Blog

Zach Cregger is reuniting with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group’s New Line division for his next original feature.

Cregger, who directed last year’s acclaimed Oscar-winning horror hit Weapons for the company, has written, and will direct, The Flood, an original sci-fi thriller on which the studio is moving at full speed, scheduling an Aug. 11, 2028 release date.

The project reunites him with his Weapons producers Roy Lee and Miri Yoon of Vertigo Entertainment and interestingly has him working with avowed Cregger fan Steven Spielberg. The latter’s Amblin Entertainment is also producing Flood.

The announcement, by Warners’ Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, came in the last few minutes of the studio’s presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

And while reveal and subsequent PR release was light on detail, including keeping the plot on a distant space station, it is known that the project was originally set up at Netflix. And the filmmaker’s previous projects have been modern-set horror thriller freakouts, this one is described as being very much in the science fiction mold.

“Zach is the rarest of filmmakers, fluent in every genre he touches, and we’re excited to continue our partnership” said New Line president Richard Brener in a statement.

Cregger stated, “I’m incredibly excited to continue my partnership with Mike, Pam, Richard, and the teams at Warner Bros. and New Line. They are true champions of bold creativity, united by a shared ambition to deliver unforgettable theatrical experiences for audiences. That’s the dream for any filmmaker.”

Weapons, which New Line/Warners won in a fierce bidding war, blew up last August’s box office, becoming an unexpected hit and sensation. It earned almost $270 million worldwide on a $38 million budget and introduced the character Aunt Gladys into the pop culture ecosphere.

Amy Madigan was recognized with an Academy Award for her role. A prequel is now in the works. Cregger won’t direct, but is co-writing with Zach Shields. A Sept. 8, 2028 release date has been set, making it a very Cregger-heavy 2028 for New Line.

Amongst Weapons‘ fans was Spielberg, who has been quietly working with Cregger for a while. In an interview with film magazine Empire, the filmmaking legend said Weapons was so good as a horror movie that it quelled his desire to make a movie in the genre.

“When I see a great horror film like Weapons, I don’t have an itch I need to scratch,” he said. “I see Weapons, and it doesn’t make me want to make a horror film that’s as scary or scarier than Weapons. It satisfies me so completely, it actually arrests my desire to someday make a really, really scary movie.”

Flood keeps Cregger in the New Line fold. Beyond Weapons, he was a producer on the division’s sci-fi thriller Companion, released in early 2025. His next feature, Resident Evil, based on the hit video game franchise, is coming from Sony in September and is already building buzz thanks to intense trailer previewed Monday at CinemaCon.

Dune: Part Three opens with no shortage of firepower, as the CinemaCon crowd learned Tuesday.

Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Jason Momoa and director Denis Villeneuve took the stage at the Las Vegas event to discuss the sequel. They then unveiled the first seven minutes from the highly anticipated film during Warner Bros.‘ presentation.

The footage featured Javier Bardem as Stilgar as he led his troops against a seemingly insurmountable enemy. The intense battle scenes featured an endless array of shots fired and plenty of actual fire.

After those seven minutes, additional footage included Chalamet’s Paul Atreides confronting Zendaya’s Chani in a tense moment.

“You’ve conquered the galaxy,” Momoa tells Chalamet in the new footage. “You’ve destroyed thousands of worlds.” This leads Chalamet to ask, “What are your thoughts on that?” to which Momoa replies, “I think you’re way beyond redemption.”

Later, Zendaya asks Chalamet, “How does it feel to be human like everyone else, Paul Atreides?”

In introducing the scenes, Villeneuve called the film a thriller and teased, “It’s more intense and definitely more emotional.”

Chalamet said of Paul, “He’s become his worst vision,” and the star teased his character “becoming an all-powerful emperor of the dark universe.”

Zendaya explained, “The years don’t seem to have been kind to anyone on Dune. It’s been an ungentle and unkind few years. There’s so much left to fight for.” She continued about Chani, “That youthful outlook is completely gone.”

Momoa acknowledged that his role in the film is much different from the last time viewers saw him, given that Duncan Idaho died in the first one, and Momoa is back as a clone: “I’m sent as a gift to Paul to see how he handles someone that he hasn’t seen and see how he takes that.”

