This past week in Las Vegas, I attended CinemaCon, a truly weird annual event for theater owners and exhibitors.
Over four days, thousands and thousands of film exhibition and distribution folks are crammed into the Caesar’s Palace Hotel to mingle with their peers and industry partners. There’s a trade exhibition hall showcasing the latest in Cheeto-related concession innovations. There are studio presentations in which The Rock is flown in on a private jet, has a Lavalier microphone clipped to a tank tight so tight you can see his nips and is shoved out in front of 4,000 members of the theatrical industry so he can hard sell us on why we should play MOANA 2 in our theaters this Thanksgiving season. When you arrive at the conference, they give you a two-pound duffle bag filled with candy. Seriously, I weighed it. Two pounds of candy!
My friend, who used to be in the industry, texted to ask which stars I had seen while at CinemaCon. I had a hard time recalling a list because, and I apologize in advance for the biggest damn humblebrag of the season, it all felt so routine to have folks like Chris Hemsworth or Henry Cavill trotted out on stage to promote their movies.
I’ve been going to CinemaCon for almost a decade now, and while it’s a lot of fun, the thrill of seeing extremely pretty people up close and personal doesn’t have the same appeal as it did when I first started going. No, for me, the appeal of CinemaCon is always the chance to see early footage of the upcoming year’s movies. The stuff I saw from Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU; Oz Perkins’ LONGLEGS, INSIDE OUT 2; BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE; Aziz Ansari’s GOOD FORTUNE; and so many other films looks so dang great that it fills me with the same excitement I once felt while flipping through the Sears’ catalog in the months leading up to Christmas as a kid. I love movies, and I love seeing them in theaters. And let me tell you, folks, some great movies are coming to a theater near you this year.
Before CinemaCon kicked off, I had the chance to check out The Sphere again. I attended U2’s residency at The Sphere last November, and it was a truly life-changing experience—just an overwhelming combination of sights and sounds. For my second trip, I watched Darren Aronofsky’s POSTCARD FROM EARTH, a 50-minute sci-fi film projected inside The Sphere’s massive arena. I arrived early, expecting a crowd similar to the one I experienced with U2’s concert. There were significantly fewer people.
As I drank a $20 IPA and waited for the rest of the audience to show up, I mentally prepared myself for what I was sure would be another life-changing experience. In the end, POSTCARD FROM EARTH was very impressive and technically stunning, but maybe not worth $100. The night’s best part was listening to a dude behind me wildly “woot!” during a montage showcasing real footage from natural disasters.
Ah, humanity…
I’ll say this, though. It’s fun that one of Vegas’ biggest attractions is a 50-minute movie from the director of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM about how, individually, we are meaningless specs in the cosmos but, collectively, humanity will kill the planet and our only hope is to fuck off into space and mess with other planets.
Vegas, baby!
I have a Twitter alert set for the term “WHERE WOLF.” It rarely provides me with anybody actually talking about the comic book I wrote, but I occasionally get fun stuff like this:
Anyway, I’m still working on WHERE WOLF 2 with my collaborators Debora Lancianese and Jack Morelli. If you've read WHERE WOLF, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon, Goodreads, The StoryGraph, or wherever you discover new books.
If you haven't read WHERE WOLF, please request a copy from your local library or buy a personal copy of your own directly from the publisher, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Ghoulish Books in San Antonio, or Whose Books in Dallas.
I spent last week watching a ton of movies. I can’t talk about most of them, but I enjoyed GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE and GODZILLA X KONG: THE HIDDEN EMPIRE. CIVIL WAR, SASQUATCH SUNSET, and MONKEY MAN are all great and currently playing in a theater near you. You know what else was really good? The BET-produced remake of DON’T TELL MOM THE BABYSITTER’S DEAD. Seriously, I laughed a lot.
The movie I want to talk about, though, is THE FIRST OMEN. I watched THE OMEN as a kid and it scared me so much I had to excuse myself from the living room and go to bed early before the film ended. THE FIRST OMEN has scenes as scary as anything I’ve seen in a studio horror film. It’s gnarly in all the best ways.
I am a little peeved it reconned the canonical “Satan banged a jackal” bit from the first film but it did it in such a clever way I can’t stay angry for too long. You can’t blame a franchise for franchising.
THE FIRST OMEN is struggling a bit at the box office - maybe because there are a lot of similar movies in the theater right now or maybe because today’s youth don’t know or care about Richard Donner’s original THE OMEN (which THE FIRST OMEN heavily ties into). Either way, if you’re a fan of creepy AF horror films, go check out THE FIRST OMEN.
I also want to highlight the fifth episode of X-MEN ‘97 on Disney+. “Remember Me” is a surprisingly deep and touching episode of a show that was, on the surface, just supposed to be a spoonful of nostalgia for folks who grew up watching the original Fox X-MEN cartoon. Instead, on Wednesday, these grown-ass kids were fed an animated version of 9/11 in which a mutant island is on the receiving end of a terrible terrorist attack. Beloved characters are killed, but their deaths hit as hard as they do because the show laid the framework with 20 minutes of incredible writing. I can’t believe the levels of care that went into making this cartoon - not because I’m biased about cartoons but because I remember how bad the original X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES could frequently be. X-MEN ‘97 is shaping up to be incredible, and I can’t wait to see where it goes in the remaining five episodes.
Finally, I finished Stephen Graham Jones’ THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE last night. I’m a big fan of Jones’ writing, so I was already primed to enjoy the capper of his Final Girl trilogy. Readers were introduced to Jade Daniels, a reluctant final girl, in MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW and continued her adventures in DON’T FEAR THE REAPER. Over the three books, Jones lays out some pretty gnarly horrors and is constantly reinventing the genre the books exist in. The result is a final book that feels like a spook-a-blast amusement park ride - just a non-stop barrage of monsters big and small and, at the center of it, Jade Daniels growing into the fiercest, most loyal fighter she could have ever dreamed of being. Proof that there’s hope for us horror fans’ yet.
I love the fact that Jones is unafraid to get emotional and show the true impact of the slasher genre on human lives. These books hit hard and I’m glad I was able to witness Jones bringing the story home as only he could with THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE.