leebutler Action, Adventure, Animation, Family, Fantasy, Mystery, Review

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender (2026) – Bent

Released: 25th July
Seen: 3rd August

From 2005 to 2008, the animated TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender was released to massive love and acclaim. It was a huge hit series, widely considered one of the best animated series of all time and spawned countless imitators. It also has spawned a stunning amount of attempted reboots, from the successful follow-ups like The Legend of Korra to the much less successful (indeed, downright hated) live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender movie made by M. Night Shyamalan and the middling live-action series that’s been rated as “Fine” by most critics. It seems obvious to anyone looking at this that the franchise is at its best and most loved when animated. Of course, eventually they were going to probably do something to follow up the adventures of Aang the Avatar and so we got Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a perfectly fine animated movie that fans are gonna love… which is all it had to do, I guess.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Scream 7 (2026) – Annoyed Yell

Released: 26th February
Seen: 2nd August

In November of 2023, it was announced that Melissa Barrera was no longer going to be a part of Scream 7. She was fired over a handful of posts she’d made calling the attacks in Gaza a genocide, these posts were deemed anti-semitic by Spyglass… they were not, they were calling out the actions of the government of Israel and specifically those of its leader, who right now has a warrant out for his arrest in relation to war crimes, specifically the genocide in Gaza. This was a pretty obvious overreaction back in 2023 but the feeling of anger towards Spyglass only grew as the war raged on and it became even more obvious that Melissa was right, which led to a lot of people calling for a boycott of Scream 7. This is why I didn’t go see the film during its initial release, despite loving this franchise which was my introduction to the horror genre that I love so much. Now Melissa has come out and said she’s moved on from everything, and the film made so much money that it feels silly to keep boycotting it (this isn’t a Harry Potter situation where the people who made it are so hateful that giving them a dollar actively harms others) so I finally saw it… and it’s probably the worst entry in this legendary franchise.

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leebutler Comedy, Family, Mystery, Review

The Sheep Detectives (2026) – Woolly Good

Released: 7th May
Seen: 25th July

In 2005, author Leonie Swann released her first book, Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story, to much acclaim, selling over 100,000 copies within six months, which is wildly impressive (certainly better than most books about sheep, I imagine). One of those copies would eventually land in the hands of screenwriter Craig Mazin, who recently showed off his dramatic writing chops with the incredible series Chernobyl and the incredibly popular The Last of Us. I suspect after writing a couple of shows like that (especially Chernobyl, one of the most intense TV series I’ve ever sat through), Craig needed something light and fluffy to clear his head, and so he adapted Leonie’s novel into The Sheep Detectives and, in doing so, made one of the most adorably charming and surprisingly intelligent movies of 2026.

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leebutler Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Review

Evil Dead Burn (2026) – Heated

Released: 10th July
Seen: 10th July

In 1979, Sam Raimi ran off into the forest with a bunch of his friends (including the chin-tastic Bruce Campbell) to make a feature length version of his short film Within The Woods. It was an insane idea made on a microbudget with effects that Sam made up on the fly, people got injured on set and for some reason they decided to strap a camera to a plank of wood and have two guys run through the swamp carrying it to get the shot. It was the kind of filmmaking that would make insurance agents weep and it ended up creating the 1981 film The Evil Dead.

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leebutler Action, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Review, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Mercy (2026) – Release Me

Released: 22nd January
Seen: 23rd March

For better or worse, we live in the era of AI… or at least the era of AI being brute-forced into our daily lives by billionaires who rely on it to turn a profit and make a couple of extra dollars. It’s in everything, it’s in all the apps you use, the very site I post this on offers AI to write a synopsis of what I post (you’ll be happy to know I never use it, I can write shitty unfunny synopsis’ all by myself), and it’s overtaken social media where it does fun things like “makes child sex abuse material” or “endorses white supremacy”. People are now losing jobs and being replaced by AI, which is incredibly faulty and has a high risk of errors… but no error is as big as the error that was made when someone decided to give Mercy a budget and allowed this film to exist because it’s just fucking bad.