Chalamet added, “It was deeply moving to be on a sci-fi trilogy on the scale of Lord of the Rings.”

For Zendaya, the footage represents the actress appearing in two days in a row of major releases teased at CinemaCon, with the Euphoria star also having shown up in Sony’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day footage.

The news comes a month after the first trailer dropped for the film, and limited seats for Imax 70mm screenings for the film quickly sold out.

Dune: Part Three stars Chalamet, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Javier Bardem, Florence Pugh, Taylor-Joy, Rebecca Ferguson and Momoa. The film takes place 17 years after Part Two and follows Emperor Paul Atreides as he struggles with the consequences of his holy war, trapped in a cycle of violence while facing conspiracies from the Bene Gesserit, Tleilaxu, and his wife, Irulan.

Warner Bros. and Legendary release Dune: Part Three on Dec. 18, which has been the source of plenty of eyebrow raising as Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday is coming on the same date (an event that’s been dubbed “Dunesday”). Exhibitors are hoping to get an exclusive look at Dune‘s box office rival when Disney has its presentation on Thursday.

Thanks to the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics, NBCUniversal — with an assist from the recently spun off Versant — dethroned YouTube for the largest share of TV viewing in February.

Nielsen released both its monthly Gauge summary of viewing by platform and its Media Distributor Gauge for the reach of TV use by company on Tuesday. The stats were held back for several weeks due to some Nielsen clients pushing back on a change in how the ratings provider assembled its Gauge data.

Briefly: Nielsen was planning to supplement its data with that from a group called the Advertising Research Foundation that would likely have shown a dip in streaming’s share of total TV use. A number of clients balked at that idea, and in late March, Nielsen decided both to hold back on releasing the monthly numbers and not make any changes to its current Gauge methodology until the 2026-27 TV season, when it will more closely align with the company’s currency ratings products that are used to set ad rates across the industry.

“The Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge (MDG) do not reflect Nielsen’s currency TV ratings,” a note with the February release reads. “Nielsen is working on updates to The Gauge and MDG reports to better reflect and include currency enhancements for the Fall TV season, at which time Nielsen will provide additional back data to clients to assist in the transition.”

To those numbers for February: NBCUniversal and Versant combined for 13.1 percent of all TV use in the February reporting period (which covered Jan. 26-Feb. 22), with the Super Bowl and Olympics accounting for a huge portion of the spike from 8.5 percent in January (Nielsen reports the two companies together because NBCU sells ads for both.) NBCU had 10 percent on its own, while Versant accounted for 3.1 percent.

The combined total ended a year-long streak for YouTube at the top of the media distributor charts, despite YouTube’s share of all viewing rising a little in February (12.7 percent, up from 12.5 percent in January).

Streaming platforms had 48 percent of all viewing in February, with a big gain for NBCU’s Peacock accounting for much of the growth. Peacock had its highest monthly share in the five-year history of the Gauge, scoring 3 percent of all TV viewing thanks to the Super Bowl and Olympics. Aside from small upticks for YouTube, Disney (5 percent) and Tubi (2.2 percent), most streamers lost a bit of share compared to January.

Broadcast viewing edged up to 21.7 percent (from 21.5 percent) in February, again likely attributable to the Super Bowl and Olympics. Outside of those, CBS’ Grammy Awards telecast was the most watched program of the month. With the NFL and college football seasons over, cable took a step back to just 20 percent of all viewing, despite an overall increase in cable news viewing and big, winter games-fueled growth for USA Network.

The Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge numbers for February are below.

Merciful Mother Mary, deliver us from evil. Or from whatever this risibly self-serious metaphysical nonsense about performance and possession, creation and exorcism, aims to be. David Lowery is an adventurous director, alternating studio material like Pete’s Dragon, The Old Man & the Gun and Peter Pan & Wendy with pleasingly idiosyncratic projects like the poetic mood piece about time and loss, A Ghost Story, or the imaginative chivalric fantasy, The Green Knight. His new film belongs decidedly in the latter grouping, but it’s all style, no substance, despite lots of heat from Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel in what’s essentially a two-hander.

