Warner Bros. Unveils Dune: Part Three, Tom Cruise in Digger, Supergirl, and an 18-Film 2027 Slate at CinemaCon

Warner Bros. Pictures held its CinemaCon 2026 presentation on Tuesday at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The nearly two-and-a-half-hour showcase was not live-streamed.

Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Jason Momoa, and others appeared in person. Comedian Patton Oswalt served as master of ceremonies and introduced co-chairs and CEOs Pam Abdy and Michael De Luca, calling them “the reason movies are so exciting right now.” Oswalt also said of the studio, “Nobody even comes close right now.”

Abdy recalled that when she and De Luca joined in 2022, the studio was releasing six films a year. That number reached 11 in 2025, a year that brought in more than $4.4 billion at the global box office through Sinners, A Minecraft Movie, and Weapons, plus Academy Award wins for Best Picture and Best Director for One Battle After Another, and Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan.

The 2026 slate will total 14 films. “That’s what committing to originality can get you,” Abdy said. De Luca added, “Originality is not risky. Derivative sameness is.” Abdy said Generation Alpha’s interest in theaters is something the studio is watching closely. “We are at a crucial, critical moment in time with this audience. The Letterboxd generation is only growing.”

Warner Bros. Clockwork and Ti Amo!

The studio launched Warner Bros. Clockwork, a new label dedicated to non-IP-driven original filmmaking. Its orange logo carries a Kubrick-adjacent aesthetic. The first release under Clockwork will be Ti Amo!, director Sean Baker’s follow-up to his Best Picture-winning Anora, set for 2027.

Abdy and De Luca also issued a mock apology to theater owners for the Chicken Jockey scene in A Minecraft Movie, a joke framed around the film’s $960.3 million worldwide gross.

Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu Present Digger

Cruise and director Alejandro G. Iñárritu were the first guests onstage and received a standing ovation. Iñárritu said the idea for Digger came to him nine years ago, and that he and Cruise began discussing the project two years later. The film was shot in VistaVision, the same large-format process Paul Thomas Anderson used for One Battle After Another.

“We know he is fearless — the stunts, the planes, the jumps — but embodying this character is another kind of fearless,” Iñárritu said. “This role could possibly be the most challenging.” He called the work “a high-wire act.”

Cruise said, “When you see this film, it is the ne plus ultra across the board in terms of writing, production, and performance. This kind of movie is why I wanted to make movies. It took 40 years for me to put on the boots of Digger Rockwell.” He added, “Also, the movie is wild. It’s funny, and I can’t wait for you to see it.”

Footage showed Cruise in old-age prosthetics, a prosthetic pot belly, and a thick Southern accent as Digger Rockwell, a reclusive energy tycoon holding a cat he has been told has “two weeks and five minutes” left to live. As the Talking Heads song “Burning Down the House” plays, he wanders through his home in pajamas, recounting stories about a shovel his grandfather received in 1917.

A contact at a drilling site tells him environmental damage is causing water to bubble up and threatening structural integrity. Digger refuses to shut down. “I’m paying for everything!” he shouts. “You say the f****** word, and it’s done!”

John Goodman plays an aged U.S. President who confronts Rockwell over the fallout: millions of displaced people and nuclear waste abandoned. “Digger here got us into this mess, and Digger’s gonna dig us out of it again,” Goodman’s character says.

Riz Ahmed plays a character who tells Digger: “You knew before all of us.” Rockwell replies: “Panic wakes people up.” Footage also showed Digger and the President on military aircraft dropping bombs onto ice, with a final image of Rockwell bathing his cat. The tagline is “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.” Digger opens Oct. 2, 2026.

Denis Villeneuve Screens Seven Minutes of Dune: Part Three

Performers dressed as Fremen marched through the Colosseum floor as footage played on the screen behind the stage. Two were lifted by wires into the rafters as Denis Villeneuve entered. “I always travel with my army with me,” he said.

