New Trailers! Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Shrek 5, Hexed, The Last House and Hot Spot
🎥 Tom Holland swings again, Shrek steps into fatherhood, Disney’s new teen witch finds her magic, Greta Lee and Wagner Moura get trapped, and Noomi Rapace enters an AI future.
🎥 “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” New Trailer: Tom Holland’s Peter Parker Gets a Street-Level Reset as Hulk, Punisher, and Possible Mutants Enter the Mix — Hitting Theaters July 31st
While most cinephiles don’t usually care about box office numbers, since financial success doesn’t automatically make a film worthy of acclaim, it has nevertheless been interesting watching how this summer movie season has been shaping up.
The conversation hasn’t been dominated by the usual franchise machinery. Instead, some surprising smaller films have managed to break through, drawing real attention in a marketplace that usually saves most of its oxygen for superheroes, sequels, and familiar IP. One could even say a cultural shift is happening right in front of our eyes, and what felt untouchable a few years ago is starting to look a little stale.
The superhero genre, for one, no longer feels like the automatic summer centerpiece it once was. Meanwhile, high-concept horror thrillers have become some of the more reliable theatrical bets, even challenging the legacy franchises that once seemed impossible to beat. Sorry, The Mandalorian and Grogu, but this may not be your summer.
Still, despite all the talk about younger audiences craving more originality on the big screen (preferably with a few scares), we can’t help thinking Spider-Man might be the major exception. After all, everybody still seems to love Tom Holland, especially when he’s wearing the Spidey suit and trying to save the day while his personal life falls apart.
That’s what makes Spider-Man: Brand New Day such an interesting test case. The latest entry arrives at a time when franchise loyalty feels more fragile than ever, and yet Peter Parker has always been a different kind of superhero: more street-level, more emotionally accessible, and more tied to the simple pleasure of watching a kid swing through New York while trying to hold his world together. He might be the one superhero who never gets old... literally.
Continuing Peter Parker’s story after the world-changing events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Spider-Man: Brand New Day finds Holland’s Peter living anonymously in New York after Doctor Strange’s spell erased public memory of his existence. That means MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon), the two people closest to him, are now strangers he can only pass on the street.
But that doesn’t mean people haven’t heard of Spider-Man, or seen him swinging around the city and taking care of local riff-raff, including an old scoundrel who goes by the name of Scorpion, again played by Spider-Man: Homecoming actor Michael Mando.
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings fame, this new installment looks like a soft reset for Holland’s Peter Parker. Gone are the slick high-tech upgrades, advanced suits, and Peter’s close partnerships with the Avengers. This Spider-Man is on his own. He’s scrappier, more grounded, and a young hero rebuilding his entire life from scratch.
And while Peter Parker remains a nobody in most people’s eyes, Spider-Man is steadily gaining public traction, earning a reputation as either a local hero or, depending on who you ask, a vigilante.
That may explain why Frank Castle, aka the Punisher, enters the fray. Jon Bernthal makes his big-screen debut as the beloved antihero, reprising the role as someone Spider-Man can trust... to a point, and likely someone who will ultimately challenge Peter’s ideals.
Then there’s Bruce Banner. Mark Ruffalo returns as Hulk’s alter ego, now serving as a college professor and offering Peter advice about his possible mutation. While this new trailer only hints at it, Peter appears to be undergoing a transformation of his own, with his body beginning to change in unexpected ways.
Mutation is a key piece of the puzzle here. Sadie Sink has joined the cast in a mystery role, with rumors suggesting she may be playing a mutant with telepathic abilities. Some speculate that the character could be Jean Grey, though nothing has been confirmed. For now, her role remains very much under wraps.
What is revealed in this new trailer, however, is a much larger presence for the Hulk, teasing a long-anticipated faceoff between Spidey and the green goliath. It’s a clear nod to their classic showdown in the comics. And with the possible arrival of mutants in this corner of the MCU, this suddenly feels like the one superhero movie this summer that could remind audiences why they cared in the first place.
Co-starring Tramell Tillman, Liza Colón-Zayas, and Keith David, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is set to swing into theaters July 31st.
For Peter Parker, a brand new day might be exactly what he needs... and what the MCU needs, too.
