If the whole world was like Patton Oswalt, nobody would worry about the future of movie theaters. As the emcee for the Warner Bros. presentation at the annual exhibition conference CinemaCon, the comedian told a roomful of theater owners and operators in Las Vegas this week that he saw 117 movies in 2025. The audience roared in approval. Oswalt was one of our own.
While not everyone can reach that high bar, the industry crowd at CinemaCon projected a considerable uptick in confidence at the latest edition, which wrapped on Thursday.
Multiple presenters noted that theatrical attendance for 2026 was already 23% higher than this time last year, with the growth largely attributed to healthy turnouts for Project Hail Mary, Hoppers, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. A survey released by Fandango, one of CinemaCon’s top sponsors, found that Gen Z is the most active moviegoing demographic. Digital natives, who grew up in the streaming era, haven’t given up on the big screen.
History suggests that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Onstage to discuss his upcoming alien coverup thriller Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg noted that he was born the same year as the mass adoption of television throughout American households. Despite his very early credits on Night Gallery and Columbo, Spielberg has directed 35 feature films across more than 50 years that lean into the singular nature of the theatrical experience. That work has inspired countless filmmakers from later generations, including several that appeared at CinemaCon to promote their own work, from Christopher Nolan to Denis Villeneuve.
Spielberg’s personal history provided a healthy reminder that movies — and, by extension, moviegoing — is a young cultural format. Enough people appreciate the collective experience to save it from extinction anytime soon.
Michael O’Leary, the president and CEO of the organization behind CinemaCon known as Cinema United, looked to the future in his own remarks from the stage. Acknowledging this summer’s 250th anniversary of the United States, he recalled a childhood memory from 50 years ago. His father laughed when the young O’Leary asked if he might live to see the country turn 300, adding that he’d be lucky to witness another 50.
And so he did. “I know that someone, 50 years from now, will stand on a stage like this, in an auditorium full of theater operators to celebrate the wonder of our industry,” O’Leary said, “and chart a path for yet another century of movies on the big screen.”
Long before that happens, audiences have a very busy year ahead. Beyond all the business talk of mergers and acquisitions, theatrical windows, and other inside baseball, CinemaCon was centered around studios presenting teasers for the most promising movies on their slates. Here are some of the highlights.
Animation Sensations
Last year’s Zootopia 2 made nearly $2 billion at the box office, officially making it the highest-grossing animated movie of all time, beating out 2024’s Inside Out 2. The appetite for mass-market animated movies has never been stronger, and the year ahead suggests that momentum will continue.
DreamWorks Animation hosted an early work-in-progress screening of Forgotten Island, an imaginative original story from the directors of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish that blends Filipino mythology with a charming coming-of-age story, as two high-school best friends contemplating life after graduation get transported to a magical land that threatens to steal their memories.
Some parents who grew up on animation franchises will have the chance to take their children to the newest installments. Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated movie, came out over 30 years ago; Ice Age followed in 2002. Both films have new entries previewed at CinemaCon, though Toy Story 5 comes out first. Disney’s Pixar screened two very amusing scenes from the movie (introduced by a charismatic Tom Hanks and Tim Allen) in which the original group of toys must contend with the dreaded existential threat of screen time — in the form of a smarmy kids’ tablet named Lily Pad — taking their child away from them. Beyond its usual charms, Toy Story 5 looks to be the series’ most topical entry.
Then there was Monsters and Minions, which is much more than the sixth movie to feature the tiny yellow humanoids first seen in Despicable Me. Set in the 1920s, Minions and Monsters finds a group of wayward critters stumbling into movie stardom against the backdrop of Hollywood’s early days. The colorful extended clip shown at CinemaCon included several spot-on references to the slapstick giants of the era, from Harold Lloyd to Buster Keaton. Children may very well discover these titans of comedy thanks to this colorful-looking tribute — a welcome conduit for movie buff parents like myself.
Pictures of Pixels
Studios have been churning out videogame adaptations for years now with no sign of slowing down. Mortal Kombat 2 opens next month, followed by Street Fighter in October, and both fighting game franchises used the CinemaCon stage to build buzz. A live-action Zelda movie just wrapped production, while Paramount teased developing adaptations of hit games Bloodbourne, Helldivers, and Call of Duty.
The most exciting presentation on this front came from Sony’s reboot of the Resident Evil series, directed by Zach Cregger, whose Weapons was among last year’s most exciting and unexpected genre hits. Cregger’s new take on Resident Evil looks like a propulsive, real-time zombie survival story that transforms the terror of the gameplay into cinematic intensity. Cregger, a professed gamer himself, seems to have made a movie that translates the appeal of the franchise into cinematic form. More of that, please.
Big-Time Biopics
With everyone from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen has received the biopic treatment in recent years, many of the icons from the second half of the 20th century continue to see fictionalized versions of their stories come to life. Amazon MGM revealed a promising trailer for I Play Rocky, the behind-the-scenes drama about Sylvester Stallone’s chaotic Rocky production 50 years ago, while Snoop Dogg showed up to celebrate the upcoming production of his own life story, Snoop. NFL fans can look forward to Jonathan Levine’s Mister Irrelevant: The John Tuggle Story, featuring David Corenswet as the underdog football star.
Superhero Swings
Marvel and DC continue to unleash dueling superhero movies at a dizzying rate. This summer’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day dropped a trailer that shows Tom Holland’s web slinger contending with a world in which his girlfriend and best friend have forgotten him, while the animated Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse looks like next-level pop art. Crowds went wild for Milly Alcock saving a spaceship in a clip from Supergirl, and then went even wilder when Robert Downey Jr. showed up to reveal that Chris Evans was returning as Captain America for December’s Avengers: Doomsday. It would appear that the world will need a lot of saving at the cinema in the months ahead.