Dune: Part Three takes place 17 years after Part Two. “I have spent a decade living in Dune and with each movie, I want to create a new cinematic experience,” Villeneuve said. “I don’t want to walk in my own footsteps. The first two movies are like B-movies split in two. This one is a thriller — it’s more action-packed, intense, and definitely more emotional.” He said the film centers on a broken love story between Paul Atreides and Chani.

Timothée Chalamet, onstage alongside Zendaya and Jason Momoa, described Paul after 17 years: “Paul has become his worst vision. He’s struggling to retain the parts of himself he sees the most.” He also called Paul “the all-powerful dark emperor of the universe.”

Zendaya said of Chani: “The years don’t seem to have been kind to anyone on Dune. Because of her morality and fierce belief in wanting to protect her planet and her people, it’s been an unkind few years. We’re catching her at a very different place in her life where that youthful outlook is completely gone.”

Villeneuve screened the film’s first seven minutes. The footage opens on a spacecraft where Javier Bardem’s Fremen commander Stilgar and his forces sit in silence before a landing they know may be their last. They touch down on a water-soaked alien world and pause at the sight of rain: “Water from the sky! It’s a miracle!”

Mountain-sized cannons then rise from the ground. Stilgar leads his forces into heavy fire, taking cover in containers and crawling beneath a tower to call in a strike. A soldier breaks from the line and is blown apart by incoming fire.

IGN called the sequence “basically the Normandy beach scene from Saving Private Ryan but on an alien planet.” IndieWire called it “staggeringly epic.” The Playlist said “it looks incredible” and recommended Disney move Avengers: Doomsday off the films’ shared Dec. 18 release date “as soon and quietly as possible.”

DC Universe: Man of Tomorrow, Supergirl, and Clayface

DC Studios head Peter Safran said James Gunn is in production on Man of Tomorrow, the Superman sequel in which David Corenswet’s Man of Steel forms an alliance with Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor against the global threat of Brainiac. Cameras begin rolling the following week. Hoult, Gunn, and Corenswet said the film will feature “a new villain and an unlikely alliance.”

Milly Alcock entered to Blondie’s “Call Me” with streamers fired from the stage edges. “She’s the first Supergirl that a lot of young girls are going to meet,” Alcock said. “Every day was weird and wonderful.”

Director Craig Gillespie said he had not expected the film to be so heavily set off-planet. The story visits six different worlds. Alcock had to learn five languages for the role, and Krypto the Superdog is entirely digital, which required considerable mime work on set. Alcock wore a T-shirt featuring the Superman logo shape with a different symbol inside it, described as two C’s overlapping back-to-back.

Jason Momoa rode onstage on the intergalactic motorcycle used by his character Lobo, fully costumed. He said he had wanted to play Lobo since he was 12 years old. When Safran asked whether Lobo could beat Aquaman in a fight, Momoa said: “I’ll be honest, I think they’d take one look at each other and just have 100 beers.” He then pitched Safran on a Lobo–Aquaman team-up film.

The scene shown from Supergirl opens with Kara putting on goggles against blowing dust and boarding a public transit spacecraft. One alien passenger is vomiting in his seat; another is smoking a hookah pipe. Kara tells the smoker, “Maybe give us a break from that hookah thingy?” She spots Eve Ridley’s character Ruthye being threatened by a large alien and intervenes in an alien language.

Tech pirates board the ship and go person to person, taking a small orb from Kara and demanding Ruthye’s sword. Kara tells Ruthye it is not worth fighting over, then steals one pirate’s teleportation device and blinks around the ship until she reaches the cockpit. She asks the pilot how close they are to a yellow sun, puts on a spacesuit, and is shoved into open space without a helmet as the vessel departs.

The yellow sun rises. Kara regains her powers, flies back to the ship, takes a laser blast, and deflects it with heat vision. A montage followed: Kara and Krypto escaping Krypton in a pod; Superman arriving and saying hello, described by Kara to Ruthye as “a fricking nerd”; Kara announcing before a fight with Lobo that she is going to do “something stupid”; and a closing shot of heat vision directed at a line of enemies. Supergirl opens June 26, 2026.

