Yes, a third Thomas Crown Affair has a reason to exist, and the new trailer says it in one exchange across a dinner table.

Amazon MGM released the full trailer on Nov. 12, a two-and-a-half-minute cut that spends its best stretch on Michael B. Jordan and Adria Arjona negotiating over a meal rather than on anything blowing up. "This is how you like it... right on the edge," she tells him. She also asks if he likes taking risks. "Only if it's worth it," he answers. The film opens March 5, 2027, directed by and starring Jordan, scored by Jon Batiste, with Kenneth Branagh, Lily Gladstone, Danai Gurira and Pilou Asbæk in support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A643rogutGM

Three Crowns, three eras, and each one hands its thief a different prize for the trouble: cool in 1968, glamour in 1999, a conscience in 2027. That shift is the whole argument for making the film again, and it is also the thing that could sink it.

Spoiler Warning

What follows spoils the endings of the 1968 and 1999 films. Nothing here reveals the 2027 plot beyond what its trailer already shows.

1968: The Thief Who Flies Away

Norman Jewison made the original the year after In the Heat of the Night, casting Steve McQueen against type as a bored Boston millionaire who masterminds two bank heists rather than an art theft, opposite Faye Dunaway as the insurance investigator chasing him. The technique was the selling point: split-screen panels, a Michel Legrand score, and Noel Harrison singing "The Windmills of Your Mind" over the titles, which won Best Original Song at the 41st Academy Awards.

The Hollywood Reporter's own review at the time called it "a flashy, undemanding technical achievement" built on "cynicism passing for sophistication." The ending earns that. Crown outwits Vicki's trap, pulls a second robbery anyway, and leaves her holding a telegram while he flies off clean. The era wanted nerve, with no accounting attached. By 1999, the Guardian would look back and judge McQueen's turn a near miss, writing that he "was trying to be Cary Grant with an edge, but it didn't quite work."

1999: The Thief Who Gets the Girl

John McTiernan's remake moved the crime into a museum. Pierce Brosnan's Crown lifts Monet's San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, valued in the film at $100 million, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Rene Russo as the investigator on his trail. The budget was $48 million; the worldwide gross was $124.3 million.

It ends the other way around. Crown escapes under a crowd of Magritte-style bowler hats, sprinklers wash the forgery back into the real Monet, and Banning boards a flight to London where he is waiting in the next row. The Guardian called it "a remake that is actually better than the original," one that "revives the lost art of the stylish romantic thriller" without a gunshot fired. Faye Dunaway, the original Vicki, cameos as Crown's psychiatrist and delivers the film's opening lines, a quiet handoff from the first movie to the second. That era wanted glamour and a Hollywood ending, and bought both.

2027: The Thief With a Cause

Jordan's version gives the female lead a badge instead of a client list. Arjona plays a former FBI agent offered $10 million to recover a stolen Van Gogh, and Branagh plays the adversary chasing Crown down. Crown's actual project, per the trailer, is restitution: returning stolen and sold artifacts to the people who made them.

Jordan has been direct about what he thinks the earlier films were really selling. "The first two films were about rich white guys stealing for fun. That doesn't land today," he told Variety. "Ours is more personal. The stakes are higher. Still got the fashion, romance." To Deadline he drew the line even sharper: "When you're re-imagining something, it's not a remake. It's not a reboot. It's a re-imagination." The shoot moved to London, the first time the title has left Boston and New York. At CinemaCon, Jordan said he wanted to give Crown "a mission" and make him "someone you could root for."

The earlier teaser sold a globetrotting gentleman thief; the new full trailer sells a man with a cause and an enemy to match.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnm4HgIAVmU

By the Numbers

1. 1968: $14 million gross on a $4.3 million budget.
2. 1999: $124.3 million worldwide on $48 million.
3. Creed III, Jordan's previous directing job: $276 million worldwide, the top earner at Amazon MGM until Project Hail Mary reached $300.8 million in March 2026.

The Case for a Third Crown

What survived both earlier films is a two-hander: a chess game, a dinner table, two people negotiating with a smirk. The heist was always the excuse to get them in the same room. The new trailer's best thirty seconds are the ones with cutlery, which suggests the filmmakers know exactly what worked.