A Continuing Comedy Comeback
After the successful reveal of the Naked Gun reboot at last year’s CinemaCon, lowbrow comedy continues to make a comeback. A trailer for the latest entry in the Scary Movie franchise found the Wayan brothers and Anna Faris onstage reminding audiences that they’re responsible for a masterful series of horror spoofs that deserve more sequels as long as the horror genre continues to proliferate. The romcom One Night Only, which envisions a world in which sex is illegal outside of one night per year, was teased with a montage about how romcoms deserve a comeback. Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro teased Focker-in-Law, which arrives 26 years after Meet the Parents.
The zaniest comedy on display is one of the most unlikely franchises to survive all these years: The upcoming Jackass: Best and Last finds prankster Johnny Knoxville and his merry band of masochists back for the fifth and (apparently) final installment of a series in which people get intentionally hurt for the sake of comedy gold. Inexplicable as it may sound, the CinemaCon clips suggest that the subversive Jackass humor has lost none of its edge over the past 30 years.
Monster Mayhem
The monster movie has been a reliable box office formula since 1933’s King Kong and recent hits have kept the phenomenon in sprightly form. There’s another Godzilla and Kong movie in the works as well as a third entry in A Quiet Place, but CinemaCon audiences were most enthralled by Japan’s Godzilla Minus Zero (a sequel to the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One), the Korean alien invasion battle movie Hope, and Nosferatu director Robert Egger’s latest reimagining of a classic monster trope with the medieval black-and-white gothic horror Werewulf.
Specialty Delights
Fans of filmmakers with a singular touch should look no further than Boots Riley’s imaginative comedy I Love Boosters, which the rapper-turned-director touted as he planned to embark on a college tour. (I’ve seen, and loved, this ambitious satire in which Kiki Palmer plays the ringleader for a ragtag group of shoplifters. Chloe Dumont’s corporate thriller A Place in Hell, which stars Michelle Williams and Daisy Edgar-Jones as warring lawyers, showed awards season potential in its extended trailer.
Previous Oscar winners with upcoming movies include Martin McDonagh with the CIA comedy Wild Horse Nine and Pedro Almodovar’s Bitter Christmas, while Anora director Sean Baker’s Italian sex comedy Ti Amo! was announced as the first acquisition by Clockwork, the new special division of Warner Bros.
Scary Fun
Horror franchises from multiple eras have new entries on the horizon, including Insidious: Out of the Further, in which the monstrosities from another dimension find their way into ours. Sam Raimi previewed Evil Dead Wrath (though it’s not slated to come out for another two years) with a gnarly scene in which a victim gets impaled on a dishwasher.
But I was personally most surprised by the mayhem of Other Mommy, in which Jessica Chastain plays both a loving mother and a terrifying entity who haunts her young child. I get shivers just thinking about it now, and can’t wait to see the whole thing.
Wild Survival Stories
CGI wizardry has enabled adventurous animal-centric live action sagas that were once unthinkable without a leap of faith on the part of audiences. Brad Pitt crash-lands in a dangerous wilderness with his combat dog in Heart of the Beast, an action movie from director David Ayer that promises canine action scenes just as prominent as human ones.
That tense preview was matched by Whalefall, the gripping story of a diver who attempts to survive getting eaten by a sperm whale. The brief scene previewing his fate was as unsettling and claustrophobic as it sounds. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen a whale gullet in the intense, closeup it receives here. Audiences were reeling from the sequence and eager to find out what happens next. For Disney, which produced the movie, that was the point. The buzz starts here. It’s slated for October.
IMAX Auteurs
There’s no bigger way to make a statement on moviegoing than to make movies for the largest possible screens. Several A-list directors surfaced at CinemaCon with new work aiming to do just that. Villeneuve previewed the breathtaking first seven minutes of December’s Dune: Part Three, a relentless intergalactic battle sequence that played like a sci-fi riff on the opening of Saving Private Ryan.
Spielberg, meanwhile, showed off more footage from June’s Disclosure Day that promised a number of riveting action and chase sequences beyond the alien conspiracy plotline, and even James Cameron came by with Billie Eilish to preview Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour, a 3D IMAX concert movie certain to please fans of the acclaimed pop star in much the same way that Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour did in 2023.
Alejandro G. Iñarritu showed up with Hollywood’s biggest theatrical advocate, Tom Cruise, to show off his gonzo turn as disaster-prone oil baron at the center of the satiric Digger, which was shot on the large-format VistaVision. And John Favreau unleashed an extensive opening sequence from Mandalorian and Grogu, while stressing that the first Star Wars movie in seven years is much more of a capital-M Movie than an adaptation of the Mandalorian series he helped create for streaming.
But the warmest welcome landed with the arrival of Christopher Nolan, whose Oppenheimer was a surprise global success, as he strode the stage to introduce a scene from his upcoming Odyssey. And what a scene it was: The first movie ever shot entirely on IMAX cameras — opening July 17 — looks like a tense and relentless action thriller, judging by the extended sequence Nolan shared.
The scene features Matt Damon and his fellow Greek warriors hiding inside a creaky Trojan Horse as they attempt a surprise invasion of Troy. The score is a constant, throbbing beat. There’s an innate joy to witnessing one of the most famous attack scenes in the history of literature elevated to blockbuster heights.
Nolan didn’t even have to show off his 50-foot cyclops to make it clear that Odyssey will feel larger than life in every frame. As long as filmmakers keep delivering movies that can do that, the medium is secure in theaters. That was the central message of this year’s CinemaCon. Put more simply: Let the big screen cook.
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