Category: Entertainment

After a rare mid-summer weekend at the box office without a new wide release, moviegoers are gobbling up the chance to see Tom Holland and Zendaya return to the big screen for Sony Pictures‘ Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Marvel Studios‘ latest offering caught a staggering $72 million from Thursday previews on 4,300 North American screens. This sets the record for a previews sum, topping the $60 million that Avengers: Endgame took in 2019 before it scored the top marks for its opening weekend with $357.1 million domestically and an unbelievable $1.2 billion globally.

Needless to say, Thursday’s tally gives the web-slinger by far the year’s biggest previews total. Universal’s The Odyssey had previously led the way in 2026 previews with $17.6 million, followed by Toy Story 5 at $17.5 million and Michael with $12.6 million. Both Toy Story 5 and Michael have surpassed the billion-dollar mark globally, while The Odyssey is well on its way to hitting that milestone, having crossed $700 million earlier this week.

The last Spidey movie to hit the big screen was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which collected $50 million in Thursday previews when it opened in December 2021. Its opening weekend notched $260.1 million domestically and $587.2 million worldwide. At the time, No Way Home’s commercial success — culminating with its $1.9 billion global total for No. 8 all-time — appeared to be anomalous, given the surprise appearance of previous Peter Parkers in Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, along with the lack of major theatrical competition coming out of COVID.

This blistering start for Spider-Man: Brand New Day suggests an opening weekend far beyond the $195 million domestic and $465 million global that the studio had been projecting. Even a domestic opening at $195 million would have put the film among the top 10 all-time debuts, and now the only question is how high it might climb on the chart. It carries a $225 million production budget.

Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal and Mark Ruffalo also star in Destin Daniel Cretton‘s feature. It centers on the eponymous hero living a lonely existence without his loved ones before an invisible enemy tracks him down.

Moviegoers have been impressed, as Brand New Day holds a 90 percent approval rating from reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, along with a 98 percent audience score. In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, chief film critic David Rooney heralded “a never-better Tom Holland.”

Also opening in wide release this weekend is filmmaker Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex, starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman. Magnolia Pictures releases the comedic thriller in 700 North American theaters after acquiring the movie in a reported seven-figure deal following its Sundance premiere.

Brian Entin will pack more shirts next time.

It is a bit morbid to say the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping investigation, which hits the six-month mark(!) on Saturday, has made the NewsNation senior national correspondent a star — but such is the genre Entin traffics in. Also, it’s true. Amid a flurry of in-and-out mainstream media and social media coverage, Entin’s good, old-fashioned (and consistent) shoe leather reporting has stood tall above the conspiracy theories so often amplified by amateur internet sleuths. This was not Entin’s first rodeo; in some ways, the 41-year-old (don’t let the silver hair fool you) has been preparing for it his whole life.

The son of a criminal defense attorney, Entin first rose to national prominence with the Gabby Petito case. His profile grew with the Idaho college murders. Entin’s strategy? Get to the scene and “camp out on the lawn” until someone throws you off. Entin was the right guy with the right job when news of Nancy’s abduction was first reported.

“I remember talking to colleagues and saying, like, ‘There’s something really strange about this,’” Entin told The Hollywood Reporter.

Entin is from Florida, so “Silver Alerts” are nothing new in his world. But this very quickly, very clearly, was not that.

“You’re so used to hearing about them,” he continued. “Someone with Alzheimer’s walks off or something. So that was my first reaction. But within a couple of hours, I remember [Pima County sheriff Chris Nanos spoke], and there was just something off about it. We flew [to Arizona] that day.”

Entin, his cameraman Maurice “Mo” Moran, and a field producer “basically have not left since,” he says. (Entin did take a break to bring his mom on an Alaskan cruise for her 70th birthday, where he says “all the older ladies” wanted to chat with him about the Guthrie case.)

“I kind of just latch onto these things, and when everybody else leaves, we’re always like the last ones,” Entin says.

Entin only packed “three or four” shirts for his initial stay — so it has been a lot of long desert days and laundry. He’s as shocked as you that the investigation has been ongoing for this long with not a single suspect named.

“When the [Nest] camera video came out — oh my God! I thought that was it. It was so clear. You could see his eyes. You could see the clothing so well. You could see his gait. There were all sorts of details about the clothing, of the backpack,” Entin said. “I remember I thought immediately, ‘OK, this is it. In the next 48 hours, everybody get ready, we’re gonna be rushing out the door to some kind of arrest or some kind of bust.’”

That was just nine days after Nancy’s disappearance. There have been almost no leads since.

Part of Entin’s work has seen him interviewing “every retired FBI profiler [he] can think of.” Those conversations have informed Entin’s personal present-day theory.