The risk is everything built around that table. This Crown comes with wires, a racetrack chase, a bounty hunter and a villain with a grudge, and a thief with a mission can drift toward a vigilante movie with a museum pass. The 1999 film's advantage was staying small: two adults, one painting, no explosions. The genre has already produced one 2026 cautionary tale about letting the craft outrun the characters, in the overstuffed cutting of How to Rob a Bank Review: A Heist Filtered Through Edits.

There is a business case layered on top of the artistic one. Amazon MGM needs a franchise-shaped hit to follow Project Hail Mary, and a star who won Best Actor for Sinners before directing a $276 million film is the safest bet on the lot to deliver one. Jordan pitched a new Thomas Crown Affair to MGM back in February 2016, before he had directed anything, and he has carried the idea for a decade since. That is a reason to make it. It is not proof the film works.

The third Crown earns its place if it trusts the dinner table over the skyline.

The plan was supposed to be a week apart: theaters on Nov. 11, Prime Video seven days later. That plan evaporated sometime between September and now, so this is one occasion, not two, and six picks follow, grouped by room and by which performance is worth the evening.

Amazon MGM's own release materials list the limited theatrical run for Nov. 18, the same day Madden lands on Prime Video. Awful Announcing reported on Nov. 9 that when tickets for the theatrical run went on sale, Sean Keeley found that "when ticket sales for those theatrical screenings launched last week, the Nov. 11 availability was nowhere to be found." The original date was never built to be a hit maker. An Oscar-qualifying run only needs seven days in qualifying theaters, which made the earlier date paperwork with a marquee attached, easy to slide once nobody was watching closely.

What hasn't arrived is a review. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic both show zero critic notices as of this morning, which means every opinion circling this movie right now comes from a two-minute trailer, not the finished film. That trailer did Nicolas Cage's Madden impersonation no favors. SlashFilm's Jeremy Smith called it "downright ghastly" in the same piece where he called Christian Bale "eerily spot-on as hard-charging Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis," then opened with the fair warning that "no film should ever be pre-judged on the strength of its trailer" and pre-judged it anyway. Treat the backlash as weather, not forecast, and pick accordingly.

For the theater, if one nearby actually lists it

This is a select-cities run, not a wide one, so check showtimes before making plans. If a house nearby carries it, the ticket buys Robert Richardson's cinematography, a three-time Oscar winner shooting David O. Russell's first film since Amsterdam in 2022, plus a room full of strangers to gasp with the first time Cage's padded, prosthetic Madden opens his mouth.

Best for: a crowd that wants to watch a big swing land or miss in real time, with witnesses. Where: select U.S. theaters starting Nov. 18, ticket required. Checked Nov. 11, 2026.

For the couch and a pause button

Prime Video carries it the same night, which means no ticket and no parking lot. The pause button is the actual upgrade here: stop on Bale's entrance, study the makeup, skip ahead if the football scenes run long. The R rating, for language, rules out a family night, and at 1 hour 50 minutes it's one sitting with however many intermissions a remote control can buy.

Best for: the viewer who wants to rewind every Al Davis scene and speed through the gridiron. Where: Prime Video starting Nov. 18. Checked Nov. 11, 2026.

Either room, same trailer that started this argument:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzh7HzLXXpk

For whichever performance is the actual reason to watch

Cage, for the size of the swing. The role is a full transformation and the actor is unembarrassed about chasing it, telling press that "accepting the role to play this larger-than-life legend has been a highlight for me." The subject suits a career built on going too far: Madden retired from coaching with the best winning percentage in league history before becoming more famous for a video game. Best for: anyone who'd rather watch a risky performance fail interestingly than a safe one coast.

Bale, for the lock. Al Davis is the role with evidence already behind it, Bale's fourth film with Russell after The Fighter, American Hustle and Amsterdam, and the one that already won him an Oscar playing a real man for this director in 2011. One trailer-watcher put it plainly:

Best for: the viewer who wants one performance they can trust while the accents fly.

