How's 2026 Been So Far?

It’s July 6th, and I feel like we’ve already had a pretty good film year in 2026.

I’ve seen about 86 new films so far, and I’ve got a ton of things I want to see in the next month to kind of catch up before the back half of the year really gets rolling. I know we haven’t seen a lot of the really big guns, but I’m having a great year so far, and the summer movie season feels like everything kicking into the next gear.

As I’ve said, I’m trying to be an optimist right now. It’s hard. The business is hard. Harder than it’s ever been. That’s tough enough to accept when it’s just me it affects, but my kids are both seriously looking at ways to pursue careers in this business now, and I am terrified for them. This is such a weird moment to try to make a living entertaining other people. For one thing, it almost feels obscene to focus on entertainment when it feels like the world is on fire. Maybe you aren’t feeling the same anxiety and tension I am, but the last few years have worn on me in a way no other point in my life has. Watching the tech industry do everything it can to burn down everything that is important to me makes me furious, and I think it’s safe to say I’ve been radicalized.

I do think the tide is turning. The AI bubble (and it is very much a bubble) is about to burst, and when it does, a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money. I take no pleasure in knowing how much damage it’s going to do, but I do, and it is. At some point soon, we are going to have to change the way we deal with Silicon Valley, which has been overrun by psychopathic snake oil salesmen who have no interest in building anything anyone actually wants or needs. It’s all magic beans all the way down these days. They sell the hype. They sell the excitement. They sell the promises that they are already breaking before they even finish telling the lies in the first place. Elon Musk, King Dunce of Stupid Shit Island, has built his entire empire by buying good ideas from other people, hyping them up, bleeding them dry, and then failing with them. Everything he touches eventually turns to garbage because he is incapable of actually running a business. He’s great at getting tax rebates and government subsidies. He’s great at slandering people. He’s great at ruining social media platforms, something he was doing long before he bought one. And he’s exceptional at cheap gutter racism. But actually running a company? No. And he’s just one of chorus of corrupt lying scumbags who love to tell us all that their useless products are “inevitable.” Fuck ‘em all. Fuck Sam Altman. Fuck Palantir. Fuck Peter Thiel. Fuck Marc Andreesen. I not only don’t want the future they are trying to sell us, I don’t think they’re remotely smart enough to actually execute on the bullshit they promise.

So… optimism. That’s the buzzword for the rest of 2026. Miles keeps sending me follow-up thoughts about the changing face of Hollywood, like when Zach Creggers and Brian Duffield optioned Sirenhead or Steven Spielberg producing The Mandela Catalogue. He’s excited, and that kind of excitement is contagious. I want to lean in and enjoy that. I’m not going to spend my time stewing in fury. I’m not going to worry that we’re about to lose another legacy media studio because of more corporate fuckery. I can’t affect these things. I can’t stop any terrible billionaires from doing their terrible billionaire shit, and it’s wasted energy for me to use this newsletter to rant and rave about things that I cannot impact. I have a limited number of words left in my lifetime, and I plan to spend them on things I love.

A lot of my newsletters since March of 2020 have been written in the shadow of COVID or the post-lockdown lunacy or terrible election cycles or professional turmoil, and I’m well aware of how easy it is for all of that to end up in the work. I have always tried to put together things worth reading (and even re-reading) for you here, but I have not always been great about keeping the outside world at bay while I’m writing for you. I think I’ve gotten better at it, and part of the reason I wanted to kick off the year with the 2025 in 50 Films series was because I knew it would be an avalanche of positive energy. That was almost 40,000 total words of me talking about movies that made last year special for me. That’s a lot of good will. I think The Last ‘80s Newsletter (You’ll Ever Need) is relentlessly positive, even when I’m writing about terrible films, because I love this kind of deep-dive historical work, and it feels like I’m accomplishing something special, one film review at a time.