World Movie News: The Last 24 Hours
Big day for the multiplex crowd in the US and Oz, some more great festival news out of Switzerland, and the new releases out today.
Our Movie News headline, of course, is that “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” finally swings into wide U.S. and Australian release today after opening in the UK and other select international markets on Wednesday. (I saw it yesterday with my review to follow shortly.) Tom Holland returns as an adult Peter Parker who’s voluntarily erased himself from everyone he loves, four years removed from “No Way Home”‘s reality-scrambling finale. The film is sitting around 90% “Certified Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes from over 120 reviews, with critics calling it Holland’s most emotionally mature outing yet under new director Destin Daniel Cretton (taking over from Jon Watts). Box office trackers have gotten increasingly bullish by the day: Sony’s own conservative estimate is a $195 million domestic opening, but rival models are now floating numbers as high as $275–300 million, which would make it not just the biggest launch of 2026 but one of the largest opening weekends in movie history. Studios won’t confirm actuals until Monday but from my scanning of seat availability I’d suggest it is a strong opening in the UK: not “Odyssey-seats-unavailable” strong but still good. It’s certainly a good time to be Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jon Bernthal with all 3 actors appearing in the two biggest summer blockbusters – this and “The Odyssey” – simultaneously!
Elsewhere on the release calendar, it’s a genuinely global weekend. Gregg Araki’s raunchy comedy I Want Your Sex, starring Olivia Wilde and Charli XCX, opens in the US (in 4 weeks time in the UK) alongside Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s period drama The Samurai and the Prisoner out of Japan (tbc for a UK release). On the streaming side, Netflix drops the Telugu psychological drama “Rao Bahadur”, with Satyadev starring as a royal figure “stuck in the past,” while Tamil audiences get “Gatta Kusthi 2” and Sony LIV premieres an animated retelling of the Mahabharata’s Karna, “The Legend of Karna”.
In festival news, Locarno has unveiled another round of honors ahead of its 79th edition (August 5–15): Zoe Saldaña will receive a Special Pardo (Special Leopard) for her career, joining previously announced honorees Darren Aronofsky, James Gray, Virginie Efira, and makeup legend Rick Baker. The lineup itself — 233 films from 69 countries, 103 world premieres — includes new work from Hong Sangsoo, Denis Côté, and Albert Serra, plus a starry Piazza Grande slate featuring Olivia Wilde’s excellent “The Invite” and James Gray’s “Paper Tiger”. And closer to home, it has been announced that the Andrew Scott film “Elsinore” is to open this year’s London Film Festival on October 7th. Also starring Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn and Monica Dolan, this 1980s-set film is about the last year in the life of Scottish Chariots Of Fire star Ian Charleson, as he prepared to play Hamlet at the National Theatre in London, which is right next to the LFF venue Royal Festival Hall, before dying of Aids aged 40.
Back at the multiplex, the rest of the weekend’s top five looks fairly settled. Beneath Spider-Man: The Odyssey continues its strong run in second place, with “Toy Story 5“, “Moana“, and “Minions & Monsters” rounding things out in a much quieter tier by comparison. It’s shaping up to be one of the biggest single weekends of the year for cinema-owners, who’ve been waiting for exactly this kind of jolt as the summer progresses. More as the weekend numbers come in.
That’s all for today. Enjoy your weekend movie-watching.
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