Feed Me’s summer 2026 movie guide.
Plus: how Joan Didion numbered her pages, and LIRR updates.
Good morning, everyone.
The biggest news story here in Orkland, an archipelago off of Scotland where I’ve been for a few days, is that a young walrus named Magnus has been commuting between Norway and Scotland. After a several-week swim from Orkney to Norway, he laid on a dock in the sun, looking tired. Experts have said the young male is likely to be “just exploring.” There’s a lesson here.
I’m also closely tracking the war between the native Orkney voles (they were selling handmade tweed Orkney voles in town) and the invasive stoats. Orkney Native Wildlife Project told the BBC that the stoats’ invasion was “deeply disappointing.” Redwall up in here. That’s enough Orkney news for today.
As the temperature approaches 93° in New York this morning, your evening plans might be feeling like “remember to check in on friend with summer house” or “try to get a table in the back garden of Frog.” But you can also resist those urges, and instead head to a place where you’ll get air conditioning, a giant cold drink, and walk out as a better person: the movies. If your hair is already blown out and your Resy notification already came through, have no fear. There are plenty of hot nights and summer movies to look forward to, curated here by Teddy Kim in his Stay Tuned column today.
Today’s newsletter includes: an update on the LIRR strike, Bloomberg’s new book newsletter, Teddy Kim on summer movies, and a16z’s latest New Media hire.
Teddy Kim’s summer movie guide.
Stay Tuned is a guest column on Feed Me written by Teddy Kim.
The box office is still down, but the movie calendar has finally settled back into a familiar rhythm after years of post-Covid weirdness. The end of summer is for the premieres of prestige films at festivals like Venice, Telluride, and Toronto—films that roll out through the fall as the weather gets colder, and that you can enjoy with your friends and family over the winter holidays. The first months of the new year make up the awards catch-up season, with more casual viewers finally getting around to the Oscar nominees, alongside a couple promising horror features and movies that studios are dumping.
We hear about interesting films at Sundance, but it’s hard to keep track of if or when those films will be released. Same goes for the spring’s Cannes Film Festival, the 2026 edition of which started last week and wraps on Saturday. But between Memorial and Labor Day, there is the vast thicket of summer to navigate, where, without a clear Barbenheimer phenomenon, it’s a bit confusing to make out what you have to go see in theaters.
These days, people who still go to the theaters watch 3-4 new movies a year, generously once a quarter. So that’s the framework I have in mind when I highlight one movie I think everyone should go see, like Eddington last summer and The Drama this spring. Looking ahead at the calendar, there are a couple titles that stand out, with strong representation from sci-fi and horror. Here are my top picks for what’ll be worth a trip to the theater over the next four months:
(May 29) Backrooms — Kane Parsons started making analog horror videos on YouTube about an infinite liminal space called the Backrooms as a teenager. Now at the ripe age of 20, he’s out with his feature debut, adapting his own videos on the same Internet lore. I can’t remember how many times people optioned the rights to Reddit posts from r/NoSleep when I was at Netflix, all for nothing. The Internet lore-to-feature-film pipeline doesn’t have a great track record. 2018’s Slender Man was a modest commercial success but got buried with an 8% score on Rotten Tomatoes. 2020’s Zola, based on a viral Twitter thread, got better reviews but failed to leave much of a mark at the box office for A24. They have another at bat with Backrooms, and if the movie is anywhere near as good as its trailer, I think it’ll be a hit.
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