🎬 Litmus Test

👋 Good morning! Sabrina Carpenter headlined Coachella Friday and turned the main stage into "Sabrinawood," a 20-song Old Hollywood production stacked with A-list cameos: Sam Elliott as a film noir highway cop, Susan Sarandon delivering a seven-minute monologue as a future version of Carpenter, Will Ferrell ambling onstage as an electrician during some "technical difficulties," and Samuel L. Jackson's voice appearing mid-song as the crowd's self-appointed "spiritual guide." Behind it all, a Hollywood Hills backdrop with glowing house lights and Walk of Fame stars on the stage. Safe to say she committed to the bit.

Whether you're nursing a Coachella sunburn or already in Vegas for CinemaCon, welcome to Monday. Let's catch you up. 👇

The bigger picture: Mario's doing the heavy lifting (more than half the weekend's total), but the ecosystem seems healthy. Year-to-date ticket sales are running 23% ahead of 2025, and April is tracking just 6% below pre-pandemic averages. Not bad, all things considered. Up next: Lee Cronin's 'The Mummy' reboot (April 17) and the 'Michael' biopic (April 24).

CinemaCon kicks off this morning at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and runs through Thursday. For those unfamiliar: it's the convention where studios pitch their upcoming slates to theater owners, execs debate industry policy, and vendors sell everything from laser projectors to fancy popcorn buckets. It's part trade show, part pep rally, part group therapy.

This year's presenting lineup: Sony (tonight), Warner Bros. (Tuesday), Universal and Amazon MGM (Wednesday), Paramount and Disney (Thursday). NEON gets a slot alongside Tuesday's State of the Industry address, and a new "Film Showcase" gives main-stage time to smaller distributors (Angel Studios, Sony Pictures Classics, STUDIOCANAL), which is CinemaCon-speak for "we need more product and we're not getting it from the usual suspects."

The elephant in the Colosseum: Paramount Skydance's $111B acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. If 'The Studio' finale taught us anything, it's that studio consolidation makes for a stressful CinemaCon. Also, don't eat the chocolate. The shareholder vote is scheduled for April 23, one week after CinemaCon wraps, and exhibitors want to know what a four-major-studio world means for their screens. David Ellison has promised 30 films a year from a combined entity, but exhibitors have heard this song before, and Cinema United's Michael O'Leary says verbal assurances aren't enough.

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Filmmaker Nina Lee went viral on X last month after revealing that multiple studios refused to buy her already-shot rom-com 'That's Her' until they see how Universal's 'You, Me & Tuscany' does at the box office. Five different execs told her roughly the same thing: we're not buying Black-led rom-coms right now, but we're "monitoring" this one. Encouraging stuff.

The Will Packer-produced film (starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page) opened this past weekend to $8M from 3,151 theaters on an $18M budget, pulling an A- CinemaScore (how audiences graded it leaving the theater). Not a flop, not a smash, and probably not the definitive answer anyone was hoping for.

The bigger picture: Studios greenlighting (or passing on) projects based on how similar films perform is nothing new. But it's rarely this specific. 'You, Me & Tuscany' is one of the few Black-led rom-coms from a major studio to hit theaters in recent years, and one movie's opening weekend is directly determining whether buyers pick up Lee's already-finished film and others like it. For what it's worth, UCLA's Hollywood Diversity Report has consistently found that BIPOC audiences are the biggest ticket-buying demographic for most of the year's top-grossing films. Whether that factors into the greenlight calculus here is another question.

🎡 YouTube launched a 24/7 TV channel for Coachella. The platform has been the festival's livestreaming partner for over a decade, but its 2026 coverage comes with a traditional-TV-style twist: 'Coachella TV,' a round-the-clock linear channel that cycles highlights, behind-the-scenes content, and archival performances, separate from the seven-stage livestream. It's YouTube leaning into a bigger shift: per Nielsen, YouTube accounted for 12.5% of total U.S. TV viewing in January, nearly 4 points ahead of Netflix, and over half of last year's Coachella watch time came from living room screens. YouTube's been quietly rolling out similar always-on channels around other artists, too (Bruno Mars has one promoting his new album). Scheduled programming, lean-back viewing, channels you tune into… the disruption has come full circle.

🌋 A $1.4B box office haul, and Disney is still wondering if it's enough. 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' grossed massive numbers by any normal standard, but the franchise is trending the wrong direction: $2.9B, then $2.3B, now $1.4B, each on a reported budget of $350M+ before marketing. The shrinking returns reportedly have Disney talking internally about making future installments cheaper and shorter. James Cameron himself has said a fourth film is "likely but not 100%." Meanwhile, the planned 'Avatar' land at Disney California Adventure may be swapped for a 'Zootopia' attraction (which outgrossed 'Fire and Ash' at $1.8B+). Scripts for films four and five are finished, and ~22% of the fourth is shot, but in an era of franchise fatigue and tightening budgets, even the highest-grossing series in history isn't getting an automatic green light.

🦄 Mubi is back on track after a rough 2025. The London-based arthouse streamer hit unicorn status last year after Sequoia Capital led a $100M investment valuing the company at $1B. But the high didn't last long: backlash over Sequoia's ties to Israeli military-linked startups sent subscribers heading for the exits. Mubi lost more than 200K subs and ended the year at roughly 1.2M, below where it started. Fast forward to Q1 2026 and the picture looks very different. Mubi hit a record 1.7M subs (helped by distributing four of the five Oscar nominees for best international film), has at least six films headed to Cannes, and recently struck a co-financing deal with IPR.VC for European auteur films. That's welcome news for the specialty film market, where Mubi has become one of the few scaled buyers willing to spend big on festival acquisitions.

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