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👋 Good morning. Brands dropped a record $8M per 30 seconds on Super Bowl ads last night. Some used that real estate to go full film festival: Yorgos Lanthimos directed two spots (including Emma Stone's art-house meltdown for Squarespace), Spike Jonze turned Ben Stiller into a deranged techno-disco singer for Instacart, and Joseph Kosinski went from 'F1' to a Michelob Ultra ski commercial. Elsewhere, Sabrina Carpenter built a boyfriend out of Pringles, singing toilets pitched hydration for Liquid I.V., Dunkin' reassembled the '90s sitcom universe (Urkel sighting included), and about a dozen AI companies showed up trying very hard not to be scary.
Welcome back to The Dailies, your Monday morning shortcut through Hollywood. Today: box office, SAG-AFTRA, and awards season. Grab your coffee, let's get into it. 👇
BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN
🎟️ The Super Bowl sacked the box office…
Kevin James in this week’s newcomer ‘Solo Mio’
🏝️ Send Help: (Wk 2) $10M domestic weekend (-48%), $35.8M domestic total, $53.7M global. $40M budget. Sam Raimi's survival thriller holds the top spot over Super Bowl weekend, now his seventh-highest domestic grosser and Rachel McAdams' biggest lead role since 'Game Night.'
❤️ Solo Mio: 🆕 $7.2M domestic opening. $4M budget. Angel Studios' Kevin James rom-com played well with Angel's faith-and-family audience, scoring an A- CinemaScore and 95% RT audience score. James' biggest opening as a lead since 'Here Comes the Boom' in 2012.
🩸 Iron Lung: (Wk 2) $6M domestic weekend (-67%), $31M domestic total, $34.4M global. Sub-$3M budget. A -67% drop sounds rough, but most of the audience was Markiplier's built-in fanbase who showed up day one. His self-distributed directorial debut has made roughly 10x its budget domestically, which is the kind of math that makes traditional studios stare at the ceiling.
🎤 Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience: 🆕 $5.6M domestic opening, $19.1M global. Bleecker Street's K-pop concert topped the charts on Friday, then watched Sunday sales fall off a cliff (-88% from Saturday) once the actual Super Bowl kicked off.
🧛 Dracula: 🆕 $4.5M domestic opening, $33.2M global. $52M budget. Luc Besson's vampire redo couldn't move the needle much domestically despite decent overseas numbers, with $11.5M from Russia doing the heavy lifting.
🐰 Zootopia 2: (Wk 11) $4M domestic weekend (-32%), $414.5M domestic total, $1.8B global. $150M budget.
🌋 Avatar: Fire and Ash: (Wk 8) $3.5M domestic weekend (-38%), $391.5M domestic total, $1.4B global. $400M+ budget.
🔪 The Strangers: Chapter 3: 🆕 $3.5M domestic opening. $8.5M budget (trilogy shot for ~$20M net total). A complete rejection by audiences with a D CinemaScore, 26% definite recommend, and 19% on RT, opening at less than a third of Chapter 1's $11.8M. Lionsgate says the trilogy is still profitable when booked as one film.
🔫 Shelter: (Wk 2) $2.4M domestic weekend (-56%), $10M domestic total, $16.8M global. $50M budget.
👠 Melania: (Wk 2) $2.4M domestic weekend (-67%), $13.4M domestic total. $40M acquisition + $35M P&A. The First Lady's doc sank fast in its sophomore frame, matching ‘Iron Lung's’ steep decline and confirming a front-loaded, fan-driven audience. Amazon MGM is banking on Prime Video streaming value to justify the hefty price tag.
The bigger picture: Super Bowl weekend lived up to its sleepy reputation with an underwhelming $61M total domestic haul, down 26.5% from last week but still up 10.7% over the same frame in 2025. Bitter cold across the East Coast and the actual game kept audiences home, while studios wisely avoided launching any big-budget tentpoles into the Big Game’s shadow. The 2026 YTD box office sits at $748.8M, +9.7% ahead of 2025's pace. Next weekend looks livelier as Sony's animated 'Goat,' Emerald Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights' starring Margot Robbie, and MGM's 'Crime 101' all step up to the plate.
CLOSEUP
🎬 SAG-AFTRA is heading back to the table today…
SAG-AFTRA heads back to the negotiating table with the AMPTP today, nearly three years after a 118-day strike that nobody wants to talk about and everybody's still recovering from. The early start (almost five months before the contract expires June 30) is by design, and there's cautious optimism a deal could land as soon as March.
Both sides have new leadership. New SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin has said he'll bring a "respectful, responsible" tone to the table. On the studio side, Greg Hessinger replaces longtime AMPTP negotiator Carol Lombardini. Hessinger is a former SAG executive director with deep ties to union leadership.
Among the big issues on the table…
AI and the “Tilly Tax”: The 2023 deal's AI protections are already looking like they were written in a different era, which, in AI years, they were. The new pitch: if a studio uses a synthetic performer instead of a real actor, it pays a royalty into union pension and health funds, essentially making AI actors cost the same or more than real humans. The name comes from Tilly Norwood, the fully synthetic AI actress that freaked everyone out last fall.
Streaming residuals: One of the big wins from 2023 was a "success bonus" that would pay out when a show hit a viewership threshold (20% of a platform's domestic subscribers in its first 90 days), projected at $40M annually. It has fallen well short. The metric is so hard to hit that theoretically no show on a platform could ever qualify if viewership is spread across enough series. There's talk of reworking the metric to something ranking-based, so at least the top-performing shows trigger a payout.
