The first quarter of every cinematic calendar year is always split between looking backward and looking forward. After all, between January and March, waves of awards must be handed out to last year’s movies before Hollywood can collectively agree to move on and focus on this year’s movies. While first-quarter success stories like Project Hail Mary or Hoppers and early-bird festivals like Sundance and SXSW offer some taste of what’s to come, Oscar night has to come and go before the calendar page can be fully turned.
That’s why 2027 begins in earnest with CinemaCon, the exhibition industry’s answer to Comic-Con. Unfolding in Las Vegas April 13-17, the annual event brings movie studios and theater exhibitors together to preview the blockbusters and awards contenders that will be gracing movie screens through the remainder of the spring, and the totality of the summer and fall. Almost every major theatrical studio or distributor — with a few notable omissions, including Lionsgate and A24 — is rolling the dice on bringing their 2027 slates to Vegas and seeing how the cards fall in terms of early buzz.
Starting Monday, Gold Derby will be on the ground for the entirety of the four-day convention bringing you the latest news and reactions from inside the cavernous Dolby Colosseum nestled within Caesar’s Palace. Here are the five questions that are top of mind as another CinemaCon begins.
Will we glimpse the 2027 Best Picture winner?
The One Battle After Another family started its long, long, long road to Oscar night at last year’s Warner Bros. panel. Future Best Actor nominee Leonardo DiCaprio joined future Best Supporting Actress nominee Teyana Taylor and the shoulda-been-nominated Regina Hall at CinemaCon to debut an extended clip from Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling saga, which at that point was the subject of intense speculation over its sizable budget and top-secret narrative.
“With this film, [Anderson]’s tapped into something politically and culturally brewing beneath our psyche,” DiCaprio remarked at the time of the year’s eventual Best Picture winner. “But at the same time, it’s an incredibly epic movie and has such scope and scale.” (Interestingly, the studio’s other major Oscar contender, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, received little-to-no CinemaCon stage time, reflecting how the film wasn’t initially perceived as an awards play — certainly not a historic one — as it geared up for an April 18 theatrical debut.)
This year, Warner Bros. has another expensive prestige picture that’s been kept largely under wraps: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, starring Tom Cruise in his first dramatic performance in years. If the studio was able to get the publicity-shy DiCaprio to Vegas to tease One Battle, maybe the Mission: Impossible star will parachute in (not literally… we think?) to bolster Best Picture talk around this mystery movie.
But Digger isn’t the only contender that could make a first or second impression at CinemaCon. Universal will come bearing more of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to Oppenheimer, which ran the awards table two years ago. And expect Sony to look for likes by sharing the first footage from The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s second bite at the Facebook apple after 2009’s much-loved The Social Network. The odds are good-to-great for all three movies emerging as Best Picture contenders next January.
Is “Dunesday” inevitable?
Speaking of Oppenheimer, CinemaCon’s 2023 edition confirmed to exhibitors that their movie theaters would soon become ground zero for “Barbenheimer,” the July 21 release date shared by Nolan’s brooding biopic and Greta Gerwig’s colorful confection, Barbie. Despite initial fears that the two films would cannibalize each other, they instead served up a box-office feast that Hollywood has attempted to replicate ever since. They were also star attractions on the awards circuit, going head-to-head in the Best Picture race.
Dec. 18, 2026, brings the next Barbenheimer-style portmanteau; that’s when Disney unleashes the next Marvel Studio’s team-up, Avengers: Doomsday, alongside Dune: Part Three, the final installment in the Warner Bros. sci-fi franchise. Already slugged as “Dunesday,” it will be a clear test for just how hungry moviegoers are for two special effects-drenched blockbusters during the holiday season.
On the awards front, at least, Dune: Part Three is expected to out-perform Marvel’s A-team, as the Avengers movies have never found their way into the major races. But there are still voices suggesting that the studios are leaving box-office money on the table by pitting these two heavy-hitters against each other. If Dunesday gets called off, CinemaCon would be the place to do it.
