I haven’t seen The Super Mario Galaxy Movie yet, so my 6,000-word essay on how the Lumas are a metaphor for Keynesian economics will have to wait until Friday. In the meantime, let’s look at some other movies that are coming our way soon. In trailer form! Yes, there were enough significant trailer releases this week that I figured we could sift through them and see what’s what. 

Backrooms (in theaters, May 29)

The main marketing hook for this film—or, at least, one of the more prominent ones, despite not being mentioned in the trailer—is that the director of the film is currently 20 years old. Meaning he was a teenager when this whole project got into motion at A24. The kid’s name is Kane Parsons and he is, of course, from the internet, where he made a number of short film-ish things. His most notable work was a series about the 4chan creepypasta-esque theory of the Backrooms, a space just beyond perceived reality that one could potentially “clip” into—which is a videogame term for exploiting a glitch in a game’s coding to, like, pass through walls and stuff. 

I vaguely know that because I’ve watched an embarrassing number of Breath of the Wild speedrun videos, as I no longer really have a concept of “valuing one’s time.” But also I know it because I watched this interview with Parsons in which he explains the whole thing. After watching the video, I gotta say . . . I don’t think I quite like the cut of this Parsons boy’s jib. Maybe it’s simply my general aversion to such precociousness, which is probably not fair and I’m just being an old crab. But give the interview a watch and see what you think. I detect something unseemly in his aura, the brashness of youth mixed with . . . something else . . . that suggests we’re in for a heap of empty pretension when the movie arrives in theaters.

Or, it’ll be great and spooky and steer us in a new horror direction, away from the witches and curses and Hereditary knockoff stuff we’ve been served so much of lately. No matter what, it will be fun to see Renate Reinsve in a buzzy horror movie, and any time Chiwetel Ejiofor leads a film I’m happy about that. I shouldn’t be too hard on this summer internship of a movie sight unseen. It’s awfully tempting though. Just watch the interview.

Masters of the Universe (in theaters June 5)

It is fun to imagine some cigar-chomping studio executive watching The Idea of You and Red, White, and Royal Blue and paging his secretary on the intercom and saying “Get me Galitzine. Have I got a picture for him.” And that picture is the He-Man movie Masters of the Universe. 

That’s Galitzine as in Nicholas Galitzine, the pouty lipped, shiny faced British actor who has played gay a number of times (RW&RB, Handsome Devil, Mary & George), played a boy band member in love with Anne Hathaway exactly once (The Idea of You), and did whatever was required of him in the Camilla Cabello Cinderella movie, for which Billy Porter won six Oscars.

In truth, though, I suspect that whatever Amazon MGM executive approved Galitzine as He-Man was banking more on his tough-guy shtick in the truly odious hit streaming movie Purple Hearts, a military romance (between a BOY and a GIRL, relax) that might as well have been produced by Pete Hegseth. Maybe that’s the strong-but-sensitive appeal the He-Man folks were seeking. 

Look, this movie is almost assuredly going to bomb, because it is wildly unclear who its target audience is. Like, it’s not strong enough IP for a successful nostalgia play. It looks too gay and lame for straight teenage boys. There aren’t enough girls and gay guys out there to support this in theaters when they could be at home flicking their beans to Galitzine’s other work, which was made for them. Masters of the Universe is basically a zero quadrant movie and I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone spent nearly $200 million to make it. Then again, the director, Travis Knight, is well regarded for his animated efforts like Kubo and the Two Strings (as well as the live-action Transformers spinoff Bumblebee). So maybe he will prove us all wrong, as only the son of the co-founder of Nike can. (For real, Phil Knight is his dad.)