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leebutler Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) – Miraculous

Released: 12th December
Seen: 12th December

In 2019, Rian Johnson released Knives Out to an unsuspecting public, and the world embraced and fell in love with his all-star cast and murder mystery. It was a true masterpiece, a definitive work in the murder mystery genre that had people salivating for more. That’s when Netflix did one of the few truly cool things that they’ve done in a long time and gave Rian Johnson 400 million dollars to make two new entries in the franchise, the first one of those was Glass Onion in 2022, which was also absolutely brilliant and proved that Knives Out had genuine franchise potential. Now we’ve been blessed with Wake Up Dead Man, the third movie in the Knives Out Franchise, and I’m fully at the point of insisting that Rian Johnson continue making these films until either he or Daniel Craig is no longer with us, because once again he’s made an actual masterpiece.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Crime, Family, Mystery, Review

Zootopia 2 (2025) – Sssensational

Released: 27th November
Seen: 8th December

In 2016, Disney released Zootopia, which told the story of a society made entirely of animals (as in lions, tigers, bears, oh my) that was dealing with the disappearance of the predator class of animals. A buddy cop mystery movie told with just a ton of adorable animals in people clothes was basically a license to print money for Disney, which would rake in over a billion dollars from this one movie alone, and that still only made it the 4th highest-grossing movie of the year, which really says a lot about how insane the box office was only a decade ago. In the years since Zootopia has remained a very popular property, even getting a TV show on Disney+ in 2022, but it’s taken until now for Disney to get around to making a sequel, and it was absolutely worth the wait.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) – Uggh

Released: 4th September
Seen: 6th December

Ed and Lorraine Warren were complete and utter con artists whose damage to the people they claimed to help won’t be fully known for years to come. For literally decades they would go from town to town and “investigate” strange goings-on and somehow come to a “scientific” conclusion that this meant they found some form of demon. All the time just a whole mess of demons, it’s never mental illness or epilepsy or strange coincidences… nope, always demons. I’ve said this before, literally verbatim because I copied that opening section from my review of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It which I still regard as the worst mainline Conjuring movie (The spinoffs are somehow worse, but none fill me with as much actual rage as The Devil Made Me Do It). One might hope that they would stop this franchise at some point, Horror as a genre is in a new era that’s not exactly suited to what The Warren’s and their lies could inspire but nope, we now have The Conjuring: Last Rites and my god, I hope this is the end because even the lies are getting repetitive and dull.

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leebutler Uncategorized

Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 (2025) – Upgrade

Released: 4th December
Seen: 4th December

In 2023, the long-awaited movie adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s came out to a pretty harsh critical reaction (myself included, I was not the biggest fan of it for a myriad of reasons) and a box office take that most films would kill to get. It was truly a sensation, bringing in about 300 million on a 20 million budget which makes sense because this franchise is basically review-proof. That’s the kind of return on investment that guarantees a sequel. It was inevitable that one was going to come out and probably quickly and sure enough, here we are with the second film, and to give the filmmakers credit, they seem to have paid attention to the problems that people had with the first one and have vastly improved things. 

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025) – You Can Fly

Released: 27th Feburary
Seen: 1st October

The Twisted Childhood Universe is the name given to the movie franchise that’s slowly being created which takes public domain fairy tale characters and turns them into horror movies. It’s a universe brought to you by the Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey people and when they first announced that this was a thing they were doing, the internet collectively groaned because the idea sounded painful and we had all suffered through the first movie which was a steaming heap of garbage. Then they released Blood and Honey 2, a marked improvement on the original that proved the actual potential of this stupid concept. Of course those were still early test films, they were banking off the Winnie the Pooh as a killer idea and we didn’t have much information about how the full Poohniverse (The other nickname given to this universe) would fare… Well, now the first film that isn’t about the bear of very little brain has come out and folks, this might actually turn out OK.

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