JULY 23, 2026

Welcome back to Buffering, where we spent way too long trying — unsuccessfully — to come up with a clever Odyssey-related pun. Speaking of Christopher Nolan, earlier this week, my Vulture colleague Nate Jones published a deeply researched list of the 100 most powerful film directors working today. We’ve excerpted his story in the newsletter this week, and I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that our guy Chris ranked pretty high. Continuing on the directors theme, we’ve also got a great tribute to the late, great James Burrows from veteran comedy helmer Pam Fryman. But we kick things off with the latest Peacock subscriber numbers courtesy of Comcast’s just-announced spring earnings and a Comic-Con preview from Savannah Salazar. Thanks for reading.  

 —Joe Adalian

In this edition: Kevin Feige, Robert Downey, Jr., Jake Schreier, Sadie Sink, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Gunn, Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, Damon Lindelof, John Cena, Mike Flanagan, Rolin Jones, James Burrows, Pamela Fryman, Peter Noah, Jennifer Aniston, Christopher Nolan, and 99 other powerful directors.

It took six years, but Peacock finally turned a profit — at least for one fiscal quarter. After losing billions since launching in 2020, the NBCUniversal-owned streamer made $189 million between April and June, parent company Comcast announced Thursday as part of its overall earnings report. Peacock also added another 2 million subscribers during the period, bringing its total base to 48 million U.S. homes, as the combination of NBA Finals, Love Island USA, and Telemundo’s coverage of the World Cup no doubt spurred sign-ups. But while new subscription revenue no doubt helped the bottom line, growing ad revenue from the streamer’s hefty sports offerings likely figured into Peacock’s lack of red ink during the quarter: The platform brought in $717 million in advertising, up 68 percent vs. last year. While making money is obviously better than losing it, this is just one quarter, and with both Love Island and soccer gone, there’s a good chance a big chunk of those 2 million new subscribers Peacock signed up last quarter will soon cancel, while the giant surge in World Cup advertising won’t be replicated any time soon. The real test for Peacock: Can it keep making money without the aid of once-every-four-years sporting events?—Josef Adalian

After its massive opening last weekend, another big NBCU property–Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey– continues to print money, and seems likely to keep pulling in moviegoers well into August (and maybe even September). Because it’s been such a hit, it’ll be interesting to see just how long Universal makes its suddenly profitable Peacock sibling wait to stream Nolan’s IMAX-filmed opus. After all, his last megahit, Oppenheimer, didn’t land on the NBCU platform until February 2024, a whopping seven months after it opened in theaters. (That’s nearly as long as the once-standard 8-9 months it used to take for most studio films to debut on pay channels such as HBO.) Odyssey is off to an even hotter start than Oppenheimer, so — as much as Peacock would love to include the film in its fall lineup — it would be surprising to see it show up there before early 2027. On the other hand, if history is any guide, at-home viewers should be able to rent or buy the movie in time for Thanksgiving. —J.A.

By Savannah Salazar

Photo: Jesse Grant/Getty Images

Depending on how you look at San Diego Comic-Con, it’s either dying or thriving, though a better word for it may be changing. It’s not as revelatory as it once felt, but it’s still ground zero for some of the buzziest announcements in entertainment. This year sees the return of Marvel Studios, which helped propel Comic-Con in the early 2000s and which, in recent years, has taken a year-on-year-off cadence in its coveted Hall H appearances. (Of course, Disney has its own biennial con, D23, that Marvel and the rest of its high-profile franchises are set to present at next month.) Apple, Prime Video, AMC, and HBO Max will be there with notable projects, too. Let’s dig into them all.

Marvel and Disney: The last time Marvel boss Kevin Feige came to Comic-Con, he announced the explosive news that Robert Downey Jr. would be returning to the MCU … as Doctor Doom. Two years later, the studio is promoting that very film, Avengers: Doomsday, going so far as to release the trailer days ahead of the panel. This same trailer was shown to CinemaCon attendees this past April. Unveiling it early frees up Feige and company to either show off more exclusive footage or or to spend the time waxing poetic about InfinityVision. With D23 a month from now, it’s hard to predict how a Marvel Studios panel will play at Comic-Con because Disney would seemingly want to reserve a splashier presentation for its own show. Additionally, Spider-Man: Brand New Day drops next week, and Feige has been making the interview rounds, revealing that the MCU has mapped out plans up until 2042. 

Though I doubt Hall H will be privy to all those plans, maybe he’ll finally offer some more information on director Jake Schreier’s X-Men movie. Or an even lower lift: Can we just know which character Sadie Sink is playing in Brand New Day? Many theorize that she’s set to play the beloved X-Man, Jean Gray. Spare some mutant news, Feige! But even without new updates, Feige just has to trot out the extensive cast of Doomsday, which, yes, still includes Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, to make Hall H shake.