Hahn, for the marriage. Kathryn Hahn plays Virginia Madden, the coach's wife, in a story loud enough about a coach, a booth and a boardroom that it needs one room where nobody is selling anything. Best for: the viewer who comes for the marriage scenes and tolerates the montage.

Mulaney, for the boardroom. He plays Trip Hawkins, the Electronic Arts founder who launched the Madden video game franchise. Greg Wyshynski put the appeal better than any trailer could: "I had little interest in seeing this until they showed me Mulaney convincing Madden to endorse a video game and now I want an 8-episode limited series of just that."

Best for: people more curious about how the game got made than who won in 1977.

Where for all four: select theaters and Prime Video starting Nov. 18. Checked Nov. 11, 2026.

Sienna Miller rounds the cast out as Carol Davis, Shane Gillis as Vince McGary, with Joel Murray as Pat Summerall and former Raiders linebacker Miles Burris as Phil Villapiano, all playing their parts around the edges of a very loud center.

If only one name earns the evening, make it Bale. A film that arrives with a moved date, zero published reviews and a trailer the internet already convicted is exactly the kind of movie where one actor doing meticulous, unembarrassed character work is the entire return on investment. Stay for the argument about Cage. That part is the actual entertainment.

Netflix carries thousands of titles and shows a home screen built for maybe nine of them, so the search for the best movies on Netflix right now usually ends in forty minutes of scrolling and a rewatch of something already seen twice. Nine picks follow instead, grouped by the kind of night on offer, from the one that deserves the whole evening to the one that just needs to end before midnight.

Clear the evening for these

Possible Love (2026)

Lee Chang-dong's first film since Burning, eight years back, and the wait bought a 164-minute drama about two marriages and the gap in power between them. It won the Silver Lion at Venice and arrived on Netflix on Nov. 6. The setup starts as a documentary shoot, a laid-off factory worker and his wife meeting a filmmaker and her wealthy husband, and what looks like an act of listening turns into a question of who gets to tell whose story.

Best for: the viewer giving the whole night to one film, phone face down.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. It carries a 98% Tomatometer from 106 reviews. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Takashi Yamazaki spends nearly as much time on a traumatized kamikaze pilot and a makeshift postwar household as he does on the creature, which is exactly why this one plays for people who claim to be allergic to monster movies. The set pieces land like weather and the human scenes still hold, a balance the 99% score from 213 reviews keeps gesturing at. Two hours four minutes, PG-13.

Best for: the person at the party who has never once said yes to a kaiju film.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

For a night when nobody can agree

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

Aardman's clay duo, a garden gnome with bad intentions, and the comeback of Feathers McGraw, all inside 79 minutes. The critics consensus calls it "comforting as cheese and crackers," and 138 reviews put it at a clean 100%, which mostly means nobody has one bad word to say about something this gentle. Short enough for a tired Wednesday.

Best for: a mixed-age room, including the grownup who needs to be out by ten.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Miles Morales, a handful of Peter Parkers, and animation that deliberately changes style every few minutes. Eight years on, it is still the most visually restless thing streaming anywhere, and the 97% score from 398 reviews undersells how many households just leave it running. One hour 57 minutes, PG.

Best for: the kid who has seen it four times already and the adult who somehow hasn't seen it once.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

For when the week was long

Bridesmaids (2011)

Kristen Wiig's Annie stumbles through one disastrous wedding duty at a time, with Melissa McCarthy stealing scenes she barely has room to stand in. The 89% Tomatometer from 294 reviews has held for fifteen years because the gross-out bits sit beside real friendship instead of replacing it. Two hours five minutes, R.

Best for: a group chat that wants to laugh at the same line at the same time.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

Stand by Me (1986)

Four boys walk a railroad to find a body, and Rob Reiner turns 89 minutes into about the cleanest coming-of-age film ever made. River Phoenix does the heavy lifting and the ending earns itself without pushing. It holds an 89% Tomatometer from 149 reviews and, at 1 hour 29 minutes, respects a school night.