🎥 “Shrek 5” Teaser Trailer: Shrek Enters His Fatherhood Era as Zendaya Joins Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz in This New Fairy-Tale Family Sequel — Coming to Theaters Next Summer, June 30, 2027
Four films in and Shrek has become one of the most beloved and commercially successful animated franchises of all time. After all, it is a fairy-tale spoof that plays beautifully for kids while sneaking in favorite pop songs, sly adult jokes, and enough irreverent humor to keep older audiences laughing too. And lest we forget, the performances from Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz helped redefine what animated voice acting could be: big, character-driven, instantly quotable, and funny without feeling like celebrities simply wandered into a recording booth.
And while Toy Story has proved that there is real audience appetite for revisiting favorite animated characters sequel after sequel, Shrek is following suit with a fifth installment, arriving more than 15 years after 2010’s Shrek Forever After. Because when it comes to animation, sometimes audiences do not want the story to end. They just want to know what happened after this particular storybook closed.
Shrek 5 brings Myers, Murphy, and Diaz back as Shrek, Donkey, and Fiona, but the new hook is generational. “Forever after” certainly meant love, marriage, and domestic bliss between Shrek and Fiona, but it also meant family, responsibility, and a few little ogres growing up into their own messy fairy-tale problems.
Zendaya joins the cast as Felicia, Shrek and Fiona’s daughter, while SNL cast member Marcello Hernandez and Superman’s Skyler Gisondo voice her brothers, Fergus and Farkle. That shifts the franchise into a new lane: less “what happens after happily ever after?” and more “what happens when the ogre who mocked fairy-tale tradition becomes the dad inside one?”
The film is directed by franchise veterans Conrad Vernon and Walt Dohrn, with Brad Ableson co-directing. Vernon was part of the directing team on Shrek 2 and has long voiced Gingy, the Gingerbread Man, while Dohrn worked across the earlier films and voiced Rumpelstiltskin in Shrek Forever After.
The bigger question here is whether Shrek can still feel like Shrek in 2027. The original worked because it was rude, sweet, self-aware, and just cynical enough to puncture the Disney-fied fairy-tale formula without losing its heart. Now, the franchise has to pull off a trickier act: returning as legacy IP while still making fun of the very kind of polished fairy-tale machine it once gleefully mocked. But perhaps fans are not looking for the franchise to reinvent the genre again so much as give them a good reason to visit this wonderfully cracked fairy-tale universe one more time.
Shrek 5 opens in theaters June 30, 2027.
🎥 “Hexed” Teaser Trailer: A Teenage Witch Finds Her Power and Enters a Magical Realm in Disney’s New Coming-of-Age Animated Adventure with Hailee Steinfeld and Rashida Jones — Arriving In Theaters November 25th
Witches have gotten a bad rap ... right? From the iconic green-skinned menace of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz to the dark folklore surrounding the Salem witch trials, witches have long been treated as shorthand for fear, danger, and social panic. But what if they could be something else entirely: a story about young women embracing their own power and rejecting the narrow roles society has written for them?
After all, who says wizards are the only ones who get to have all the fun? Move over, Harry, you ain’t the only one with magic anymore.
That’s the spell Disney appears to be casting with Hexed, an all-new animated coming-of-age saga introducing Billie, voiced by Sinners’ Hailee Steinfeld, an impulsive and unconventional teenage girl who feels miscast in her own life before discovering that her strangeness may actually be the first clue to something much bigger.
Yes, it feels a little like Harry Potter. But witches just might be a little angstier than boy wizards, and that gives Hexed a fun wrinkle to play with.
Billie’s life takes a sharp magical turn when she accidentally unleashes secret abilities, sending her out of suburbia and into “Hexe,” a hidden world of witches filled with strange creatures, enchanted objects, and a sense of possibility she has never found in the normal world.
Parks and Recreation’s Rashida Jones voices Billie’s cautious mother, Alice, whose relationship with her daughter seems to sit at the emotional center of the story. As Billie begins to understand her own connection to magic, she also uncovers family mysteries that could reshape the witch world itself.
The supporting voice cast includes comedy legend Tracey Ullman as Ms. Quill, an enchanted feather quill pen, and British comic Stephen Fry as Elias Quire, the voice of a magical journal who gives Billie the rundown of this magical world she just stepped into.
