Two Weeks of Voting Remain
To all those signing up to watch and support the films in our Summer Showcase, thank you. Stick around over the next two weeks as we start to share weekly leaderboards, standings, and more.
Official Selection: The First Five
Thirty directors are competing in the Summer Showcase. Over the coming weeks, we’ll feature at least one film from every one of them, starting this week with five – what they are, and how we chose them.
Read Receipts, Vol. 10
Tom Holland – fresh off his role as Telemachus in The Odyssey – has just swung to nearly a billion dollars with Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And Benny Safdie just became – briefly – the highest-grossing actor of 2026… yes, really.
By Ryder McNeal
A quick note this week because your time will be better spent reading about the films currently competing for the top spots in our Summer Showcase – and, ideally, filling out your ballot.
A lot of you are new here, having signed up over the past week to watch and vote for films. So, for the uninitiated, here’s what The Weekend Read is: a Sunday newsletter about movies, from the box office to the art house. Some weeks that means a three-thousand-word essay on a David Lynch film (thank you, Chief Film Critic Miles Stephenson) or a Shakespearean account of David Zaslav’s years spent fattening – or, rather, trimming – Warner Bros. for a sale (thank you, TWR writer-at-large Anthony Fallow). This week, it means telling you a little bit about why and how we chose the films competing.
Voting in the Summer Showcase is open for two more weeks – it closes August 16 – and if you haven’t filled out your ballot yet, you should at least start watching the competing films and making your shortlist. Once you’ve picked your favorites across all five categories (Best Acting, Cinematography, etc.), cast your ballot here. The most-voted films become official nominees and go in front of our panel of industry judges, so your picks decide which filmmakers get that shot.
To help you get started, we’ve spotlighted the first five of the films in the running – not as endorsements (your votes decide everything), but as a look at the range of what’s competing.
And we’re closing with Volume 10 of Read Receipts, where the box office just had the biggest domestic weekend in the history of movies, thanks to Spider-Man. Thank you, Tom Holland and Zendaya… and Benny Safdie?
We explain below.
That’s all for now – go vote.
Compiled by the PREVO Team
Thirty directors are competing in the Summer Showcase, and a few of them have more than one film in the running. Over the next several weeks we’ll feature at least one film from every director in the field. To start, here are five.
These aren’t endorsements. The selections were made before voting opened, and the films that make it in front of our industry jury are determined by your votes. Consider it a look at what we were watching for.
Dir. TJ Coughlin · Loyola Marymount MFA
Logline: A high school theater outcast connives to climb from an extra to the star.
How we’d describe it: If Whiplash were about a school play.
Why it’s in the Showcase:
– A hyper-ambitious orbit shot at 8:45
– Lead Brady Gentry going ape in the climax
– Blockbuster-looking color grading
Coughlin came to film school by way of a finance degree and describes his own specialty as resource-efficient filmmaking. It shows.
Dir. Ryan Fajet and Paloma Ronquillo · UCLA thesis
Logline: A young woman sets out to quiet a barking dog, and the more she tries, the more chaotic her world becomes.
How we’d describe it: Betty Draper’s worst nightmare.
Why it’s in the Showcase:
– Eyeball lemons
– Sophia Rosetti’s deadpan voiceover
– Stunningly detailed 1960s set design
Ronquillo, a two-time Panavision New Filmmaker Program recipient, shoots the film beautifully. And we’re still wondering how the team got their hands on all of the 1960s set design elements.
Dir. Brendan Sweeney · Lost Objects
Logline: A photographer looks back on her life and career capturing Los Angeles.
How we’d describe it: A brutally honest love letter to L.A.
Why it’s in the Showcase:
– The “perfect” shade of red as the interview backdrop
– “Sumerian Paradise” scoring the title drop
– A stunning closing shot of L.A. at sunset
There was no script. A cinematographer had an Alexa 35 idle between jobs and asked whether anyone wanted to go shoot something.
Dir. Siddharth Joshi · London Film School
Logline: An ordinary man and an extraordinary ghost share a house and try to kill each other.
How we’d describe it: More evidence that the best mockumentaries have British accents.
Why it’s in the Showcase:
– The beautifully lit Exorcist parody at 6:40
– Crash zooms and whip pans everywhere
– The “Six Months Earlier” ending is hilariously dark
A terrific – and somewhat rare – example of a successfully crowdfunded short.
Dir. Brendan Beachman · Written by Matt Sweeney
Logline: A novelist plagued by writer’s block buys a macabre sculpture that a deceased writer called his “muse.”
How we’d describe it: The Substance for writers.
Why it’s in the Showcase:
– A thumping, riveting score that steals the show around 12:00
– That reveal at 14:20
– Avital Ash bringing an outrageous respite from the scares
Beachman directs commercials for a living – Pepsi, Budweiser, Allstate – and makes horror between jobs. This one premiered at the Telluride Horror Show.
Weekend of Jul 31- Aug 2, 2026
#1: Spider-Man: Brand New Day posted the second-biggest opening in history. Sony and Marvel’s reboot swung to an estimated $355 milliondomestic – behind only Avengers: Endgame‘s $357.1 million, and close enough that Monday actuals could still catch up with it. It set an all-time single-day record on Friday ($168 million, previews included), earned an A CinemaScore and 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, and pulled $927 million worldwide in three days – the second-biggest global debut ever, again behind only Endgame. Tom Holland, fresh off playing Telemachus in The Odyssey, is having a greatsummer.
The weekend itself made history. The weekend grossed roughly $430 million across all titles – the biggest domestic weekend of all time, past the $402 million Endgame set in 2019. An estimated 24.1 million people went to a movie theater in the U.S. and Canada in three days. Whatever you’ve heard about the death of cinemas, 24 million people did not get the memo.
#2: The Odyssey is still rowing. After two weekends at #1, Nolan’s epic ceded the throne, adding ~$51 million for a $395.5 million domestic total and nearing $700 million worldwide – about to become the year’s fourth film past a billion.
The highest-grossing actor of 2026 is Benny Safdie. Yes, that Benny Safdie – Uncut Gems co-director. He voices Bowser Jr. in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ($1.01 billion) and plays King Agamemnon in The Odyssey(~$728 million), and the two together push him past $2 billion for the year. He is, for the moment, the most commercially successful performer alive. “For the moment” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though: Holland just booked $927 million in a weekend and will pass him within days.
The macro: Universal crossed $4 billion for the year on Sunday – the first studio there – and 2026 is now running 15% ahead of last year. This is shaping up to be the first $10-billion domestic year since before the pandemic. Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday are still to come.
What it means for filmmakers: The biggest domestic weekend in the history of film just happened; everyone can breathe a slight sigh of relief after worrying about the death of cinema for the last six years. And the lesson is simple: give people a reason to be there, and there is no ceiling on how many will come.
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