Best for: someone who wants to feel something and still be asleep by 11.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

For the ones who stay up arguing

Whiplash (2014)

Damien Chazelle's drumming duel between Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons is cut like a thriller and loud enough to bother the neighbors. The 94% Tomatometer from 303 reviews comes with a consensus calling it "intense, inspiring, and well-acted," which is a polite way of saying the last ten minutes will raise a pulse. One hour 46 minutes, R.

Best for: anyone who wants a movie to grab the collar instead of ease into the night.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

Geeta Gandbhir builds the 2023 fatal shooting of Ajike "AJ" Owens in Ocala, Florida almost entirely from police body camera footage, so the film plays less like true crime and more like a case file read aloud in the living room. It won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award at Sundance, took five Critics Choice Documentary Awards including Best Documentary Feature, and earned an Oscar nomination. Gandbhir has said plainly, "I do wish this film didn't have to be made. Ajike should be alive." A 98% Tomatometer from 100 reviews, 1 hour 36 minutes.

Best for: the viewer who wants a documentary with an argument and expects to leave it angry.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

Looper (2012)

Rian Johnson's time-travel hitman story pits Joseph Gordon-Levitt against his own older self, with Bruce Willis happy to complicate the arrangement. The 93% Tomatometer from 274 reviews reflects a thriller that keeps its rules straight while letting the emotions get messy. One hour 59 minutes, R.

Best for: a Tuesday that needs a puzzle more than a clean payoff.

Where to watch: included with a Netflix subscription in the U.S. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

Where to start

Start with Possible Love. It's the pick most likely to drop out of conversation by spring and the one worth rearranging an evening for, a 164-minute film that gives Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu room to work and carries a Venice Silver Lion plus four performances NPR's Justin Chang placed among the year's best. The runtime is the price of admission. Pay it once and every other pick on this list feels easy.

Netflix's weekly chart and its U.S. chart are having an argument this week, and the reader is the one who has to settle it. A Dog's Perfect Christmas topped Netflix's English-language film chart worldwide with 8.6 million views for Nov. 2 to 8. At home, it only cracked No. 3. Five picks follow, every one of them confirmed playable in the U.S. right now, grouped by the kind of night that's actually happening in the living room.

For the night the tree gets decorated

A Dog's Perfect Christmas (2026)

Half the ornaments are still in the box and nobody is giving this their full attention, which is fine, because it was built for exactly that. Netflix's own logline has a medical emergency splitting the Goss family apart while the basset hound Winstead, voiced by Thomas Haden Church, tries to put them back together before Christmas Eve. The Guardian's Adrian Horton called it "technically workable on the surface but totally indistinct" and predicted it "will probably do numbers as it hits the overflowing holiday stockpile on second screen". Treat that as a viewing instruction, not a warning label. The actual draw is the dog.

Best for: wrapping paper chaos and a pet who survives the runtime. Where: Netflix, included with a subscription. Availability checked Nov. 11, 2026.

For the night when nobody can agree

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Four people, one sofa, four opinions about what counts as a holiday movie. Settle it with the title that's actually No. 1 on Netflix's U.S. movie chart this week, in its second week on the list, 22 years after it opened in theaters. Roland Emmerich's disaster epic runs 2 hours 4 minutes, PG-13, with Dennis Quaid as the climatologist walking north to reach his son. Quaid is quietly doing double duty on this chart: he's also the dad in A Dog's Perfect Christmas, which means one actor is behind both the world's No. 1 movie and the country's No. 1 movie, in the same seven days.

Best for: a mixed-age room that needs a plot everyone can follow at once. Where: Netflix, included with a subscription. Also free with ads on Tubi. Checked Nov. 11, 2026.

For the relative who's seen everything

Heist (2001)

Every family has one person who claims to have already watched the good stuff. Hand them David Mamet's con-artist thriller, which is No. 2 worldwide on Netflix's chart but has no Netflix offer at all in the U.S., which means they probably missed it. Gene Hackman plays the thief, Danny DeVito plays the fence who double-crosses him, and Sam Rockwell, Delroy Lindo and Rebecca Pidgeon circle the edges of a script that still out-talks most of what's new this month.

Best for: DeVito loyalists and anyone who wants dialogue sharper than the plot requires. Where: rent for $3.99 on Amazon, Apple TV or Fandango at Home, or included on the Sony Pictures Core Amazon Channel. Checked Nov. 11, 2026.

