The Future of ‘Star Wars,’ Marvel, Pixar, and Disney’s Movie Monopoly. Plus: Our Summer Movie Awards and Paul Downs Colaizzo on ‘Brittany Runs a Marathon’ | The Big Picture

D23 and Disney's Movie MonopolyStar Wars, Marvel, Pixar, and the legacy titles, all at once

Star Wars 1977

Amanda's go-to party trick is reciting the entire plot from memory; she always nails the Luke/Leia/Han tension and always forgets that the Death Star gets destroyed.

Eternals 2021

The D23 cast reveal: Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Brian Tyree Henry, Gemma Chan, Kumail Nanjiani, and Kit Harington as Black Knight, joining fellow Game of Thrones alum Richard Madden. Chris doesn't know who any of these characters are yet.

Onward 2020

Amanda's outline notes on the new Pixar film, which stars Chris Pratt as one of two elf brothers who lost their father young.

Soul 2020

The other new Pixar reveal, with Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey, built around the question of where a soul comes from.

Inside Out 2015

Comes up as the group tries to place Tina Fey among Pixar's other tearjerkers (that's actually Amy Poehler).

Jungle Cruise 2021

Dwayne Johnson's ride adaptation, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, whose résumé (The Shallows, The Commuter, Run All Night, Nonstop) suggests a much darker movie than the marketing implies.

Aladdin 2019

Chris still hasn't seen it, but concedes it's soaking up an outsized share of the pop-culture airwaves.

Lady and the Tramp 2019

The live-action remake gets its first look at D23.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever 2022

Announced roughly a thousand days out, which strikes Chris as a strange flex; Amanda reads it as Disney simply confirming what everyone already suspected: that it owns the whole board now.

Avatar: The Way of Water 2022

No footage, no clear sense anyone's asking for it. Except, Amanda notes, nobody was asking for it in 2009 either, and James Cameron just made the two biggest movies of all time twice.

Ford v Ferrari 2019

Bob Iger name-checked the Fox films Disney inherited when explaining a down earnings quarter; this is the one they're actually backing, and Sean expects it to be a real awards contender this fall.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie 2019

Leaked out of D23 season rather than announced at it. Amanda's default skepticism about victory-lap revivals; Chris trusts it because Better Call Saul already proved this team clears the bar.

Deadwood: The Movie 2019

Left Amanda with a bad taste. She says it's the same problem that sank the Veronica Mars movie: compressed, fan-servicey, missing what made the original work.

Best Performance in a Bad MovieChris's fringe categories, plus Sean's

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 2019

Chris's best-supporting-in-a-bad-movie pick: Austin Abrams, doing more with the role than it requires.

Always Be My Maybe 2019

Keanu Reeves's cameo gets a shoutout: briefly the only thing anyone talked about, then instantly forgotten.

Late Night 2019

Sean's pick for Emma Thompson; he's also still trying to figure out what happened to Hugh Dancy's character.

Best Leading Performance

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 2019

The obvious answer for both Leonardo DiCaprio and, per the DGA podcast conversation between Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, an increasingly hard-to-ignore Brad Pitt.

Luce 2019

Naomi Watts, as good as she's been in a long time. They table the rest of the discussion for the surprise category.

Midsommar 2019

Florence Pugh's other nod this summer.

Yesterday 2019

Himesh Patel, singing Beatles songs live at Wembley for an audience that had mostly never seen him before.

Booksmart 2019

Beanie Feldstein, a performance the group feels got swallowed by the will-it-flop discourse around the movie's opening weekend.

Plus One 2019

Maya Erskine, who Amanda calls transcendent even though the movie is structured around the guy character.

The Souvenir 2019

Honor Swinton Byrne, cast two weeks before filming with essentially no preparation, which is exactly why the performance works.

Best Supporting Performance

Rocketman 2019

Jamie Bell, in a movie Sean says has already been forgotten the way Bohemian Rhapsody never was.

The Farewell 2019

Diana Lin and Zhao Shuzhen as the mother and grandmother.

The Nightingale 2019

Baykali Ganambarr, incredible in what Amanda calls a genuinely brutal watch.

Best Scene

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 2019

Sean picks the out-of-time montage of Cliff driving Rick home through a changing L.A.; Amanda picks Brad Pitt on the roof.

Midsommar 2019

Chris's pick: the cold open, which he calls as punishing as filmmaking gets.

Avengers: Endgame 2019

Sean saw it on the Disney lot with a crowd that lost its mind when the hammer found Captain America's hand.

