Coyote hires Will Forte as a billboard lawyer to sue the defective-products company that keeps dropping anvils on him. Foghorn Leghorn is apparently integral. The live-action and animation hybrid is being pitched as a Roger Rabbit descendant, and the trailer actually backs that up, which is more than can be said for most animation-adjacent IP getting trotted out in 2026.

The pettiest possible outcome is now visible on the horizon. If this opens well in August, every dollar it earns is a dollar Warner Bros. voluntarily handed to a competitor rather than distribute itself. Zaslav already looked bad for shelving it. He'll look worse for selling it.

Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders approved Paramount Skydance's $110 billion megadeal with a 99% vote this week. They also voted against the exit pay packages for David Zaslav and the other executives who engineered it. That is the clearest possible way of saying "take the money and go."

A Hollywood petition opposing the merger crossed 4,000 signatures, with Robert De Niro, Sofia Coppola, Holly Hunter and Martin Scorsese on it. The Writers Guild East and West issued a joint statement. Representative Zohran Mamdani urged a no vote on behalf of "thousands of jobs at risk." None of it mattered. The shareholders wanted out, the bid cleared, and now the regulatory gauntlet starts.

David Ellison hosted a "private dinner honoring Trump" the same week he cleared the last major hurdle on his CNN acquisition. Read that sentence again. If you wondered what this merger was actually about, the answer is now a matter of public record rather than speculation.

James Gunn confirmed Clayface is in fact a horror film, which tracks with the Mike Flanagan script, the James Watkins direction, and a teaser that plays like Darkman grafted onto The Fly. Tom Rhys Harries plays a rising Hollywood actor whose descent into monstrousness is apparently the whole point rather than an origin beat. October 2026 release. The tone is a bet that superhero cinema's path forward is genre fragmentation rather than another team-up.

Darrell Sheets, "The Gambler" from Storage Wars and one of the original four cast members who defined an entire reality-TV subgenre, dead at 67. Dean Tavoularis, the Oscar-winning production designer who built Michael Corleone's office for The Godfather and Kurtz's compound for Apocalypse Now, dead at 93. David Wilcock, the History Channel's resident alien researcher, dead at 53 following a reported mental health crisis. Three very different Americas losing their voices in the same week.

Miami Vice '85 locked Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler as its leads under Joseph Kosinski. The pivot to the pilot's actual era (not a revival timeline) is the right call. Kosinski plus Jordan plus Butler plus synth-pop Miami is the only version of this anyone should have been trying to make.

The Simpsons Movie 2 nabbed $22M in California production tax credits, a signal the state is finally serious about clawing animation jobs back from Vancouver.

Silo S3 got a release date and a teaser, ending a year of Apple TV silence. The Juliette Nichols arc finally pays off.

Dexter: Resurrection S2 is filming in NYC with Desmond Harrington upgraded to series regular.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair streams May 22 on Peacock, which is the first time the four-hour cut has been legally available anywhere.

Netflix authorized a $25B stock buyback and dropped its WB pursuit. Reed Hastings exited the board. The company just posted a massive earnings beat. Read it as a victory lap, not a stumble.

Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz are engaged, which wouldn't normally make this column except it was the only piece of celebrity news this week that Reddit seemed to be in a good mood about.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (May 1) brings Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Tucci back, with NRG tracking a $66M opening that would nearly double the original's inflation-adjusted debut. The audience wanting this is real, large, and has been waiting twenty years.

Chainsaw Man: The Movie - Reze Arc streams on Crunchyroll April 30. MAPPA has been building toward this since the S1 finale, and the Reze arc is the point where Fujimoto's manga stops warming up. 8.3 on TMDB with 800+ votes out of Japan is not a coincidence.

Half Man (April 28 on HBO) is Richard Gadd's follow-up to Baby Reindeer, which means the bar is Emmy-high and the discourse cycle is already warming up. Weekly release. HBO is betting the slow drip beats the binge.