Oh, and it should be noted that Doomsday isn’t the only Marvel production that will get a spotlight in Vegas. Last year, Sony used the CinemaCon stage to unveil the title of Tom Holland’s latest Spider-Man installment, Brand New Day, and is expected to share more footage this time around. And we’ll almost certainly get a status update on that other friendly neighborhood wall-crawler, Miles Morales, as his animated saga draws to a close with 2027’s Beyond the Spider-Verse.
Who will be Bond… James Bond?
When Amazon MGM hosted its first-ever CinemaCon panel last year, they smartly led off with Project Hail Mary, the reigning box-office champ from Spider-Verse architects Phil Lord and Chris Miller. But nascent studio left audiences shaken and stirred by not spending more time on their plans for James Bond, a franchise they had finally acquired in full after handing over a pretty (money)penny to producers Babara Broccoli and Michael Wilson.
Granted, the ink was still relatively wet on the deal at that point, and Amazon had yet to assemble a creative team for 007’s next incarnation. Flash-forward 12 months, though, and the 26th Bond film has new producers, Amy Pascal and David Heyman; an Oscar-nominated writer, Steven Knight; and an Oscar-nominated director, Denis Villeneuve, who will already be in Vegas anyway to promote Dune: Part Three.
What the new movie doesn’t have yet is a new James Bond — and that announcement would be a mic drop of Moonraker 5 proportions. With casting in place, the next 007 adventure could potentially take aim at a 2028 release date, which would not-so-coincidentally mark the 75th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale. To date, the franchise has never received a Best Picture nomination, but if anyone could break that streak, it’s Academy favorite Villeneuve.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone don’t venture away from that quiet mountain town of South Park, Colo., often, but when they do, attention must be paid. Two years ago, the Emmy and Tony winners teamed up with Grammy winner Kendrick Lamar for the new feature film, Whitney Springs, a musical comedy that Paramount proudly announced at CinemaCon’s 2024 edition… and has been silent about ever since it wrapped filming that year.
You can likely chalk that delay, in part, up to politics — in both the Hollywood and Washington, D.C., sense of the word. Paramount has since been acquired by Skydance Media, which is owned by the Trump-friendly Ellison family. That change in ownership has resulted in a number of changes across the merged company’s creative portfolio of media properties as well as a move away from politically charged voices. (See also: The impending end of the Late Show With Stephen Colbert on CBS.)
And the premise for Whitney Springs certainly sounds politically charged, reportedly revolving around a Black man who learns that his white girlfriend’s family owned his ancestors after getting a job at a living history museum depicting America’s ugly legacy of slavery. But that’s also the kind of provocative territory that Parker and Stone have ably mined for comedy across their careers in everything from South Park to The Book of Mormon to Team America: World Police.
If nothing else, with Lamar in the mix, Whitney Springs is sure to have some banger tracks that could join “Blame Canada” in Best Original Song contention. Let’s see if Paramount is ready to spring forward and put the movie on the calendar.
Have Disney and James Cameron agreed to return to Pandora?
Last year, the Mouse House treated the CinemaCon crowd to the first extended scene from James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, which hoped to join its two Pandora-set predecessors in Best Picture contention. Sadly, Eywa couldn’t deliver a third nomination in that category, although the franchise holds a 3-for-3 record in the Best Visual Effects race. And even though Fire and Ash handily crossed the billion-dollar mark at the global box office, it didn’t reach the $2 billion heights of the first two movies.
That’s led many to wonder whether Cameron and Disney will re-team to make the long-promised fourth and fifth installments in the sci-fi saga, which at least one member of the extended creative team has described as “superb” and “bonkers.” But the director has also acknowledged that visiting Pandora comes with an astronomical price tag, an investment that’s sizeable even for the home of a Mr. Moneybags like Scrooge McDuck.
The Friday before CinemaCon, though, Cameron was notably announced as an honoree at the Big Screen Achievement Awards, the annual awards ceremony that closes out CinemaCon. The filmmaker will specifically be receiving the Spirit of the Industry award and Disney could take the opportunity to lift our collective spirits by announcing that Avatar 4 and 5 are a go at the studio’s panel earlier in the day. We see you, Spider.
