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👋 Good morning! If you’re wondering why Ed Harris has been all over your feed lately: a single frame of him as Christof in 'The Truman Show' has gone massively viral. The meme has become shorthand for the specific category of inconvenience that's so precisely calibrated to ruin your day that you have to wonder if you're the subject of your own personal Truman Show: The "low fuel" light that comes on right as you pass the last exit for 40 miles. The music in the restaurant that stops exactly when you say something you didn't want anyone to hear. None of this is happening by accident, and the internet has identified Christof as the culprit.
Welcome back from the weekend. Box office numbers are in, Cannes is still happening, and we've got the rest of your Monday below. Let’s get into it. 👇
BOX OFFICE BREAKDOWN
🎟️ Don’t stop ‘til you get enough weekends at #1…
Inde Navarrette in this week’s newcomer 'Obsession.' (Focus Features)
| WEEKEND TOTAL $106M| VS. 2025 +1.17%| VS. LAST WKND -41.8% | |
Michael WK 4 Lionsgate · $26.1M domestic weekend (-31%) · Domestic total: $282.8M · Global total: $703.9M · Budget: $200M A rare fourth-frame return to #1, powered by 1,100 IMAX/PLF screens vacated by 'Mortal Kombat II.' Already the top-grossing music biopic ever domestically, and Japan hasn't even opened yet (June 12). The catalog is feeling it too: 'Billie Jean' topped Spotify's global chart last week, 43 years after release. | |
The Devil Wears Prada 2 WK 3 20th Century Studios · $18M domestic weekend (-57%) · Domestic total: $175.9M · Global total: $546M · Budget: $100M The drop is steep, but the cumulative is not: already the top-grossing female-led film since 'Barbie,' with $600M global in sight by Memorial Day. | |
Obsession NEW Focus Features/Blumhouse · $16.1M domestic weekend · Global total: $23.1M · Budget: $1M Curry Barker's debut feature (acquired by Focus/Blumhouse out of TIFF for a reported $15M) opened at 16x its production budget on just 2,615 screens, with an A- CinemaScore and 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. | |
Mortal Kombat II WK 2 Warner Bros. · $13.4M domestic weekend (-65%) · Domestic total: $62.2M · Global total: $101.2M · Budget: $80M The C+ CinemaScore said it all: fans showed up opening weekend, and that was about it. | |
The Sheep Detectives WK 2 Amazon MGM · $9.3M domestic weekend (-38%) · Domestic total: $29.66M · Global total: $58.7M · Budget: $75M | |
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie WK 7 Universal · $4.45M domestic weekend (-33%) · Domestic total: $418.62M · Global total: $945.7M · Budget: $110M | |
Project Hail Mary WK 9 Amazon MGM · $3.9M domestic weekend (-41%) · Domestic total: $334.85M · Global total: $660M · Budget: $248M gross | |
Top Gun 40th Anniversary RE-RELEASE Paramount · $3.1M domestic weekend Paramount's 40th anniversary double-bill of 'Top Gun' and 'Maverick' picked up PLF screens vacated by 'Mortal Kombat II,' including some IMAX. | |
In the Grey NEW Black Bear · $3M domestic weekend · Budget: $59M Guy Ritchie's Henry Cavill/Jake Gyllenhaal action thriller earned a collective 'meh' from critics (44% RT) and a B CinemaScore, despite audiences being considerably warmer (83%). | |
Is God Is NEW Amazon MGM · $2.2M domestic weekend Aleshia Harris's revenge drama (adapted from her off-Broadway play) earned limited-release raves (97% RT, 89% audience) on 1,510 screens. | |
The big picture: The year-to-date domestic box office is up 16% over 2025, powered by a strong spring slate. Memorial Day is shaping up soft, likely well below last year's $330M holiday record, and 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' is the only real tentpole left standing in May. The summer doesn't really get going until 'Toy Story 5' in mid-June.
CANNES
🇫🇷 Cannes got its first 8-figure bidding war…
The 'Club Kid' cast at their Cannes premiere. (Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images)
The festival's first few days were quiet, even by early-Cannes standards. But by Friday, it finally got around to being Cannes. Jordan Firstman's 'Club Kid' premiered in Un Certain Regard (the festival's sidebar section, outside the main competition) and immediately became the only film at the festival everyone wanted to buy. UTA and Charades are handling sales. The details:
A24, Netflix, Searchlight, Focus Features, and MUBI all wanted it
Warner Bros.' new Clockwork label joined the race and then bowed out
Offers climbed from high seven figures into eight-figure territory over the course of the weekend
As of last night, no deal had closed
Meanwhile, in competition…
On Saturday, James Gray brought one of the festival's two big American-filmmaker moments with 'Paper Tiger,' starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller. The crime drama drew a long ovation and strong early reviews. Neon, on a run of six consecutive Palmes d'Or, holds U.S. rights.
Hamaguchi Ryusuke's 'All of a Sudden' and Jeanne Herry's 'Garance' (with Adèle Exarchopoulos) were the weekend's other two big crowd-pleasers. Then Na Hong-jin closed out Sunday night with 'Hope' (his first film since 'The Wailing' a decade ago), a big-budget alien invasion thriller set in a rural South Korean village, starring Hwang Jung-min, Hoyeon Jung, Michael Fassbender, and Alicia Vikander. The crowd loved it. Neon has U.S. rights; MUBI took international.