“I think it’s possible that it’s not about money. That that was like a distraction,” he said. “It’s possible it’s a Savannah stalker-type — someone who wanted to get to Savannah Guthrie in an emotional way.”

Tragically, mission accomplished. Savannah Guthrie returned to the Today show in March, but she has not stopped putting out the occasional, law-enforcement-assisted calls for help. It is clear that everyone believes Nancy, who was 84 years old at the time of her abduction and in poor health, is dead. But the job — not Entin’s, not Nanos’, not FBI director Kash Patel’s — is not done.

Entin’s not going anywhere. Entin, his camera operator, and a field producer are hunkered down in a hotel near Nancy’s Tucson home. Really, they’re mostly hunkered in a shared rental car “just staking places out.” (The investigation has taken them are far as Mexico, but right now Entin is splitting time between Tucson and working a separate story in Phoenix.)

The NewsNation crew gets a chance to stretch their legs in a driveway of a Guthrie neighbor whom they’ve befriended — a new ordinance has banned parking on Guthrie’s street — and 30 minutes away at the sheriff’s office. (Entin has been working on getting a new one-on-one interview with Nanos, though the last one was not especially friendly.)

Though one can still walk down Nancy’s street and film (for a bit) in front of her home, that is about the extent of the accessibility. It was the YouTubers who blew it for everyone else.

“They would stream live and stay there constantly — like, literally almost around the clock,” Entin said. “That was just becoming annoying to the neighbors.”

You know what’s even worse than being a pest? Putting non-suspects, like Nancy’s son-in-law Tommaso Cioni, out there as the possible kidnapper, which some people did. (One of them was Ashleigh Banfield, an occasional NewsNation contributor who used to host 10 p.m. To be fair to her, Banfield at least couched all of her reporting on sources, albeit anonymous. There are far-less-responsible amateurs putting information out via social media.)

“It sounds crazy to even have this conversation because, for you and I, it’s like kind of just what we do. But in today’s world, it’s kind of a commodity, but verifying everything that we report… having multiple sources — having good, solid, strong sources,” Entin said. “If you ever do get something wrong, which luckily I haven’t in a while, but it happens, make sure you correct it right away and explain to people what happened and why you made the mistake. So yeah, we try to do that all the time.”

Though the first six months hasn’t gone great, Entin believes the cops and the feds will solve this thing within the next six.

“Any day now something could happen,” he said. “All it takes, and it sounds cheesy, and you always hear this, but all it takes is like that one person to call in something, or them to get some kind of DNA match, which they’re still working on behind the scenes. So I do— I think before the one-year mark, there’ll be some kind of significant progress. That’s just what my gut says.”

James Gray and Darren Aronofsky are among the big-name filmmakers getting honored at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival this August. But the 2026 lineup of the Swiss festival also showcases all sorts of newer and emerging filmmakers from around the globe.

Their names may not be widely known yet, but buzz at a festival, such as Locarno, could, of course, open doors and bring support for more projects ahead. Some of these up-and-coming filmmakers, however, create cinematic experiences not under their legal names, but pseudonyms. Cases in point: Filmsaaz and Neozoon, whose works are featured in this year’s Pardi di Domani, or “Leopards of Tomorrow, program.”

The name of the program is a reference to Locarno’s Leopard awards and is designed to provide “a vital space for expressive experimentation and innovative forms of cinematic poetry,” the festival says. In fact, it calls the section “a cornerstone” of its mission “to foster dialogue between generations and traditions and to support the filmmakers who will define the future of cinematic expression.”

Whether or not you are already aware of Neozoon and Filmsaaz and their work, THR has compiled some key info about these filmmakers and asked them about their work as a small tease of what awaits you.

Filmsaaz world-premiered Wolfgang, the minimal-budget feature directorial debut of the Tehran-born audiovisual artist that is a gender-queered acid trip opera, earlier this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In Locarno’s Pardi di Domani – Concorso Corti d’Autore lineup, they will debut a new 21-minute short film called Ãsheghetam.

The title is “a very intense way to say ‘I love you’,” Filmsaaz explains. “It literally means ‘I am your lover’.” Written, directed and edited by Filmsaaz, whose real name is Saleh Kashefi, the short feels particularly timely. “During a chaotic night at an underground Tehran rave disrupted by the morality police and the sudden outbreak of war, a queer youth chooses to retreat into a bubble of romantic illusion with their partner just to survive the brutal reality outside,” its synopsis reads.

“I started developing the film about a year ago, after the 12-day war between Iran and Israel happened,” Filmsaaz tells THR. “Even though very complex to make, the important thing for me was to finish and release it fast, as it is important for this film to be seen as soon as possible. So we were lucky that Locarno was kind enough to accept the film with a rough cut; the film just [got] finished about two weeks ago.”

