It’s the last weekend for summer, at least as far as those working in Hollywood are concerned. And that usually means a quiet weekend at the box office.
Adam Wingard’s return to indie filmmaking Onslaught (check out our story on the movie’s Dan Stevens below) opens against the still-ruling titans Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, the latter of which amazingly is adding Imax 70mm screening.
But while it’s a bit of ho-hum at the theaters, this week’s comics are proving buzzy, with three number ones that have people talking: DC's Legion of Super-Heroes (with Hayden Sherman on art!) and Doom Patrol (one of the best team names in comics history), and Image Comics’ dystopian Crowbound, which is already going to a second printing.
But people are looking past this weekend and right now that means the imminent opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts, which is getting big write-ups by the NYT and plenty by hometown paper LAT, which is one article calls the new spaceship-like edifice “among the boldest, most contradictory buildings this city has ever seen.” THR’s own review calls it “a bold throwback to Gilded Age patronage.”
We can’t wait to go.
Then there are the festivals, with Venice and Telluride this weekend and Toronto International Film Festival opening next. Who will be the hot genre discovery from those? (It was about year ago, Curry Barker was an unknown when the Toronto's Midnight Madness premiere of Obsession propelled him to new heights.)
Well, speaking of genre, this is a special issue: The first Heat Vision list. What’s it a list of? Read on. —Aaron Couch and Borys Kit.
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THEY WERE THE B MOVIES.
Sure, those of us who read this newsletter loved them. But to polite society, they were dismissed as disposable, even as they shaped popular culture.
But in 2026, the movies called “genre films” took hold of the conversation and box office like never before. Heck, they even went legit, winning Oscars. (Sinners, Weapons, anybody?) To mark the moment, we surveyed key genre players, studied the box office and considered cultural impact to rank the 30 most influential directors working in the space today, as we see it in 2026.
There were guidelines: Some filmmakers, even though they helped create modern culture, are in a class of their own or have transcended genre (Spielberg, Nolan, Villeneuve). People working strictly in franchises these days also were not considered (e.g., Cameron). The comic book/superhero movie, meanwhile, is a behemoth that is a genre unto itself (so no Russo brothers or Destin Daniel Cretton).
The focus also is on directors who have released a movie in the past two or so years or have one coming soon (sorry, Jordan Peele and James Wan). And it is disappointing to note, by us and by our consultants, that too few women are getting the shot at making these types of movies (but are making scarily good things in the world of TV, like Widow’s Bay, or on streaming or VOD platforms).
What is genre, anyway? There’s no hard-and-fast definition. It depends on whom you ask. Horror, certainly. But there are certain intangibles to a movie, such as a scrappy feel to the filmmaking. Maybe a hint (or more) of some dirt underneath its fingernails. To paraphrase a Supreme Court justice, you know genre when you see it.
The top 30 genre filmmakers of 2026.
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"IT'S DIE HARD, BUT ON A ..."
For years, that was how action scripts of a certain nature were described around Hollywood.
In more recent years, spec scripts of a certain action nature have found themselves described as “John Wick but with…”
Well, welcome to “John Wick but with a Bigfoot.”
The logline for Wildman, a spec by budding writer Jacob Reiner, says it all: When his little brother is killed by hunters, Bigfoot goes on a quest to retrieve the body while killing everyone responsible along the way.
The spec has just been picked up by Badlands, the genre label run by Scott Strauss that is an arm of Wick franchise producers Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee of Thunder Road.
Reiner is a Texas native who indulged in his Bigfoot obsession and decided to enter the horror screenplay contest on Scriptshadow.com a website dedicated to the craft of scriptwriting run by Carson Reeves (and who recently also had a hand in bringing to the fore the 190-page spec Ember Knight). As part of the contest, named Blood and Ink, Reeves highlighted scripts that caught his eye, Wildman being one them. That in turn caught the attention of manager Jake Wagner of Alibi Entertainment, who sought Reiner out.
Yeah, we're thinking Big Foot is back.
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➤ Trailers, trailers: the new Street Fighter reel kicks; it's Hogwarts and all in the latest Harry Potter series spot; and Nicolas Cage makes the James Bond-coded Fortitude spot a delight.