Safran called Clayface “a riveting horror-thriller.” Footage showed Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries as the man who will become the villain, lying in a hospital bed heavily bandaged. Quick cuts showed experimental procedures and injections. The tagline is “Look Fear in the Face.”

He smashes a mirror, then, in a bathtub, wipes his hand across his face, and his features smear like clay and disappear. Director James Watkins has directed multiple episodes of Black Mirror. Clayface opens Oct. 23, 2026.

The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum

A brief clip showed Gollum in a cave muttering that his story must be kept secret and can never be told. Andy Serkis, who directs and stars as Gollum, described it in character as “a tale that must never be told.”

Jamie Dornan will play Strider/Aragorn, taking over from Viggo Mortensen. The full confirmed cast is below.

Confirmed Cast — The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum

The film is scheduled for Dec. 17, 2027.

Mortal Kombat II

Footage opened on the apparent end of Shao Khan’s reign. Liu Kang challenges Baraka to single combat; Baraka declines. Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage calls both of them a string of obscenities, and Baraka, finding Cage irritating, agrees to fight him.

Cage says “My stuntmen do this s*** for me” while dodging blows and asking Baraka not to damage his face. He flees into a hut filled with Baraka-like children, is found, and thrown into a pit where he finds his sunglasses. He puts them on, continues dodging, drops to his knees, and punches Baraka in the groin. Jax’s response from the sidelines: “Goddamn!” Mortal Kombat II opens May 8, 2026.

Evil Dead Burn

Footage from Evil Dead Burn, directed by Sébastien Vaniček, opened on a woman at a dishwasher. Someone walks in and asks, “Alice… what’s wrong?” A knock at the door follows. A figure enters slowly, making strange sounds, visible only by her hands, until a seat back is seen protruding through her skull.

The footage cuts to a funeral where a man says his grandfather believed the dead would return if someone read from the Book of the Dead. An Evil Dead incantation plays. Fingers are severed by a slamming door. A power saw appears, then a giant wolf leaping at someone, then a girl drinking hot candle wax like a shot.

Alice pulls the seat back out of her own head, advances on a man, and he falls backward onto the open dishwasher’s upturned utensils. The Playlist called the footage “utterly terrifying.” Evil Dead Burn opens July 24, 2026.

Practical Magic 2, The Great Beyond, and The End of Oak Street

Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman appeared together for Practical Magic 2, the sequel to their 1998 film. Bullock asked: “Why do we come here, Nicole?” Kidman replied with her AMC Theaters line: “We come to this place for magic.” The room applauded. Kidman said, “I didn’t think anyone would clap.”

Kidman’s character Gilly has no children but has a cat; Bullock’s character Sally now has two grown kids. Kidman described the plot: “It picks up from where we have the iconic house, but we also have our past catching up with us.” A teaser showed the Owens family welcoming Lee Pace’s character, with Gilly warning him: “Everyone we love dies.” Bullock said: “We needed the entire country to want it as much as we did.” Practical Magic 2 opens September 2026.

J.J. Abrams presented The Great Beyond, his first film as director since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in 2019 and his first original feature since Super 8 in 2011. The film stars Glen Powell, Jenna Ortega, Emma Mackey, and Samuel L. Jackson in a world approaching a close encounter. The trailer opens with an H.G. Wells quote, followed by Ortega’s character: “People like us — I think we’re looking for something.”

Abrams said: “I’ve been very lucky to get to work on franchises that are bigger than all of us, but I felt I had to get back to telling original stories. The Great Beyond took a long time to write partly because of the extensive world building. I wanted this idea to be big.” The Great Beyond opens Nov. 13, 2026.

Warner Bros. also showed footage from The End of Oak Street, an original science fiction thriller from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, produced by Bad Robot, arriving Aug. 14, 2026.

