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Weekly · 2026-07-24 00:00 UTC

Nolan's Odyssey Oscar Frontrunner, Atari's 10-Film Deal, Dungeon Crawler Carl Casts Its Cat — Pop Culture Digest — July 24, 2026

Academy voters call Christopher Nolan "the definitive filmmaker of our time" after first Odyssey screenings. Universal signs deal with Atari to turn 10 classic games — Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede, and more — into movies. The Dungeon Crawler Carl TV series casts audiobook star Jeff Hays as Princess Donut at SDCC. Martin McDonagh returns to Venice with Wild Horse Nine, Florian Zeller's Bunker thriller pairs Bardem and Cruz. And Johnny Depp brings Ebenezer Scrooge to Comic-Con in full regalia.

"The Definitive Filmmaker of Our Time" — Academy Voters Anoint The Odyssey

The 2027 Oscar race just found its gravitational center. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey — which shattered his own global opening record with $264 million worldwide — began its formal courtship of Academy voters this week with member screenings on both coasts and abroad. The early verdict? Borderline reverential.

"I didn't think anything could top Oppenheimer," one veteran Academy member told Variety after the 70mm screening at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles. "He is the definitive filmmaker of our time." The roughly 1,000-seat house was near capacity — an early tell in a season where turnout becomes its own form of polling. UK membership followed with a screening at London's Soho Hotel on Monday.

That kind of language matters. Nolan spent two decades as the most commercially dominant filmmaker the Oscars couldn't quite bring themselves to reward, until Oppenheimer swept 2024 and gave him his first directing statuette. Voters don't typically hand out multiple coronations in close succession — but they do reward a body of work that keeps elevating. The Odyssey, with its all-IMAX production and star-laden cast (Matt Damon, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron), is already being discussed in terms that suggest the race is, at least for now, tilted heavily in one direction.

Source: Variety

Atari's Arcade Cabinet Goes Hollywood — Universal Signs 10-Game Film Deal

In a deal that sounds like a pitch from a 1982 fever dream, Atari has signed an agreement with Universal Pictures to develop 10 classic video game properties for the big screen. The roster includes the ones you actually remember: Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede, Breakout, Pong, Adventure, Berzerk, Crystal Castles, Millipede, and Yars' Revenge.

The partnership, which also includes Entertainment 360, has already greenlit its first project — an original screenplay by former Universal studio exec Matt Reilly and Carl Hampe (a producer on Hellboy) that uses an Atari IP as the launch point for what's described as large-scale action-adventure fare. "The best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest," said producer Guymon Casady. "Carl and Matt saw an opportunity to take that same spirit and build an original, large-scale adventure around it."

Atari chairman Wade Rosen framed it as a natural evolution: "For more than five decades, Atari has created games and worlds that have remained part of popular culture long after their original release." Whether any of these titles have enough narrative DNA to sustain a feature film is the billion-dollar question — but after The Super Mario Bros. Movie cleared $1.3 billion and The Last of Us proved video game adaptations could win Emmys, nobody's betting against the pipeline.

Source: Deadline

Dungeon Crawler Carl Finds Its Princess Donut — Audiobook Star Jeff Hays Cast

The Dungeon Crawler Carl TV series just pulled a move that'll make the fanbase very happy. Jeff Hays — the narrator who's voiced every single character across all eight audiobooks, amassing over 140 million listening hours on Audible — has been officially cast as the voice of Princess Donut in Seth MacFarlane's live-action Peacock adaptation.

Announced Thursday at San Diego Comic-Con during Penguin Random House's "Spotlight on Matt Dinniman" panel, the casting marks the first concrete news since the show was ordered to series last month. For the uninitiated: Princess Donut is a tiara-wearing, self-obsessed talking cat who becomes Coast Guard vet Carl's reluctant partner when an alien invasion forces humanity's survivors into a televised death game. The official logline describes it as "the apocalypse will be televised … and Carl finds himself stuck with his ex-girlfriend's cat."

Chris Yost (The Mandalorian, Thor: Ragnarok) is writing and showrunning, with MacFarlane's Fuzzy Door producing alongside Universal Global Television. Dinniman's LitRPG series has sold 14 million copies — the audience is already built in. The smart money says this one hits.

Source: Variety

Venice 2026: McDonagh's CIA Comedy, Zeller's Bunker Thriller, and an Oasis Doc

Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera unveiled the lineup for the 83rd edition of the festival this week, and while it's lighter on Hollywood studio fare than recent years, the auteur firepower is undeniable.

Martin McDonagh returns to the Lido — where both Three Billboards and The Banshees of Inisherin premiered — with Wild Horse Nine, a dark comedy about CIA agents dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup. The cast is a McDonagh fever dream: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, and Parker Posey. Searchlight is distributing.

Florian Zeller follows The Son with Bunker, an elevated psychological thriller starring Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz as a real-life couple whose lives are infiltrated by a mysterious construction project commissioned by a tech mogul. Paul Dano, Stephen Graham, and Patrick Schwarzenegger round out the cast. Sony Pictures Classics has North American rights.

Also on the Lido: Robert Pattinson stars in Primetime, Danny Boyle premieres his latest, Werner Herzog returns, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Lee Chang-dong bring new work, and — for the rock-and-roll contingent — the Oasis reunion documentary Don't Look Back in Anger will have its world premiere, with Liam and Noel Gallagher expected to attend. Barbera, asked about the state of cinema, pointed to The Odyssey as proof that "cinema is not on its deathbed" but "can continuously regenerate itself, continuing to generate epiphanies and miracles of vision."

Source: Variety

Johnny Depp Haunts Comic-Con as Ebenezer Scrooge

San Diego, July. Eighty degrees. Christmas carolers appear on the sidewalk. And then Johnny Depp emerges in full Ebenezer Scrooge regalia — black coat, top hat, period makeup — to promote Ti West's Ebenezer, coming this November from Paramount.

The stunt, staged outside a "Scrooge and Marley" pop-up shop in the Gaslamp district, drew a crowd that began gathering at noon despite Depp not appearing until 2:30. When he did, he stayed in character: "Have you no jobs? It seems as though you have so much spare time. I work," he croaked at the assembled masses. Someone shouted "Good day to you, Mr. Scrooge." He replied: "What's so pleasant about it?"

It's the kind of guerilla marketing that cuts through Comic-Con's noise precisely because it's weird. Ti West — who spent the last few years building the X / Pearl / MaXXXine horror trilogy — pivoting to a Christmas Carol adaptation with Depp is itself an intriguing left turn. The film lands November 2026.

Source: Variety