Directed by Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand, with Josie Trinidad co-directing, Hexed looks like it’s leaning into classic Disney territory: a young outsider, a hidden world, a family secret, and a heroine slowly realizing that the thing making her different may be the very thing that makes her powerful. Which is to say, it’s a Disney movie through and through.
Hexed marks Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 65th animated feature. The film is slated to open in theaters November 25th, just in time to turn Thanksgiving into something a little more magical.
🎥 “The Last House” Trailer: Greta Lee and Wagner Moura Are Trapped Inside Their Own Home in Netflix’s New Horror Thriller — Premiering August 7th on Netflix
They say home is where the heart is. A place meant for comfort, safety, and belonging. No one should be fearful behind their own front door... right?
Well, what if home becomes a locked cage... a trap with no way out? Suddenly, all those creature comforts start looking more like signs of how much control has been surrendered for convenience... and how the thought of going outside becomes a fantasy when you’re locked inside your own house by a mysterious force.
In what feels very much like a post-Covid horror fable, The Last House taps into the lingering tension of isolation and confinement when one’s home becomes both shelter and jail sentence.
Hailing from French-born director Louis Leterrier, of The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk, Now You See Me, and Fast X, Greta Lee (Past Lives, Toy Story 5) and Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent, Narcos) star as Riley and Jason, parents trying to protect their children after the unthinkable happens: their family home becomes impossible to leave.
Doors will not open. Windows offer no escape. The outside world remains close enough to see, but suddenly unreachable, as if some unseen force has drawn a hard line around the place they once trusted most.
It’s a simple setup with a nasty little edge, where the terror does not come only from what is outside, but from what confinement does to the people trapped within. Food, water, patience, and trust all become limited resources. And once the days begin stretching into something much longer, domestic life starts to look less like stability and more like a pressure cooker.
And when Riley and Jason discover that they aren’t the only ones on the block dealing with the same terrifying phenomenon, this increasingly claustrophobic supernatural mystery begins to widen beyond the borders of their neighborhood. Rumors spread into panic, and now the fear is that the entire world might be suffering the same impossible lockdown. Time to hoard the toilet paper... again.
Written by Matthew Robinson, of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die and Love and Monsters, and also starring Riley Chung, Emma Ho, Noah Alexander Sosnowski, and Gabriel Barbosa, The Last House aims to make staying home feel like the scariest option of all when it starts streaming August 7th only on Netflix.
🎥 “Hot Spot” Trailer: Andrzej Konopka and Noomi Rapace Enter a Near-Future AI Thriller Where Reality Starts to Break Down — Opening In Theaters August 21st
Welcome to the future: a place where sentient artificial intelligence runs the show, and one murder investigation is enough to expose a dangerous truth.
Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczyńska, whose work has often drifted into surreal, genre-bending territory, from the offbeat siren musical The Lure to the psychological sisters thriller The Silent Twins, now steps into AI-driven sci-fi with a colorful, not-too-distant future that feels grounded, strange, and deliberately off-kilter.
Starring Polish actor Andrzej Konopka and Swedish star Noomi Rapace, Hot Spot takes place in a dystopian society governed by an all-powerful AI system. Konopka plays Djonny, a private investigator assigned to look into a murder case that quickly slips into something more paranoid, unstable, and hallucinatory.
What starts with a killing soon reveals a much larger fracture in the digital order. Djonny crosses paths with a rebel group capable of threatening the AI system’s control, pulling him into a conspiracy where surveillance and rebellion are locked in a battle over what reality is allowed to be. And the deeper he digs, the less the mystery seems to be about one murder, and the more it becomes a question of whether reality itself can still be trusted.
Noomi Rapace co-stars as Rana, a mysterious woman caught at the center of the case. A refugee living in a nearby encampment, she may possess a strange power capable of resisting the system, earning her the label “cyber witch.” But in a world ruled by a digital authority, where evidence can be shaped and truth can be rewritten, who gets to decide whether a crime even happened?
Written by Robert Bolesto, and co-starring Reika Kirishima, George Aurimas Cris, Filippa Kaye, Niki Sereti, and Ektor Liatsos as TseTse, Hot Spot looks to blend hardcore cyberpunk with an ’80s-tinged fever-dream aesthetic, offering a vision of the future that feels both hypnotic and ready to melt down. It opens in theaters August 21st.
