CinemaCon 2025 - Paramount
‘Mission: Impossible 8’ delivered a better second trailer, and Liam Neeson’s ‘Naked Gun’ relaunch looked funny; however, it’s the 2027 release, ‘Children of Blood and Bone,’ that piqued my interest.
Paramount’s presentation went hard on three key titles at this year’s CinemaCon, emphasizing Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Richard Bachman’s The Running Man, Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (which is indeed being treated as the end of the line for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt) and the Liam Neeson-starring The Naked Gun. The latter, which dropped its trailer *before* we Vegas attendees got to see it (scandal!) is thus far doing the job in terms of looking like a fun and funny action movie/cop flick spoof (with some on-point jabs at legacy sequels) for those who haven’t seen or aren’t obsessed about the ZAZ Leslie Nielsen-starring trilogy. Do I care about a Naked Gun movie? No. But am I interested in a Liam Neeson-starring action comedy produced by Seth McFarlane and directed by Akiva Schaffer (who helmed the cult favorite Pop Star and the stupefyingly good Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers)? Absolutely.
The hope is that the resurrection of otherwise “IP for the sake of IP” properties like Sony’s Anaconda, Disney’s Freakier Friday and Paramount’s Naked Gun (alongside their eventual Scary Movie relaunch) is a trojan horse to get audiences reacclimated to the notion of seeing *comedies* in theaters sans mega-budget tentpole attachment. I’m less forgiving of getting yet another damn Smurfs movie (The Smurfs earned $545 million in 2011 but then became the definitive “folks were only curious the first time” franchise) that is essentially a remake of that “Smurfs get thrust into real-world New York City” Sony flick. It’s bad enough for studios to keep reviving their own “not really a franchise” IP. It’s another for one studio not to learn, in this regard, from another studio’s mistakes. As for The Search for Squarepants, maybe Mark Hamill will win the Oscar that Antonio Banderas was so cruelly denied for Sponge Out of the Water.