🎬 Promises, in Writing

👋 Good morning! To promote its new trapped-at-home thriller 'The Last House,' Netflix built a house-shaped billboard above Sunset Boulevard and paid an actor to live in it for three days. Crowds, news crews, and at least one helicopter spent the weekend treating him like a Tamagotchi, periodically checking if he was still alive in there. He was, sustained largely by Sour Strips, and was released back into the wild Saturday night.

Hope the weekend treated you well. Let us ease you back into the work week with this weekend’s box office numbers and everything else you missed. 👇

The bigger picture: Conventional wisdom says two tentpoles this size should be eating each other alive. Instead, Spidey and Odysseus are holding like the other doesn't exist, and there's a case they're actually feeding each other. The summer 2026 box office should cross $4B today, which puts 2013's all-time summer record ($4.755B) within reach.

Specialty note: A24's Anthony Bourdain origin story 'Tony' posted the weekend's best PSA ($58.2K on 6 screens), with Mubi's 'Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma' close behind at $50.3K per screen.

Art imitates life this week as Mason Thames and McKenna Grace hit the big screen for the road trip coming-of-age comedy Nimrods. When it happens, some fans won’t just be watching - they’ll be invested. Literally. 

That’s because Legion M is giving fans a never-before-possible chance to OWN a piece of the industry they love. Click below to see how it works, and change your role from consumer to investor and movie-lover to studio-owner.¹

✍️ Paramount is putting its movie math in writing. The studio reportedly agreed to sign contracts with AMC and Regal guaranteeing it'll release 30 movies a year in theaters if its Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition goes through. The three-year deals are said to include a 45-day exclusive theatrical window, a 90-day streaming holdback, and penalties if Paramount comes up short, meaning CEO David Ellison's public promises would actually be binding. Exhibition hasn't been this divided since reclining seats: while the chains getting the guarantees are on board, Cinema United, which represents exhibitors big and small, is still against the deal.

🇺🇸 Add Spencer Pratt to the list of federal film tax credit advocates. The reality star and former L.A. mayoral candidate sat down with President Trump this month, then posted that he's working with him on a 25% federal credit to bring production back home. The list already includes Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, Jon Voight, the major guilds, and Sen. Adam Schiff, who's gone as far as drafting a bill. As production keeps drifting to cheaper locales abroad (L.A. alone has lost 40k+ jobs), supporters will take momentum wherever they can find it. Pratt also reported the best clam chowder of his life, so the meeting produced at least one concrete outcome.

🇪🇺 De-aged actors now come with paperwork in Europe. Last week, the EU started enforcing the AI Act's transparency rules: AI content that could pass as real has to be labeled, whether it's a TikTok, an ad, or a streaming series. Dragons and obviously fake stuff are safe; situations like a streamer de-aging an actor with AI are not. That could cover a lot: Netflix alone says gen AI touched ~300 of their titles this year, mostly in post. It applies to anything reaching EU audiences, wherever it's made, with fines up to €15M. For movies and shows, disclosure can live in the credits rather than on screen. Now we'll see if similar rules head stateside.

Viewers spent roughly 19B minutes watching 'Love Island USA' S8, according to Peacock, making it the streamer's most-watched original season ever and the summer's most streamed series, per Nielsen. (Fun fact: that's 36,000 years of villa time, roughly triple the age of agriculture.)

The impressive part is that the show is still growing. Lately, even the giants are mortal: 'Stranger Things' dropped 13% in its final run, 'Bridgerton' fell 30% in S4, and Netflix's 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' lost 60% of its first-week views this June, per Luminate. 'Love Island' went the other way, climbing three straight years:

Looking ahead… Analysts think a dip in 2027 wouldn't be surprising. Still, for a streamer that spent six years as the answer to "wait, who has that show?", this is a huge win.

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