Looking ahead… The festival runs through the week, with the closing ceremony and Palme d'Or announcement set for Saturday.
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CLOSEUP
📽️ Netflix is reviving a genre Hollywood abandoned…
(Courtesy of Netflix)
Cast your mind back to the '90s and early 2000s, when R-rated blockbusters ruled the multiplex (think 'Die Hard,' 'True Lies,' that whole lineage). Somewhere along the way, those gave way to franchise IP and superhero slates, and the adult blockbuster became a forgotten genre. That is, until Netflix looked at that gap and made a deliberate decision to fill it.
The strategy isn't accidental. Netflix has been deliberate about positioning itself as the home for exactly the kind of film studios have deprogrammed themselves from making:
"It has been a conscious decision to fill gaps in the marketplace when legacy studios are leaning into reboots and remakes. While others have slowed down making these types of original, high concept action films that dominated the late ’90s and early 2000s, we’re seeing in real-time how much they still resonate and how much audiences still love them."
At least in this corner of its slate, the strategy is paying off. Netflix has put out four R-rated originals in just five months this year ('The Rip,' 'War Machine,' 'Thrash,' and 'Apex'), and the numbers are hard to argue with:
Each film hit the Top 10 in at least 92 of 93 country charts
The four films have collectively held the global #1 spot for half the year
'War Machine' pulled 128.4M views in its first eight weeks, a clear hit for the streamer
Most households that watched one had already watched another, meaning Netflix isn't generating one-off hits but is building genuine genre loyalty
Some of these films were built in-house, others were picked up when studios walked away. Sony dropped 'Thrash,' seeing no obvious home for it theatrically. Netflix saw the streaming potential, picked it up mid-post, finished it, and released it to 80M+ views. The acquisition play is just as deliberate as the development slate.
There’s more in the pipeline: A Tarantino/Fincher collaboration and Ben Affleck's 'Animals' are still ahead.
CLOSEUP
💸 James Cameron’s trying to make ‘Avatar’ cheap…
James Cameron (Getty Images)
James Cameron wants to make the next Avatar films faster and cheaper, and he's got new technologies in mind to get there. On a recent podcast promoting 'Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft, the Tour, Live in 3D,' the concert film he co-directed with Eilish, he laid it out pretty plainly:
“We're going to be looking at some new technologies to try to do them more efficiently because they're hideously expensive and take a long time. I want to do them in half the time for two-thirds of the cost. That's my metric. And so it's going to take us a year or so to figure out how to do that.”
He didn't name the technologies, but people have gone straight to AI as the obvious answer. It's not a crazy leap: on the Eilish film, Cameron used AI for 3D conversion, image upscaling, and generative background reconstruction in long-lens stereo shots. Worth noting: Cameron ran a pre-screening presentation for 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' specifically to assure audiences no AI was used in that film.
The urgency has some context behind it: 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' grossed $1.4B worldwide on a reported $500M combined production and marketing budget. That’s a huge success by most standards, but $1B less than 'The Way of Water' and less than half the original's $2.9B haul. The franchise is trending down with each installment, and Disney still hasn't formally greenlit a fourth film, despite complete scripts for both sequels and roughly 22% of 'Avatar 4' already shot.
Looking ahead… Cameron has said the next film is "likely but not 100%." Disney has December 2029 release tentatively penciled in, and Cameron estimates about a year to sort out the new pipeline.
LAST LOOKS
Development 🗒️
James Franco is joining David Harbour and Noah Centineo in 'John Rambo,' the upcoming prequel to 'First Blood.' (more)
Sam Raimi is remaking 'Magic,' Anthony Hopkins' creepy ventriloquist thriller, for a modern audience. (more)
'The Beast,' Samuel L. Jackson's presidential action-thriller with Joel Kinnaman, found its U.S. home at Aura Entertainment. (more)
Glen Powell's Judd Apatow comedy 'The Comeback King' keeps stacking its cast, adding Kumail Nanjiani, Tig Notaro, Mike Birbiglia, and more. (more)
Russell Crowe is back fighting Romans in 'The Last Druid,' with Rose Leslie and Daniel Zovatto now on board. (more)
Natasha Lyonne and Jaime King will star in ‘Darlene,’ a dark comedy thriller from ‘Pet Sematary’ director Mary Lambert. (more)
Tom Blyth will lead Michael Winterbottom’s new adaptation of ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ which is heading to the Cannes market. (more)
Cate Blanchett, Selena Gomez, and Michael Fassbender are all signed on to star in Brady Corbet’s mysterious new “X-rated” epic. (more)
Colman Domingo, Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, and Noah Jupe are set to star in Francis Lee’s psychological thriller ‘The Servant.’ (more)
Business 🤝
See-Saw Films, the studio behind ‘Slow Horses,’ signed a $50M financing deal with Entourage Ventures to back new feature films. (more)
Dev Patel's A24 actioner 'The Peasant' kicks off a new multi-picture deal between Fifth Season and HarbourView. (more)
Kristen Stewart and Wagner Moura's 'Flesh of the Gods' is the first project out of a new multi-film deal between XYZ Films and Vixens. (more)
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That's Monday in the can. If a friend passed this along, subscribe below and join the regulars. See you Wednesday, unless Christof has other plans for your morning.
-The Dailies Team