For the horror crowd

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Lights off, volume up, somebody always dares somebody else to look away first. The sixth entry in the series sits at No. 3 worldwide on Netflix's chart, with Kaitlyn Santa Juana as Stefani untangling a family curse and Tony Todd back as Bludworth. R-rated, 110 minutes, no homework required beyond knowing death doesn't like being cheated. In the U.S. it lives on HBO Max, which is where Netflix's own chart stops being useful and this list keeps going.

Best for: a group that likes yelling warnings at characters who never listen. Where: HBO Max, subscription. Checked Nov. 11, 2026.

For the family that's run out of classics

Love the Coopers (2015)

Elf has played twice already and the gift wrap is only half done. This one landed at No. 9 on Netflix's U.S. chart in its first week, a solid showing for an 11-year-old ensemble piece. Diane Keaton and John Goodman host a chaotic Christmas Eve with Olivia Wilde, Ed Helms, Marisa Tomei and a very young Timothée Chalamet filling out the family. PG-13, 107 minutes, streaming on Netflix for anyone who wants background noise with a plot attached.

Best for: half-attention viewing with a second pot of coffee going. Where: Netflix, included with a subscription. Checked Nov. 11, 2026.

Start with The Day After Tomorrow. It costs nothing extra, it's the one the country actually voted for, and it's the rare pick here that four different age groups will agree on before the opening credits finish.

Skip it. How to Rob a Bank has a premise built for trashy fun and a cast that can deliver it, but director David Leitch keeps routing his own robberies through the crew's slick YouTube edits of themselves, so two hours pass watching footage about people rather than watching the people. It is a strange thing to do to a heist movie, and it is the reason almost nothing here lands the way it should.

Nicholas Hoult plays Ryan, known online as the Wolf, who leads a four-person crew robbing banks across Pittsburgh in giant animal masks and posting each job as a web series almost before the vault closes. Rhenzy Feliz edits the videos, Pete Davidson plays a combat veteran with a family to support, and Anna Sawai plays Ryan's partner and the crew's strategist, with John C. Reilly's veteran FBI agent John West and Zoe Kravitz's house-arrested hacker Reagan Gardner closing in from the other side of the case, as The Hollywood Reporter lays out the cast. The trailer sells the pop-up-graphics texture the whole argument below is built on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORxw68y3lyw

The choice that sinks the picture is a formal one, and Leitch's own team describes it without apology. The in-universe videos were shot on prosumer digital cameras and the unmasked drama on 35mm, with a stunt crew Leitch nicknamed the "YouTube unit" handling the masked robberies while Hoult, recovering from a torn ACL suffered shortly before production, carried the quieter scenes himself. That split is how the film got made in 40 days instead of the 86 Leitch spent on The Fall Guy, and it shows in every job: the masks cover Hoult's face, the graphics interrupt the tension, and the character beats arrive late enough to feel grafted on. The Prague Reporter named the cost precisely, writing that "the central problem is that we experience much of the robbers' activity through their own stylized online videos," an approach that, the review adds, "distances us dramatically from our heroes."

The rest of the notices are blunter. Mashable calls it a "toothless bank robbery movie" with "the psychological depth of a kiddie pool," Awards Radar hands out 2.5 stars for something "all style over substance, lacking any nuance or complexity," and even Deadline's friendlier review admits "the film self-deconstructs itself so often it's hard to get a grip on what it's ultimately trying to say." IndieWire gets closest to generous, calling it "Leitch's YouTube-era fairy tale," which explains why a teenager raised on the real thing might enjoy the cuts and why anyone hoping for a serious argument about money will be done waiting before the first job wraps.

The film's best asset is sitting in a better movie next door. The Prague Reporter found Reilly "terrific as Agent West, a weary but engaging investigator whose determination to catch the criminals makes him the film's most sympathetic presence," and said Kravitz "also shines as Reagan." The News-Herald called them "an odd but appealing pair". Reilly plays a man doing quiet arithmetic on a career nearly finished, and Kravitz gives her hacker a loose, unhurried authority the masked kids never earn. (Mashable disagrees, measuring the banter against Lethal Weapon and finding it short, which is fair, though the two actors still look like they wandered in from a film that trusted them more.)