➤ Roll of the dice: One D&D TV show (The Forgotten Realms) dies but another one (titled Ravenloft with creators John August and Alfonso Cuaron) rises to take its place.
➤ RIP: Will Murray, co-creator of Marvel's Squirrel Girl, dies at 73.
Catch up on these Heat Vision interviews...
➤ Onslaught star Adria Arjona explains why Man of Tomorrow provided her a feeling she's only felt on the Andor set.
➤ Dave Franco believes his Idiots diarrhea sequence contends with Jeff Daniels' Dumb and Dumber scene.
➤ Idiots director Macon Blair will appear in Jeremy Saulnier's Rebel Ridge follow-up, October, after all.
➤ Insidious: Out of the Further director Jacob Chase, aka Aaron Couch's doppelganger, tells the wild true story of how he ended up making Ben Affleck's Batman cackle on the set of Justice League.
➤ Task Emmy nominee Tom Pelphrey is kinda glad he didn't land Professor X.
➤ Damon Lindelof sounds off on the adaptation wars of 2026.
➤ Unlike Furiosa, Anya Taylor-Joy won't have to wait 20 years to talk in detail about Dune: Part Three.
➤ Lanterns showrunner Chris Mundy is going to pitch season two to James Gunn soon.
➤ Lanterns stars Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler aren't getting ahead of themselves with regard to season two's potential renewal.
➤ Wagner Moura says he was picking up dog shit on the set of The Last House instead of accepting the highest honor of his career so far at Cannes.
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DAN STEVENS HAS NEVER SEEN ADAM WINGARD WORK SO FAST.
The actor’s director on The Guest and Godilla x Kong: The New Empire plays Dr. Hans Kammler, a deranged Nazi scientist in Onslaught. It was a good part, but Stevens was worried that the role of his character’s wife would fail to attract a top actress, as it wasn’t particularly exciting or dynamic on the page, Stevens says.
Stevens expressed his concern to Wingard, who asked for suggestions.
“So I said to Adam, ‘What if Kammler is a sub to his dominatrix wife?’ And I’ve never had a rewrite from Adam come back faster. It was literally in my inbox 12 minutes later. And then Rebecca Hall very quickly said yes,” says Stevens.
The result? In the movie, before the doctor heads off to work, Frau Kammler orders her husband to crawl toward her and lick her feet.
In a conversation with Brian Davids, the actor also talks his upcoming turn as the lead of RoboCop in the just announced series, and looks ahead to his work on Dexter: Resurrection season two.
Even Stevens.
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CAN YOU FEEL IT? The drop in temperature? The nip in the morning, even if it’s still warm in the day? Yup. Fall is upon us. (Can we please tell the stores to cool it with the Halloween decorations, though? I mean, slow it down, for Pete’s sake.)
Anway, fall and the holidays mean one big thing around here: Big comic and comic art and prop auctions. Well, before we open the door to that, we’re going to take a gander at one auction that happened back in May but turns out is timely.
We’re talking Lanterns. The green kind. Just bear with us for a second as we overwrite.
Lanterns is proving to be a mighty hit for HBO and DC Studios. The show, starring Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre, attracted 9.3 million viewers worldwide in its first three days on HBO and HBO Max. About 71 percent of that total (6.6 million) came from the United States, and when numbers were crunched, showed the debut episode outperformed the series premieres of It: Welcome to Derry, The Penguin, and True Detective: Night Country.
And since then, it's only grown. Today, Warner Bros. Discovery said the third episode hit a series high, reaching 10 million global viewers (7 million in the US). And it's been growing its audience weekly. Also, since premiering August 16, the pilot episode has attrated over 20 million viewers worldwide and continues to grow. And Lanterns now ranks among the top 5 series launches in platform history, both in the U.S. and globally.
We’ve been watching it and we love it.
Anway, in May, ComicLink put a beauty of page drawn by the great George Perez for sale. It was the very first page from the first issue of DC’s 2007 revival of Brave and the Bold, and showed Hal Jordan and John Stewart flying through space in the friendliest of fashion, in complete opposite of how they are on the show. All in all, a great Perez piece.
It sold for $1,585, a reasonable price for a Perez…but probably a bargain in light of what the show is doing for the popularity of both of those characters.
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