What to Watch This Week

Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair premieres today, and The Guardian just called it "absolutely miraculous," which is the kind of word critics reserve for the thing they never expected to work.

Bryan Cranston and Frankie Muniz return for a story set years later. Malcolm has been shielding his daughter from the family chaos that defined his childhood, only to get dragged back for Hal and Lois's 40th anniversary. It joins Scrubs and King of the Hill in what's becoming the golden era of revival shows that actually understand why people loved the original. The secret: don't reinvent anything. Same tone, same energy, same beautifully dysfunctional family. Just older, with the accumulated weight of two decades landing harder than any reboot gimmick could.

Every revival gets announced with dread. This one earned the exception.

Outcome, Jonah Hill's writer-director debut on Apple TV+, landed this week carrying a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 34 on Metacritic, and the distinct energy of a man settling scores with himself in public.

Hill stars alongside Keanu Reeves as a Hollywood A-lister caught in a blackmail scandal. The concept isn't bad. The execution, per nearly every critic, drowns in hyper-saturated visuals and humor-killing style choices that one reviewer compared to "a Gaspar Noé drug trip." Hill segued from Apatow comedies to two Oscar nominations to a Scorsese film. He earned real credibility. Then, per Reddit's reading of the situation, it went directly to his head.

There's a version of this movie that works. This wasn't it.

Patrick Ball cried on camera this week talking about how The Pitt got him out of $80,000 in student debt, and somehow that wasn't even the biggest Pitt story of the week.

Noah Wyle received his Hollywood Walk of Fame star. He told press he negotiated with HBO over the show's ICE storyline for season 2 and warned that the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is "not good for labor." Season 2, episode 14 aired. Emmy prediction articles name the show in every major drama category. Fiona Dourif just joined A Head Full of Ghosts, a horror film produced by Robert Downey Jr. Everything orbits this show right now.

This started as "the ER spiritual successor nobody asked for." Fourteen months later, it's the most vital drama on television.

IGN gave Euphoria season 3 a 4 out of 10 and called it "an overstuffed mess with little heart" that "transforms the show into a wannabe crime drama that's surprisingly boring." That's a lot of adjectives to confirm what everybody already suspected.

Rotten Tomatoes has it at 56%. Labrinth, whose score was inseparable from the show's identity, is gone. His music has been scrapped entirely. Sam Levinson pushed the series into crime-drama territory after a four-year gap between seasons, and the result feels like a show that lost track of its own thesis. The Idol should have been the warning shot. Nobody heeded it.

Euphoria season 1 felt like lightning. Season 3 feels like the power went out.

The Boys season 5 reviews landed this week with phrases like "more sombre than satisfying" and "bittersweet goodbye," which are polite ways of saying the finale doesn't quite stick the landing.

Prime Video's superhero satire wraps five seasons with a final stretch that critics find restrained where it needed to be ferocious. The formula ran its course. Whether the ending satisfies depends on how much closure you demand from a show that thrived on chaos.

Super Mario Galaxy sits at $231M domestic. Project Hail Mary sits at $229M. Separated by the price of a movie ticket, running neck-and-neck in the kind of dual blockbuster sprint that doesn't happen often enough.

Mario pulled $9M on Wednesday alone. Hail Mary continues its IMAX run with late-evening screenings added this weekend. Mario rides family audiences and Illumination's brand gravity. Hail Mary rides Ryan Gosling, hard sci-fi credibility, and an 8.2 audience score. Different demographics, same stratosphere. Meanwhile, Zootopia 2 debuted on Disney+ with 1.7 billion minutes viewed in five days, the kind of number that reminds you the theatrical window keeps shrinking whether Hollywood likes it or not.

Two movies clearing $230M in the same window. Somebody at a studio will still call this a bad year.

Brad Bird's Ray Gun dropped first images this week: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits as a one-eyed alien in a retro-futuristic pulp noir. Bird's first film since Incredibles 2 in 2018. Reddit broke for it.

The Punisher: One Last Kill trailer arrived for the Marvel Television special presentation. Jon Bernthal returns.

Peter Dinklage joins Alien: Earth for season 2 on FX. That cast just got considerably more interesting.

Disney layoffs: up to 1,000 employees cut under new CEO Josh D'Amaro. First wave of changes under new leadership, probably not the last.

Rooster (Steve Carell, HBO) earned a season 2 renewal after five episodes. Quiet show, loud vote of confidence.

Cunk on Cinema announced for BBC and Netflix. Diane Morgan returns as Philomena Cunk to do for movies what she did for Britain, Shakespeare, and the Earth.

Tales from the Crypt hits Shudder on May 1st, its first time on any streaming platform. Thirty years after the last episode aired.

The Mummy (Lee Cronin, director of Evil Dead Rise) opens in 3,200+ theaters next weekend. Warner Bros. is betting big on a horror reimagining. The genre faithful are cautiously optimistic.

Mortal Kombat II tickets went on sale this week, IMAX and 4DX posters in tow, for the May 6 release.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 hit NRG tracking at a $66M opening projection, nearly doubling the original's inflation-adjusted debut. The Michael biopic surged to $61M on the same tracker. Big summer energy is arriving early.