The irony is worth one line. A studio owned by Jeff Bezos financed an eat-the-rich heist movie that, as IndieWire put it, "wouldn't dare to take aim at massive corporations that widen the wealth gap." The villain stays a single predatory bank manager, played by Christian Slater, never a boardroom. Leitch told The Hollywood Reporter "there was never any pushback from the studio about what we were making," which says less about Amazon MGM's nerve than about how little the finished film actually threatens.

Leitch's run goes from John Wick through Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train and The Fall Guy, which opened to $27.7 million and finished with $92.9 million domestic. This one carries a tracking forecast of $10 million to $15 million for its opening weekend, after Amazon MGM moved it off its Labor Day date to chase a bigger 18-to-34 crowd over Thanksgiving instead. That is a modest number for a Leitch picture, and it lands as his most ambitious misfire rather than his usual reliable one. He was clearly after something about a generation turning crime into content because the economy stopped working for them, and that idea survives in the 35mm scenes he shoots like he means it.

Skip it in theaters, where the format problem is the whole experience. When it turns up streaming, the Reilly and Kravitz investigation is worth the fast-forward button to find, even if the crew they are chasing never becomes more than footage of itself.

Amazon MGM did not need to defang How to Rob a Bank. Nobody at the studio had to cut a line or soften a target, because the script never aimed anywhere that could cost the company that bankrolled it.

Director David Leitch said as much to The Hollywood Reporter: "So there was never any pushback from the studio about what we were making." THR added the context that matters. The parent company is the world's largest by revenue, and it "made no attempt to temper the film's late-stage anti-capitalist stance."

A conglomerate that size does not fear a bank-robbery comedy. It greenlights one.

Reason one: the only villain wears a vest and a lanyard

IndieWire's David Ehrlich named the boundary the film refuses to cross. It "wouldn't dare to take aim at massive corporations that widen the wealth gap by destroying small businesses, normalizing exploitative labor practices, and accelerating worldwide environmental collapse." Instead it is "very specifically a film about how banks are bad and should be fucked with, an opinion that the founder of Amazon might actually share with the average ticket-buyer."

That sentence is the whole scam. Banks make a safe punching bag for a studio this size because nobody who signs the checks owns one.

Empire's Kim Newman caught the casting choice that proves it. "Christian Slater pops up as the slimy banker who can be blamed for everything," and the gang, given their own circumstances, "ought to have more beefs with America's ruthless health-insurance industry and lack of government support for veterans." Mashable's Kristy Puchko found the same gap and called it vague on purpose: "Exactly which system Ryan is referring to is left vague in Bianculli's screenplay." The grievances on screen are real: medical debt, a veteran failed by the VA, predatory lending. The script files every one of them under a single logo because a logo is easier to rob than an economy.

Reason two: the robbers show up as strangers

The Prague Reporter called the film Heat for the TikTok generation, then found the flaw underneath the compliment. "Crucially, that movie allows us to understand its protagonists' circumstances while How to Rob a Bank instead treats their motivation as a mystery to be solved."

Hell or High Water runs on the same anger and spends it correctly. Taylor Sheridan's script lays out the foreclosure, the reverse mortgage and the back taxes before the brothers hit their first branch. It cost $12 million and returned $37,999,693 worldwide, which is proof that understanding a criminal is not expensive. THR's David Rooney clocked what withholding that same understanding costs here: the fun wears thin, the turn into trauma arrives late, and "basically, it turns into a different movie."

Reason three: revolution with chapters, versus revolution with a filter

How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which Neon released in 2023, hands eight characters their own backstory and lets them argue the ethics of sabotage out loud. Variety wrote that it "duly grapples with" whether the violence is justified and "evades lending them excessive heroic glamour." Prague's verdict on the new film is the one that stings: it has "the moral seriousness of How to Blow Up a Pipeline awkwardly grafted onto the visual language of TikTok." One film argues with its own criminals. The other lectures through a mask.