The 2027 Slate

Jack Black performed an original song about the 2027 slate, set to a sizzle reel. He confirmed A Minecraft Movie 2, which will feature Kirsten Dunst. M. Night Shyamalan described Remain as his first ghost story since The Sixth Sense. Margot Robbie confirmed she plays Danny Ocean’s mother in an Ocean’s Eleven prequel set in 1962.

Melissa McCarthy appeared as Margie Claus, who hopes to save Christmas. Keanu Reeves appeared from the set of Shiver, a shark film directed by Tim Miller, shot in the Dominican Republic. Sam Raimi said Evil Dead Wrath will be “the most terrifying experience,” with footage showing someone cutting off their arm and someone vomiting blue liquid. Nancy Meyers, on the set of her untitled romantic comedy, called it “a bit of a love letter to the world of making movies.”

Warner Bros. confirmed the title Game of Thrones: Aegon’s Conquest for its Targaryen film, which will focus on Aegon Targaryen I’s campaign to forge the Iron Throne approximately 300 years before the HBO series. No release date was announced. Abdy and De Luca confirmed the studio plans 18 theatrical releases in 2027. The full slate is below.

Warner Bros. Pictures — Full 2027 & Beyond Slate

• Animal Friends
• Remain
• Panic Carefully
• Godzilla x Kong: Supernova
• Untitled F.A.S.T. Film
• Bad Fairies
• Man of Tomorrow
• A Minecraft Sequel
• Shiver
• The Conjuring: First Communion
• The Batman: Part II
• Margie Claus
• Gremlins
• The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum
• Ocean’s Prequel
• A Nancy Meyers Film
• Ti Amo!
• Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
• Dynamic Duo
• Hello Kitty
• The Lunar Chronicles
• Final Destination 7
• The Revenge of La Llorona
• Evil Dead Wrath
• A Baz Luhrmann Film
• Gladys
• The Flood
• Game of Thrones: Aegon’s Conquest

The Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance Merger

The pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance, following David Ellison’s successful defense of his company against a challenge from Netflix, hung over the convention. Neither Abdy nor De Luca addressed it from the stage, and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav did not appear.

On Monday, more than 1,000 actors, filmmakers, and industry figures, including Don Cheadle, J.J. Abrams, and Villeneuve, signed an open letter opposing the deal, published at BlocktheMerger.com. Some convention attendees wore #blockthemerger pins.

Cinema United, the trade organization that runs CinemaCon, hosted a breakfast before the Warner Bros. presentation. Its president and CEO, Michael O’Leary, was asked about the open letter. “We appreciate people using their voices,” he said. Cinema United does not plan to sign the letter, but does not support a merger that would reduce the number of legacy studios. “Nothing is inevitable,” O’Leary said of federal regulatory approval.

O’Leary repeated his position Tuesday morning: “Consolidation results in fewer films being produced for movie theaters. We believe this transaction will be harmful to exhibition, consumers, and the entire industry.”

Greg Marcus, whose company Marcus Theaters operates 78 locations across 17 states as the fourth-largest theater circuit in the United States, told the Associated Press on Monday: “The concentration of power at the studio level has allowed them to raise the cost of going to the movies to the consumer quite significantly. Our margins are no better. We’re not making more money. And yet the cost to the consumer has far outpaced inflation.”

Director James Cameron publicly supports the combination. He told the Associated Press last week that he previously opposed a Netflix-owned Warner Bros. but does not share the same concern here. Cameron worked closely with Ellison on Terminator: Dark Fate.

“I know David quite well. And I know that he really cares about movies. He’s a natural born storyteller and thinks like almost an old-school entrepreneurial producer that was a storyteller that loves storytelling and loved putting on spectacular shows,” Cameron said. “He’s the right man for the job to run a major studio, and now it looks like he’s going to have two of them, you know, swept under his leadership, which doesn’t bother me at all.” Ellison has pledged to grow the combined Paramount–Warner Bros. slate to around 30 theatrical releases a year.