When you spend four days in Vegas bouncing between meetings, parties, and trying to remember which movie trailers you just saw, there’s a lot that happens at CinemaCon an entertainment business reporter might not get to write about, or that materialize into bigger ideas later on.
We had four stray thoughts of what’s still to come for theaters — and what we’ll be talking about up until next year’s CinemaCon.
Warner Bros. has a lot of movies it would prefer don’t go away
In addition to a hefty sizzle reel of filmmakers from their sets talking about all the big projects arriving from Warner Bros. in 2027, a montage that included Margot Robbie’s “Ocean’s” prequel, Nancy Meyers’ untitled film, Sam Esmail’s “Panic Carefully,” M. Night Shyamalan’s “Remain,” “A Minecraft Movie 2,” the animated “Bad Fairies” with Cynthia Erivo, “Margie Claus” with Melissa McCarthy, a Keanu Reeves shark movie “Shiver,” “Evil Dead Wrath,” “Godzilla x Kong Supernova,” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,” Warner Bros. closed its presentation with a big list of all the projects it has in development for ’27, ’28, and beyond.
Film chiefs Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca said that this list represented “a promise” of what they intend to deliver to theater screens. But it may not be up to them.
Paramount is, of course, buying Warner Bros. Discovery, and David Ellison made a promise of his own to theater owners that it would release 30 movies a year between the two studios, so they’re going to need a lot of those movies that Warner Bros. is promising, in addition to their own. Each studio touted that the number of movies they’re putting out this year has gone up compared to last year’s slate
But we have no idea what that structure is going to look like under a combined Paramount-WBD. Do Mike and Pam stick around? Are they working underneath Paramount film chiefs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein? Is there something that distinguishes a Paramount movie from a WB movie? What about WB’s other labels, like New Line, DC, the newly relaunched WB Animation, or the brand spanking new indie label Clockwork that is releasing Sean Baker’s “Ti Amo!” as its first film?
By projecting that big slate, Warner Bros. is trying to get ahead of any of these movies going away under a merger, but we’re guessing they won’t be able to keep every promise.
Anthony Russo, Robert Downey Jr., Joe Russo, and Chris Evans at the Walt Disney Studios Presentation during CinemaCon 2026, the official convention of Cinema United held at The Dolby Colosseum at Caesars Palace on April 16, 2026 in Las Vegas, NevadaGilbert Flores/Variety
Disney’s “Infinity Vision” thing is a big IMAX flex
I’m going to level with you: when Disney announced “Infinity Vision” just ahead of the trailer for “Avengers: Doomsday,” quite literally the grand finale of an entire week of CinemaCon when everyone was ready to get out of town, I didn’t make much of it. Some new corporate branding of a premium large format? Sure, just get to Robert Downey Jr.
What it is, really, is Disney’s answer to not having any IMAX screens for “Doomsday.” Whoops. I figured that out after I landed at LAX.
Both “Dune: Part III” and the next “Avengers” film are opening the same day, December 18, and each has been daring the other to move off that date. “Dune” will be the one getting the IMAX screens, which means all the other non-IMAX premium large format screens will try and play “Doomsday.”
Disney’s response is to use this “Infinity Vision” branding to indicate to fans that the version of the film they’ll be getting is the best picture and sound available, that it meets certain Disney criteria for how the film should look or be presented. Will any theaters across dozens of circuits actually adopt this branding? Will audiences have any idea what it is or care if their screening of “Doomsday” is not in Infinity Vision? They care about the IMAX brand, so our guess would be no.
‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ popcorn bucket shaped like a red pursePhoto by Brian Welk
Let’s hope Dirty Sodas can save theaters
In the several years I’ve been going to CinemaCon, I confess I had never made it down to the trade show floor where various vendors gather to present new product ideas to exhibitors that may be looking to shake up their inventory or concessions offerings.
As part of a tour this year, we saw companies that sell photo booths and arcade games to theaters, popcorn and pretzel snack brands, and some consultants who help redesign the footprints of theaters. There’s also the companies designing ever-crazier popcorn buckets, like the Michael Jackson hat as popcorn receptacle (white glove not included), or the “Devil Wears Prada” red purse popcorn bucket.
Then there are the tech companies pushing new projection innovations, and let us tell you, only at CinemaCon do you see something as monumentally dorky as a Barco executive asking Air Bud the dog what he thinks of HDR laser projection. Some, like Samsung, are even pushing giant LED screens with no projection booth or projector required.
There’s also food, and so, so many samples, all in the hopes that theaters experiment with hot yet portable food options that wouldn’t be just for dine-in theaters. We sampled a miniature chili dog inside an egg roll wrapper, a baked cookie dough bite, some brisket mac and cheese, and a slice of cookie cake.
Finally, we came across a small, upstart company called Coca-Cola that hopes to push some things like its new pickle lemonade, a “Devil Wears Prada” branded Diet Coke, and Fanta or Coco Cream dirty sodas. This is increasingly becoming a thing theaters are experimenting with, tapping into the latest TikTok trends to gussy up your pop. When most theaters are already outfitted with recliner seats and bars, this is what it has come to.
Michael O’Leary, President & CEO, Cinema United, speaks onstage during CinemaCon 2026 – The State of the Industry and NEON Presentation at The Dolby Colosseum at Caesars Palace during CinemaCon, the official convention of Cinema United, on April 14, 2026, in Las Vegas, NevadaGetty Images for CinemaCon
The next innovation for theaters is not one-size-fits-all
In between a whole lot of questions to Cinema United’s Michael O’Leary about Netflix, I managed to squeeze one in there about the challenges facing the smallest: independent theaters, the ones that maybe have just one location with a few screens or in some instances just a single screen.
The challenge facing those theaters — and this is not a new challenge — is if that if a single screen books “Oppenheimer” and then, per the terms of booking needs to keep it for several weeks, that theater owner might only see its patrons once a month, because they’ve already seen that film. Or if that movie is a turkey, they’re still stuck with it past its sell by date.
That’s the frustration one indie theater owner expressed to us before CinemaCon when it comes to PLF screens they’ve invested a lot of money in, or in any terms that are thrust upon them by the studio. Why do I have to play a kids movie late at night when another film would do much better in that slot? Why can I only play this particular film on my PLF screen when I know another one will perform better?
Sony Pictures’ Tom Rothman alluded to something like this in his remarks, that it’s not just studios that should respect windows, but theaters who don’t give a movie a proper run in theaters before yanking it early, even at the expense of potentially losing another film. Rothman was speaking more to the bigger chains, and when we asked O’Leary, he clarified that holding a movie over for longer (a “holdover” in exhibitor parlance) is really only a problem for those small chains that can’t bump a movie to another screen if it’s underperforming and could be blocked from getting something else.
“That one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work when you get down to the smaller guys,” O’Leary said in a press breakfast ahead of his State of the Union address. “I’ve advocated that there ought to be two systems in place.”
O’Leary said small theater owners are the connective tissue to the audience in those theaters. They know the people who come in very well, and they should be allowed to do what’s best for their audience.
“If they have the flexibility to schedule in a way that reflects their knowledge of the film-going community, they can make more money for everybody,” he said. “But when you have this rigid system which is passed through the whole system where someone else can put it down the hall, but the one or two screen theater can’t do that, that’s a big issue.”
All of that depends on the studios participating in finding another model that can work on multiple different levels or tiers and changing a model that’s been in place for decades, but O’Leary said there’s “nothing tangible” just yet in terms of movement on that front.
Maybe by next CinemaCon.