Here is the trailer Amazon is selling the fantasy with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORxw68y3lyw

A fair concession: Amazon did not gut this thing. Leitch says the studio wanted something provocative, and Rooney found real work inside it, including what he called Pete Davidson's "intensely moving" final scene. TheWrap's William Bibbiani called it "a film that says you should stand up to Jeff Bezos, but only after you pay Jeff Bezos," which is true and a little too easy. His own review notes The Battle of Algiers streams on Prime right now. The money was never the obstacle. The screenplay was.

The business detail underneath is uglier than any metaphor. THR reports the production "reportedly poured nearly $60 million into the Steel City's local economy to qualify for a tax incentive." A movie about robbing banks got built on a public subsidy.

Then comes the tell, one line of dialogue. "You know what's more powerful than a gun?" Ryan asks. "An audience."

That is the most Amazon sentence in the whole film. Revolution measured in subscribers is not a threat to a streaming studio. It is the business model. Amazon never had to soften the politics of a movie whose idea of power is a follower count, because that idea already belongs to the company, not the crooks.

The movie wants to look brave. The studio knew better.

James Gunn and Peter Safran are stepping down as co-CEOs and chairmen of DC Studios, with Marvel veteran Jeremy Latcham installed as president and chief creative officer, Variety reported Monday. The timing is 34 days: Paramount's $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery closed Oct. 6, and Gunn and Safran had just been named to David Ellison's leadership team for the merged company (the kind of appointment that usually means someone is staying, not leaving in five weeks).

The box office explains why the goodwill ran out. Superman closed at $618.7 million worldwide against a $225 million budget, a profitable hit that, per THR's sourcing, did not land with the cultural force Skydance wanted from a movie at that price. Supergirl opened to $37.1 million domestic from 3,600 theaters and finished at $126 million worldwide against a $170 million budget, a flop by any math. Clayface, a $44 million swing, has done $109 million worldwide through its third weekend, which is the kind of return that should be a win and somehow reads as a footnote here.

Television held up better, with an asterisk attached. Lanterns averaged 19 million viewers globally per episode going into its finale and still has no second-season order, and showrunner Chris Mundy put the odds at "a coin flip, 50/50". Peacemaker's second run did not match the first.

The org chart is the actual story. Gunn and Safran's contracts guaranteed a direct reporting line to the CEO after any change of ownership, according to THR, a clause written for Warner Bros. Discovery's David Zaslav and carried over to Ellison. Latcham answers instead to Skydance Motion Picture Group co-chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein and starts Dec. 1. THR's sources place the actual ending in a Friday, Nov. 6 meeting in Burbank, where Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz told the pair the plan had changed. Whether they jumped or were pushed stays unconfirmed reporting.

Gunn gave his own account on Instagram, calling the job "trying, to say the least" and writing that he disliked "the at-times corporate nature of the job (thanks to Peter for taking the brunt of that.)." His sign-off: "I will miss being the co-caretaker of these great characters, but I'm also incredibly relieved and excited to get back to pure filmmaking."

https://www.instagram.com/p/Dfh3WS1mLwK/

What this probably means. Latcham is Marvel to the bone, hired as David Maisel's assistant in 2004 and promoted into Kevin Feige's inner circle, with credits on Iron Man, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-Man: Homecoming. He left Marvel in 2017 to found Latcham Pictures. What his hiring signals about DC's creative direction is still an open question, but Goldberg and Greenstein's own statement leaned on brand stewardship over auteur vision: "Jeremy brings a deep reverence for DC and its passionate fanbase, recognizing that they are the very foundation of this storied, multigenerational brand."

What is actually locked in: Superman: Man of Tomorrow, written and directed by Gunn, opens July 9, 2027 and is already in post. The Batman Part II brings Robert Pattinson back on Feb. 18, 2028, with Gunn and Safran staying on as producers. The People v. Gorilla Grodd, an eight-episode HBO Max series, has finished shooting for 2027. Everything past that, including Gunn's claim he is writing another DC movie and the stalled Waller, Booster Gold and Wonder Woman projects, is reporting only.

Latcham's chair opens Dec. 1. The first release on it was shot by somebody else.