This week marks the latest installment of Cinema United’s CinemaCon, a.k.a., “The movie convention where they don’t let those of us who hang out on the internet see shit.” Sure, the occasional trailer will leak out of the event—which is, at least ostensibly, a trade show intended mostly for actual theater owners to evaluate upcoming studio releases—but it’s almost never anything massive; we’re instead forced to content ourselves with grim spectacles like an AI Val Kilmer telling audiences not to be afraid of digital ghosts.
Still, if we’re forced to be bitter cranks about all the cool new footage we’re being teased with, yet not allowed to see, we might as well be well-informed ones; hence this quick rundown of all the big CinemaCon trailers and footage drops that we’re all going to just force ourselves to accept that we’re experiencing secondhand.
That starts most especially with Avengers: Doomsday, one of several Disney properties that got showcased at CinemaCon on Thursday. That included a trailer that will presumably arrive online someday, in which Chris Hemsworth’s Thor delivers some portentous monologues while showing various members of the X-Men and their enemies (Mystique, Cyclops, Gambit, and more), facing off both against, and alongside, established Marvel characters. It also included the first real footage of Robert Downey Jr. as Dr. Doom—and, just to hammer home the “Make it 2019 again by science or magic” of it all, a shot of Chris Evans apparently returning as Steve Rogers.
Elsewhere at the convention, Disney finally brought Star Wars back to theaters, too, showing off a new trailer (plus 17 minutes of actual footage) from The Mandalorian And Grogu. Which sounds like it opens with a riff on The Empire Strikes Back, with its Lone Wolf And Cub (With Magic Powers) facing off against a base full of Imperial snowtroopers and blowing up a bunch of AT-AT walkers. Disney also showed off new footage of Toy Story 5, apparently revealing the terrifying fact that even sentient toys can suffer from age-based hair loss.
Not that it’s only been the House Of Mouse holding court in their cinematic ivory tower: Universal and Paramount have also gotten in on the fun this week, with the former showing off new footage from Steven Spielberg’s alien thriller Disclosure Day. (Mostly sounding like an expansion on the trailers we’ve already seen, with Colin Firth playing the bad guy while various people around the planet start spouting alien gobbledygook.) Fans of both Minions and meta-ness (and, we guess, monsters) got a treat with a look at this July’s Minions And Monsters, showing that the animated film will take place at least in part on a movie set, with the Illumination mascot creatures tasked with making a movie called… Minions And Monsters. Horror fans in attendance were gifted footage from Jessica Chastain’s Other Mommy and Robert Eggers’ Werwulf, while the rest of us were forced to subsist on the Focker-In-Law trailer that got dropped online yesterday.
As for Paramount: We did get a chance to indulge in the sheer weirdness of the Street Fighter trailer earlier today, as Kitao Sakurai’s film publicly embraced the fighting game franchise’s inherent camp. Meanwhile, the other pickings from the studio felt a little slimmer, despite new owner David Ellison showing up at the convention to double down on his commitment to putting movies in theaters. That includes stuff like a new look at Sonic The Hedgehog 4—making it clear that, yes, Jim Carrey really is back—David Corenswet’s sports movie Mr. Irrelevant, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Children Of Blood And Bone, and, in the most apparently eye-catching bit of Paramount’s presentation today, a showcase for Ti West and Johnny Depp’s ridiculously named Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol. (“Ohhh,” audiences seeing the subtitle for the first time are apparently expected to say. “That Ebenezer.”) Besides proving that there are still crowds who will cheer their heads off for Depp, the footage from the CinemaCon appearance apparently included shots of West’s ghoulish takes on the story’s ghosts, and, from reports, more comedy than you might be expecting from this particular Dickens adaptation.
Finally, the other major studios had their chances to shine earlier in the week: Warner Bros. showed off new footage from Dune: Part 3, Clayface, Supergirl, Practical Magic 2, and more; Sony showed off more of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and the first looks at Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie; and Amazon MGM showcased Michael B. Jordan’s The Thomas Crown Affair, that new title for the Spaceballs sequel, and a further look at Chad Stahelski’s upcoming Highlander remake. Which is, admittedly, a pretty huge bushel of sour grapes to contend with—but we’ll be damned if we won’t do our best to get it down.
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