Plus One 2019

Amanda rewound and rewatched Maya Erskine's wedding dance, something she says she never does.

Long Shot 2019

Charlize Theron's hostage-negotiation scene.

Why Didn't This Work

Long Shot 2019

Killed at SXSW, then made about $14 million, less than Booksmart. The group's theory: a political rom-com released a week after Endgame, starring two people over 35, in a genre nobody goes to theaters for anymore.

Worst Rebootthe category that swallowed remakes, relaunches, and cinematic universes

Men in Black: International 2019

Sean's pick, one of the year's bigger what-the-fucks.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw 2019

Debated as a reboot since it launches a new corner of the Fast universe.

The Hustle 2019

A remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that Chris argues is a better film than Hobbs & Shaw, box office aside.

Shaft 2019

Chris only caught it because Netflix owned the rights in Europe, where he was traveling.

Dark Phoenix 2019

Not technically a reboot, but gets a special shoutout as maybe the worst movie of the summer, and the one that gave Chris and Sean a false fire alarm 15 seconds from the end.

Best Reboot

Pokémon Detective Pikachu 2019

Sean's come around on it, mostly thanks to a weak summer making everything look better by comparison.

The Lion King 2019

Sean's other nominee; Amanda refuses to engage with it as a category entry.

Best Sequel

Avengers: Endgame 2019

The consensus answer, arrived at without much debate.

John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum 2019

Amanda's pick, though she thinks it runs long.

The Secret Life of Pets 2 2019

Chris, only half-joking, citing the commercials as proof the barrel is being scraped.

Best Surprise

Luce 2019

The most divisive pick of the episode: Chris found it genuinely surprising and interesting; Amanda thought it raised hot-button issues it never developed and that the lead performance didn't land.

Horror Movie of the Season

Midsommar 2019

The unanimous pick.

Head Count 2019

Chris's recommendation for anyone hunting for a lesser-known scare on iTunes.

The Dead Don't Die 2019

Not a traditional horror movie, but worth it if you're into Jim Jarmusch's tone, per Chris.

What the F*** Movie of the Season

Godzilla: King of the Monsters 2019

A cast stacked with Millie Bobby Brown, Charles Dance, Kyle Chandler, and Vera Farmiga, and nobody in the room saw it, talked about it, or knows anyone who did, despite the prior two films in the MonsterVerse doing well.

Best Indie

The Souvenir 2019

Amanda's pick; she went in on a tip and came out having discovered a filmmaker.

The Farewell 2019

Sean's alternate pick.

Sword of Trust 2019

Chris's pick: a Lynn Shelton movie with Marc Maron, Jillian Bell, and Michaela Watkins that plays like a small '70s character piece.

The Art of Self-Defense 2019

Chris's other pick, Riley Stearns's hand-to-hand-combat psychodrama with Jesse Eisenberg, watched in the kitchen of a South by Southwest Airbnb.

Best Movie of the Summer

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood 2019

Unanimous. Sean saw it twice in theaters; the group agrees it's the only movie from the summer they're still thinking about, and that it beats out even Fleabag, Succession, Chernobyl, and Mindhunter as the best thing they watched all season.

In conversationthe writer-director on his first film, which premiered at Sundance and sold to Amazon

Paul Downs Colaizzo on

Brittany Runs a Marathon 2019

Colaizzo started writing it in 2011 about his real-life best friend and roommate, then spent two and a half years developing the script with Tobey Maguire and Matt Plouffe's company before convincing them to let him direct it himself. Jillian Bell lost the same 40 pounds her character does over the shoot, timed against a custom prosthetic that had to be remade mid-production when her weight loss outpaced the fitting.

Paul Downs Colaizzo on

The Big Sick 2017

The reason Colaizzo wanted Amazon as a distributor: he thought it handled a small, true-story indie with both theatrical reach and home accessibility.

Paul Downs Colaizzo on

Carnal Knowledge 1971

His answer to the show's closing question, the last great thing he'd seen: a Mike Nichols film he watched jet-lagged two nights before the interview.

Also mentioned raised along the way

In passing TitanicAvatarBambiGuardians of the Galaxy22 Jump StreetBroadcast NewsBohemian Rhapsody

The summer of 2009, for comparison Inglourious BasterdsFunny People(500) Days of Summer

Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads

TV The MandalorianObi-Wan KenobiWandaVisionFleabagSuccessionChernobylMindhunterBallersThe AmericansThe Walking DeadEuphoriaLess Than ZeroPen15

Podcasts The WatchDGA podcast

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