Culture Crave newsletter — #5 💣

Welcome to another addition of the Culture Crave newsletter 🍿

This week we are following up on Joker 2’s all-time box office bomb, Universal’s stacked 2026 directorial slate, Secret Level’s leaked cast, and more

Joker 2 is looking to set a record — worst ever performing sequel to a $1B film. The Marvels currently has the title. Variety’s recent report has the film losing closer to $200M now. You can check out our previous breakdown of what went wrong with the film here 💣

Universal is stacked with event films from prestige directors in 2026. Here’s what we know ⬇️

Christopher Nolan — Reportedly, it won’t be a sci-fi. Matt Damon will star. It’s expected to start filming in early 2025. Nolan himself wrote the script. There’s speculation it could be another espionage-style film 🕵️‍♂️

Steven Spielberg — This is reportedly another UFO film. His frequent collaborator David Koepp is writing. Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo are reportedly in talks for roles 🛸

The Daniels — It’s been very quiet for the directors after their Oscar winning film, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Currently, all we know is it comes out June 12, 2026 🤔

Jordan Peele — The film will be another horror, and the director thinks it could be his ‘favorite’ film yet if executed correctly 😱

DC finally cast their leads for the Lanterns show. They join the DCU’s previously cast Green Lantern, Nathan Fillion, who will play Guy Gardner in Superman 🟢

James Gunn describes the show as ‘True Detective with a couple of Green Lanterns who are space cops watching over precinct Earth. In it, they discover a terrifying mystery that ties into our larger story of the DCU’

The Penguin is a hit and Cristin Milioti likely secured her Emmy nomination with E4 — one of the highest-rated live-action TV episodes ever 🐧

The voice cast for Secret Level reportedly leaked and featured some big names. It was essentially confirmed when Amazon DMCA’d the leak and Patrick Schwarzenegger confirmed on IG that he’s part of the cast 📺

The anthology series was created by Tim Miller and produced by Blur Studio (Love + Death + Robots) with Amazon MGM Studios. It consists of 15 stories set in the worlds of different video games and releases December 10 🎮

Speaking of leaks, Game Freak has experienced a significant security breach, resulting in the leak of extensive information about their upcoming Pokémon projects, including details on lore and previously scrapped content. While Game Freak has confirmed the hack, they have not verified the specifics of the leaked information. You can find a compilation here 🕹

• Denis Villeneuve confirmed he will make Dune: Messiah sooner than he thought. When pressed further, he added that it would potentially start filming in 2026. His next film is slated to released December 2026, which does not seem like enough post-production time for a film like Dune: Messiah after filming is wrapped. This could mean Denis is planning to film one of his other 3 projects in the works within the next year 🎬

• Tom Holland says that despite the latest draft of Spider-Man 4 needing work, it ‘lit a fire’ in him and feels like a movie worthy of fans’ respect. He also expressed his interest in bringing Miles Morales into the MCU and wants to ‘do for a young kid what Robert Downey Jr. did for me’ 🕷

• Invincible S3 is set to premiere February 2025. There will be no mid-season break. The official trailer is rumored to drop in November 🦸‍♂️

• The Wild Robot sequel is officially in the works 🤖

That’s all for this week. Hit the subscribe button if you enjoyed it 🤝

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