As a global pop sensation whose stage costuming includes ornate halos that make her look like sexy religious iconography and clearly contribute to the cult-like devotion of her fans, Hathaway is a commanding avatar for music superstars from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé to Lady Gaga and Madonna. (Lowery has acknowledged the film of Swift’s Reputation stadium tour as a key inspiration for the concert scenes.) But it’s Coel, as Sam Anselm, a maverick British designer with the arch intensity of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, who dominates the film, for better or worse. 

The heady visuals at times recall the films of Tarsem Singh, which means the strengths of Mother Mary are mostly aesthetic, from the elaborately staged performance interludes to ghostly, quasi-horror developments as the central pas de deux yields more secrets. 

Despite reams of dialogue that tends to be enigmatic if not downright opaque, the gothic melodrama is stretched too thin to have much grip. In its bias of effect over emotional complexity, the storytelling leans more toward music-video atmospherics than robust narrative. To that end, suitably trance-like original EDM songs by Jack Antonoff, Charli xcx and FKA twigs, alongside Daniel Hart’s score, are a vital component. But none of that does much to camouflage a core drama that’s pretentious and dull.

In ominous voiceover, Sam feels her bile rising as Hathaway’s Mary approaches after a decade-long estrangement. Sure enough, Mary shows up unannounced, bedraggled and strung-out — unlike the leggy goddess we see on stage — at the English countryside estate that serves as the designer’s atelier and home. The pop star needs a dress for a comeback show the following weekend, just days away, which Sam and her aloof assistant Hilda (Hunter Schafer, wasted) say can’t be done. 

But we all know how that goes. Sam tosses around lofty claims about her creative process — she describes her work as “the transubstantiation of feeling” — but soon she’s draping bits of fabric on Mary like a Project Runway contestant confounded by the challenge. 

It emerges that although visionary image-maker Sam built the look that made Mother Mary an object of worship to millions of fans, the singer unceremoniously dropped her 10 years ago with no explanation. Sam has not listened to her music since; she found that hating Mary was the only way to soothe her abandonment.

Coel bites into the acerbic bitterness of that history in their early exchanges, with a vein of malice in questions supposedly intended to reveal who Mary has become and hence what kind of dress will feel true to her. Sam refuses to hear the new song Mary plans to debut, but she does consent to watch the dance — without music — that the performer has worked out to accompany it. Hathaway hurls herself into that punishing sequence with violent physical force and emotional rawness.

Then come the ghosts. Without giving too much away, the long night they spend together takes on a hallucinatory quality as first Sam reveals a vision that appeared to her, beckoning her to follow, and then Mary confesses that the same vision entered her body and can only be released via a flesh-wound portal. Or something.

Lowery manifests that vision as a swirling tangle of red fabric that acquires an almost corporeal form, a mesmerizing jolt of color in the sumptuous darkness of DP Andrew Droz Palermo’s visuals (Rina Yang shot the concert scenes). But what it means beyond the obvious connotations of a tortured connection in the blood — encompassing creative collaboration as well as a personal, possibly even romantic, bond — is anyone’s guess. It’s no clearer even after some occult business in a chalk circle transports them back to a night in which Mary and a group of young women participated as Imogen (FKA twigs) physically summoned the spirit in a seance.

Given that Hathaway plays Mary not as an entitled diva but a tremulous mess, at risk of being consumed by her public image, the drama invests heavily in the possession and exorcism aspects. It must be said that Hathaway looks sensational in Bina Daigeler’s stage costumes, and while her vocals are electronically enhanced to death, the songs are convincing and catchy enough for her to pass for a legit music phenomenon.

Lowery is digging into the mystique of pop superstardom and the creative alchemy that makes it happen, the intimacy of inspiration and the enormity of communion with a massive audience. Some might be willing to find depth in his stylish, stylized but gossamer-thin depiction of a woman at the height of her performative powers struggling to bear the weight of her stage persona. I found it a bore — self-consciously cool but distancing and empty.

At least the dress (by Iris van Herpen, no less) is a knockout. No prizes for guessing the color.