It’s going to take another year to break out balloons and bubbly to celebrate the return of the theatrical business after COVID and two Hollywood strikes, but at least there’s a halo over the horizon. That said, CinemaCon 2024 made clear that the studios don’t have enough movies to satisfy theater owners this year — and what they do have feels uneven.
There’s some good work coming up: Universal’s “Wicked” at Christmas will be incredible. Disney’s “Kingdom of Planet of the Apes,” coming next month, looks otherworldly. Bong Joon-ho’s “Mickey 17,” in which Robert Pattinson keeps dying and getting cloned, from Warners, looks insane in the best possible way.