DC and Warner Bros.: With Marvel’s return, when will James Gunn’s DCU make its grand debut at Hall H? They have had some presence at the con: Last year, Peacemaker promoted its second season and this year, they’ll have Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, and Damon Lindelof hyping the gritty, True Detective–inspired Lanterns series. But aside from that, DC Studios has not had a presentation for any of their feature films since 2022, when it teed up Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and that was before Gunn’s takeover. Supergirl’s diminishing box office returns wouldn’t have made for a triumphant return to Hall H, but there has to be some sort of plan for DC Studios to make some real noise at Comic-Con again, right? Maybe once they nail down their plans for Batman. 

Apple TV: As for a company having a great year, Apple is making its Comic-Con debut at Hall H. It will roll out some of its upcoming slate, which includes the newly minted awards darling Widow’s Bay, John Cena’s Matchbox: The Movie, the second season of Dark Matter, and Rebecca Ferguson’s Silo. Also, it feels a little strange that Severance isn’t on the lineup at all at the service’s first Comic-Con. It’s sci-fi, it’s beloved, it has a stable of fun actors to invite, it’s about to shoot a new season, and — most importantly — it’s cosplay appropriate. There’s probably nothing new to promote, but it makes us wonder: Could there be a surprise announcement or appearance in the works? We’ll have to wait and see.

Prime Video: In recent years, Prime has maintained a healthier presence at the convention than most other studios. Just last year they brought out Chris Miller, Phil Lord, author Andy Weir, and Ryan Gosling to debut footage from Project Hail Mary, which delivered Amazon a much-needed hit. This year, Prime and MGM hit up Hall H again to promote the sequel to Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs. Aside from the Star Wars parody, horror maestro Mike Flanagan will be at Comic-Con for the first time to debut his Stephen King project, a new-age Carrie.

AMC: The  presentation I’m personally most excited for is AMC’s The Vampire Lestat. Rolin Jones’s series reflects how the convention thrives now — not through major film franchise players, but on niche, beloved series that rely on their passionate legions of fans to spread the gospel. Formerly known as Interview With the Vampire, this series has made a yearly appearance at the con since before its 2022 premiere and built up such a following that it’s nabbed its first slot at Hall H to discuss the third season, and to hopefully announce a fourth.  

By Nate Jones

Illustration: Ari Liloan

Who is the most powerful director in Hollywood right now? Perhaps you’d opt for a clean answer: It’s the person whose latest movie started selling tickets a year ahead of time. But who’s the second-most powerful director in Hollywood? What about the third? The 23rd?

These are the questions that have occupied the Vulture offices for the better part of a year, since I first started mulling a list of the most powerful directors in Hollywood. As the industry exits an era of cinematic universes, when mega-producers like Kevin Feige ruled the land, directors seem to matter again. A new generation of cinephiles has come of age, raised on YouTube, Reddit, and Letterboxd. Having spent their youths under the hegemony of the MCU, they bristle at interconnected comic-book worlds the same way their forebearers in the ‘70s did at old-fashioned musicals. Our young stars feel the same way: When Timothée Chalamet devoted years of his life to prepping for a role, it was for a Safdie, not a superhero.

The balance of power has shifted, Puck’s Matt Belloni told me. It used to be that a figure like Pirates of the Caribbean’s Gore Verbinski, “a big-time commercial director,” was considered far more important to the industry than any Oscar-friendly auteur. “But because of the rise of film-fan culture, the communities built around filmmakers, that has given more power to the auteurs who can deliver an audience.” Think Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig, or Denis Villeneuve — “butts-in-seats directors who can also get awards,” Belloni says. IP is still king: Many of our most influential directors got that way thanks to their facility with it. However, if franchise producers were the power players of the 2010s, the buzziest deals and biggest releases of the 2020s belong to filmmakers who are attractions in their own right.

In a sense, we’re living through an echo of the 1970s, when Movie Brats like Coppola and Scorsese took over Hollywood, leveraging their own talent and reputation to get studios to bankroll their projects. The movie business is more niche today, but it’s also accessible to a wider group of directors, who now have myriad ways to wield their influence. The YouTube-to-horror pipeline is a well-trodden path to success. Indie studios like A24 and Neon dangle creative freedom in exchange for tastemaker cred. A new class of Oscar voters use their platform to elevate a host of fresh and exciting filmmakers.

That’s why, when it came time to create the list, we couldn’t stop at 20, or even 50 names. We had to take it all the way to 100, handily organized into tiers to reflect the myriad mental (and actual) taxonomies executives employ when casting about for a name for a new project. And given the nature of the list, we couldn’t do it entirely ourselves. Over the course of several months, I consulted with agents, executives, producers, and publicists — all anonymously, of course — as well as a handful of L.A.-based journalists like Belloni who know the inner workings of Hollywood intimately. Their opinions influenced the rankings, though the final order was determined by me alone….

By Pamela Fryman, as told to Josef Adalian