Filmsaaz shares this thought on a possible regime change in Iran. “Of course, nothing is permanent, and even the most powerful governments and monarchies have collapsed in history – it’s only a matter of time.” And they add: “These days I feel quite hopeless and cynical in general about the world we live in. The film, in fact, is about giving up hope and dissociating from reality, which is the defense mechanism all of the Iranian youth have learned.”

So, where does the moniker Filmsaaz come from? Well, it mixes the Farsi words for “filmmaker” and “music.” And this new name was a conscious decision. “I wanted to let go of the conventional birth name, which represents a culture, a gender, a religion, a history, and represents a family,” the creative told THR earlier this year. “I wanted to give myself a name that was as simple as possible. I wanted to free myself from all those contexts and layers, and also to somehow redefine how filmmakers are represented.”

After all, the likes of Bono and Prince prove you can make a name for yourself with just one name. “Why are we always known by our first name and last name?” explained Filmsaaz. “Musicians and other kinds of artists can have artistic names. They can have a persona.”

Filmsaaz has made all sorts of shorts in the past, and they have such colorful titles as The Three Letter Word (2017), Kim Kardashian in a Cat’s Eyes (2019), I Was Gonna Kill Myself but Instead I Made This Film (2020), Leaving Here and Her (2021), And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil (2023), A Man Passes by the Soaked Trees (2024) and Overture (2025).

Meanwhile, Locarno 2026‘s Pardi di Domani – Concorso Internazionale lineup includes Together, a 14-minute short that the festival website teases this way: “An exploration of human desires for land ownership and property through archival footage and social media. It contrasts togetherness with rising individualism, questioning whether possession stems from need or a Eurocentric, patriarchal narrative.”

The short comes from the “eco feminist art collective” Neozoon. The two main creatives behind it are Friederike Kersten and Michaela Metzger, who have also worked with other collaborators in the past. The Locarno website notes that Neozoon was founded in 2009 in Berlin and Paris. And it highlights: “Their work is based on the principle of collage and investigates sociological questions of the Anthropocene,” or our epoch in which human activity shapes the planet’s climate and ecosystems. The collective’s website is even more specific, saying the team “examines sociological questions dealing with speciesism in the capitalocene.” 

You may know that “neozoon” is the word for a non-native or invasive species. And the collective’s street art, films and installations have used the concept of non-native species to explore how modern human society interacts with nature and animals. “In their video films, the de-and recontextualization of found footage and social media material is a recurring element,” especially the use of YouTube and TikTok footage, the Locarno website also explains.

And the Locarno site highlights some of their past works. Again, they have titles that will turn heads. Among them are Good Boy – Bad Boy (2011), Unboxing Eden (2013), Shake Shake Shake (2016), Little Lower Than the Angels (2019), Biting the Dust (2021) and Lake of Fire (2022).

If you get a sense that there is an activist vibe and a desire to challenge our thinking behind Neozoon’s work, that is surely by design. For example, Lake of Fire is described as “a film collage that addresses the fear of death and hell and how a dualistic way of seeing and living fuels the climate change-related ‘hell on earth’.”

The inspiration for Together came in the form of a 2021 book by an anthropologist and an archaeologist. “After reading [David] Graeber and [David] Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything a few years ago, we started looking specifically for film and audio material about ‘the history of mankind,’ the Neozoon duo tells THR. “The same story came up again and again: people settling down, claiming ownership, fencing themselves off, becoming more and more individual, more and more alone – as if that were the great goal of humankind and as if there had never been another option. So we started asking what kind of story that actually is.”

Neozoon also has a clear take on how Eurocentric, patriarchal narratives play into this urge to own land and fulfill individuals’ desires. “All the material we found comes from the global North, produced by a small number of institutions,” the Neozoon members explain. “What those films narrate as human development is a story of acquisition: settling down, putting up fences, owning. They weren’t inventing it. They were illustrating the science of their time, and that science was done by the same people. European men excavated and European men interpreted, and the past they found looked like the world they already lived in: the hunter at the center, the woman at the fire.”

Things are starting to change, though. “Much of that is being rewritten now – the abilities of early humans, who actually hunted, the role of women completely – not because new evidence appeared, but because other people are doing the interpreting now,” highlights the Neozoon team.

So, does the collective consider itself political and/or activist? “Political, yes. Activist would be claiming more than a short film can do,” the duo tells THR. “What runs through all our films is the question of the exploitative treatment of non-human animals and of nature by (male) human beings. New research suggests that this world was once a different one, in which ecofeminist perspectives, for instance, were the standard rather than the exception. Part of that is observing and acknowledging other species on this planet.”

Such as ants, for example, which play a key role in Together. They are “masters of bridge-building in order to survive as a group,” Neozoon explains. “That seems to us more admirable than the story we have been telling ourselves about our own species.”