World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
Sony is about to try to dethrone Avengers: Endgame. Locarno is about to try something nobody else in Europe will. And somewhere in the middle, Tom Holland is quietly having the busiest summer of any actor alive.
Here’s what happened in the world of movies during the last 24 hours.
Let’s start with the number that keeps climbing, because it genuinely won’t sit still. Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened yesterday in the UK and the tracking has turned into something close to a live sporting event. A week ago the studio itself was projecting a conservative $195 million domestic opening. Then estimates crept to $260–280 million. As of yesterday, one especially bullish tracker was calling for $330 million-plus — which would make it the second-highest US domestic opening of all time, trailing only Endgame‘s $356 million. Whether that holds is anyone’s guess (tracking a week out has been wrong before, often spectacularly), but even the conservative case makes this the biggest debut of the year, ahead of “Toy Story 5“. Reviews are sitting at a “Certified Fresh” 90-91% on Rotten Tomatoes, so the film clearly isn’t coasting on hype alone. And there’s a nice bit of scheduling irony buried in here: Holland currently has two movies in theaters at once, playing the son of the title character in “The Odyssey” and swinging around as the actual Spider-Man in the other. Two roles, two very different fathers to live up to, one very good month for his agent! One trade columnist floated Holland for a Fred Astaire biopic next, which, if it happens, would be the first time in a while a Marvel lead has gone somewhere genuinely surprising with the goodwill.
Meanwhile in Switzerland, the Locarno festival‘s artistic director just laid out what makes his event different — and it’s a genuinely useful distinction if you follow the festival circuit at all. Giona A. Nazzaro’s pitch is essentially: Cannes gives you one kind of cinema, Venice gives you another, and Locarno is the one place where the programming can follow its own instincts rather than a house style. This year’s edition (August 5–15) leans into that with Hong Sang-soo’s twelfth feature since 2020 (“The Day She Returns”), Denis Côté returning to straight fiction in a dystopian world (“Nobody’s Violence”), and Albert Serra’s Ingrid Caven documentary (“Sixteen Moments of My Life”) all sharing a program. It’s the kind of festival identity that’s easy to state and hard to actually deliver on, so it’ll be worth watching whether the lineup backs up the pitch and whether these also emerge at the upcoming London Film Festival (one of the highspots of my personal calendar).
A few other things worth knowing about today:
- The Odyssey’s UK numbers just landed, and they’re strong enough that Nolan’s film is now credited with single-handedly firing up the UK-Ireland summer box office — a £12.6 million opening weekend across 760 cinemas, part of a worldwide debut Universal is calling a career record for Nolan at $264 million.
- Cannes has already released its full ‘Un Certain Regard lineup’ for next May, and the geographic spread is worth noting on its own: Germany, Austria, Latvia, Chile, Costa Rica, Morocco, the DRC, Rwanda, Nepal, Japan and Lebanon all represented among the 15 selections. Sandra Wollner and Valentina Maurel are the two names festival regulars will recognize immediately.
- Paramount has quietly picked up the rights to The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix’s horror novel, with Christopher Landon attached to write and direct. Landon’s the guy behind Freaky and Heart Eyes, and if you’ve read the book you’ll know it’s less a slasher than a slasher autopsy — a group of women who survived their own real-life Halloween-style massacres, years later, in therapy together. It’s the kind of premise that could either be genuinely sharp or collapse into cleverness for its own sake, and Landon’s had a decent track record lately of landing on the right side of that line.
- On the international side: Yash Raj Films’ Alpha, the Alia Bhatt–led action thriller, continues its theatrical run in India after its July 10 release, while France’s coming slate is stacked with festival-adjacent prestige work — Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales with Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Cassel, and Guillaume Canet’s Karma with Marion Cotillard, both due later this year. It’s a useful reminder that while Hollywood spends July arguing over nine-figure opening weekends, a huge amount of the industry is still operating on a completely different scale and timeline.
Nothing here is really connected except the calendar — a superhero sequel about to break records, a Swiss festival betting on not looking like its neighbours and a British blockbuster still counting its money three weeks in. But that’s usually what a single day in this industry actually looks like!
That’s all for today. I’m not sure I’ll get to post this round up every day, but when I do it will be with a round up for the news since I last posted. Let me know if you find this new set of movie news posts useful!
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