Charles Bramesco

The movie studio has set plans for a Hunger Games/Twilight-themed amusement in South Korea.

Channing Tatum’s a delight — fleet-footed dancer, lovably lunkheaded actor, and crooner of the occasional showtune, he’s got more of a claim to the title of America’s sweetheart than just about anybody. But while I may love Channing Tatum, and you may love Channing Tatum, he’s got one critic he just can’t seem to win over: his four-year-old daughter Everly.

I know that this very web site has declared a personal fatwa against slowed-down pop songs in movie trailers, but I can’t help but feel like the spots advertising the upcoming remake of Joel Schumacher’s 1990 cult object Flatliners won’t be complete until they’ve tapped a creepy children’s choir to cover the Doors’ “Break On Through (To The Other Side).” It’s perfect! The song is about permeating the boundaries between life and death, the film deals with the same topic (only with what appear to be unsettling CGI zombies in the mix), it’s bananas that some enterprising ad executive hasn’t made the connection.

Our children won’t believe us when we tell them that there used to be doubt over whether a female-fronted superhero movie would work at the box office. Even at present, the days of studio executive hand-wringing over whether audiences would deign to shell out their precious $11.75 to see a film in which a woman — who was not a man — did superhero things feel favorably remote. For director Patty Jenkins and her marble-carved star Gal Gadot have proven beyond all debate and rage-choked internet commenting that women are perfectly capable of making a whole mess of money during blockbuster season. And now it’s official.

The British espionage agency must team up with their American cousin to defeat Julianne Moore.

Sandra Bullock has been relatively quiet as of late. She starred in Our Brand Is Crisis and lent her vocals to Minions in 2013, which means the last time anybody actually saw her face (sorry, Our Brand Is Crisis) was in 2013’s Gravity. Presumably, she’s been getting some quality time with the family while waiting for the right script, which has hopefully come in the form of the all-ladies Ocean’s 8 due next year. But today brings the news that the former Miss Congeniality has now laid plans for another future project, and this one’s going online.

It may be hard to believe now, but there was once a time when studios would wait until a release had proven itself at the box-office before investing in a massive franchise around it. But the likes of DC, Marvel, and the future firee at Universal who came up with the Dark Universe boondoggle have now set a standard of placing the cart before the horse, and other studios cannot help but follow suit. Fox is the latest showbiz entity to go all-in on an untested concept, banking that the respectable profits generated by that Goosebumps movie from 2015 that you’ve already forgotten about shall be a bellwether for future riches.

While you and I may know July 3rd as “Fasting in Anticipation of Tomorrow’s Onslaught of Grilled Meats Day,” a certain subset of conspiracy-monger recognizes it as World UFO Day. Apparently, one such believer resides at Sony, as the studio released a mysterious new video on the 3rd and included the hashtag #WorldUFODay in the caption on YouTube. In it, a glowing green air traffic controller’s matrix appears on screen with some slightly-garbled dialogue in the background about an enigmatic foreign craft entering their airspace. While some may find its significance confounding, Spielberg fans recognized the clip straightaway.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that in the film A Bad Moms Christmas, there will be moms, they will be bad, and it will be Christmas. The sequel to 2016’s sleeper hit has now gotten its first trailer, and if nothing else, I can confirm for you beyond any shadow of a doubt that A Bad Moms Christmas will star a collection of moms, all of whom will indulge in varying levels of badness. This year, the reason for the season is mom-ing, and doing it badly.

The universe of The Conjuring just keeps expanding outward. James Wan’s ’70s-set creepfest made swimming pools of money for New Line Cinema, which made a greenlighting a sequel pretty much a no-brainer. When that film sold like hotcakes too, New Line moved onto an Annabelle spinoff and a scheduled sequel, a solo project for the demon nun that torments Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, and yet another spinoff for the bowler-sporting Conjuring 2 villain known as The Crooked Man. And now the seventh film in the connected Conjuring world has been announced, promising more highly lucrative scares for New Line.

As Shane Black works on his planned Predator reboot, details continue to leak out of the production. The latest concerns a new casting notice with greater significance than one might think – an Easter egg embedded in a specific actor’s mere presence. Friends, the Busey family legacy is about to be carried on by the next generation.

Will The Emoji Movie be horrible? We just don’t know. The premise of “Toy Story, but with the little pictorial icons that live inside your smartphone” sure sounds like something that an executive with an analytics page for a heart would come up with, but it’s the critic’s responsibility to reserve judgement until the film can be seen in full. At least today brings us a bite-sized sample of The Emoji Movie with a new trailer that contains both a painfully out-of-fashion “Bye, Felicia” reference and a sincerely humorous joke about forgotten phone passwords. So it’s really anyone’s guess, at this point.