Health and pension: All three guilds' plans are running on fumes. The AMPTP may propose record contributions in exchange for a five-year contract instead of three. DGA president Christopher Nolan has already pushed back, noting that a five-year deal signed in March 2020 would've aged like milk.
Exclusivity: Streaming shows can go years between seasons, and series regulars are often locked into options waiting to hear if they're picked up, leaving them unable to book other work. The 2023 deal raised the exclusivity pay threshold significantly, but in practice, no second show wants to cast someone with a potentially complicated schedule. So the fix hasn't fixed much. Expect this to come up again.
Looking ahead… There's a real chance these initial talks don't produce a deal and pick back up in June after the other guilds have their turn. The WGA's contract expires May 1, and the DGA (whose talks start May 11) expires June 30 alongside SAG-AFTRA's. Nobody wants a repeat of 2023, but SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland hasn't ruled out a strike if it comes to that. Expect incremental progress rather than sweeping change.
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WIDESHOT
🎬 DGA Awards, DOJ, and YouTube TV…
Paul Thomas Anderson accepts a Directors Guild of America Feature Film Medallion for ‘One Battle After Another’ (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
🏆 The DGA Awards crowned their winners Saturday night. Paul Thomas Anderson finally nabbed the top feature film prize for 'One Battle After Another,' after previous noms for 'There Will Be Blood' and 'Licorice Pizza' came up empty. The ceremony at the Beverly Hilton was hosted by Kumail Nanjiani and marked the first under new guild president Christopher Nolan. On the TV side, 'The Pitt' won dramatic series while Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg took comedy for 'The Studio,' dedicating their win to the late Catherine O'Hara. The DGA has matched the Best Director Oscar all but eight times in its history, so the odds are looking pretty good for Anderson come March 15.
⚖️ The DOJ is investigating Netflix itself, not just its Warner deal. A recently surfaced civil subpoena sent to a rival entertainment company reveals the Justice Department is asking competitors and business partners broad questions about whether Netflix has leveraged its dominance to stifle competition. That goes well beyond what Netflix calls a routine review of its proposed $72B Warner Discovery acquisition and looks more like a monopoly investigation. The DOJ is also probing how past studio mergers affected competition for creative talent. If fewer companies are competing for writers, directors, and showrunners, it could put downward pressure on deal terms across the industry. And if the DOJ decides Netflix has too much market power, it could block the deal entirely.
📺 YouTube is breaking up the TV bundle. For years, TV customers have wanted to pay for only the channels they actually watch, and for years, media companies said no. Now that’s changing: YouTube will soon roll out more than 10 smaller, cheaper live TV bundles built around sports, news, and entertainment, with the sports plan starting at $65/month. YouTube actually tried to make this happen years ago, but companies like Disney and NBCUniversal shot it down because bundling propped up their weaker cable networks. After the pay-TV industry lost 30M+ subscribers over the past decade, YouTube had enough leverage to force the issue. That shift could have real implications for future carriage negotiations, as YouTube is now the third-largest pay-TV provider in the country
LAST LOOKS
Film Development 🗒️
David Mamet will direct a film adaptation of his Hollywood satire ‘Speed The Plow,’ starring Anthony Mackie and Ben Mendelsohn. (more)
Austin Butler will star as Lance Armstrong in a biopic directed by Edward Berger, with Scott Stuber producing. (more)
Eli Roth’s The Horror Section has acquired stripper slasher ‘Stiletto,’ set as the banner’s next release. (more)
Focus Features has set a late-summer theatrical release for rom-com ‘Finding Emily,’ starring Angourie Rice and Spike Fearn. (more)
Warner Bros. has pushed ‘Clayface,’ from Sept. 11 to Oct. 23, 2026, with the ‘Practical Magic’ sequel moving into the earlier slot. (more)
Alexandre Aja will direct Netflix’s sequel to hit shark thriller ‘Under Paris.’ (more)
Teyana Taylor will make her feature directorial debut with dance drama ‘Get Lite,’ set for a spring 2027 theatrical release from Paramount. (more)
Neon has acquired worldwide rights to ‘Clarissa,’ a modern ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ reimagining starring Sophie Okonedo and Ayo Edebiri. (more)
David Harbour, Rebecca Hall and Esmé Creed-Miles are in talks to star in ‘A Head Full of Ghosts,’ with Lionsgate taking worldwide rights. (more)
Charli XCX’s Takashi Miike horror film ‘Untitled Kyoto Project,’ has added Milly Alcock and Norman Reedus to the cast. (more)
Emma Roberts and Ben Platt are set to star in psychological thriller ‘The Technique,’ now heading to EFM for international sales. (more)
TV Development 📺
Weruche Opia and Pablo Schreiber join ‘The Day of the Jackal,’ as series regulars for S2 alongside returning star Eddie Redmayne. (more)
CNN and National Geographic are teaming on four-part docuseries ‘Disaster: The Chernobyl Meltdown,’ premiering March 1. (more)
Apple TV+ is leaning into L.A. production, with shows like ‘Lucky’ and ‘Sugar’ shooting locally amid a post-fire #StayinLA push. (more)
Netflix is moving ‘Untamed,’ to Hawaii for S2, with Eric Bana returning to investigate a new case at Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. (more)
CALL SHEET
📅 The week ahead…
THURSDAY: The European Film Market opens in Berlin alongside the 76th Berlinale 🇩🇪
SUNDAY: The 41st Film Independent Spirit Awards ceremony 🏆
VIDEO VILLAGE
📺 Latest trailers
MARTINI SHOT
🍸 Latest viral moments
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-The Dailies Team