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This week I've been watching CinemaCon, the annual Las Vegas convention for movie exhibitors, from afar. All the big Hollywood studios show up to hype their upcoming slate for the theater owners in presentations, revealing exclusive footage and trailers and wheeling stars out to address the crowd. I have no fondness for Vegas and the week sounds like a load of hot air and PR nonsense. But boy, do I wish I was there. It just seems so exciting!

This is partly because the vibes were good this year. The global box office is strongly up on last year so far, and the years ahead seem packed with lots of big, crowd-pleasing movies, a surprising number of which are original, and many of which sound pretty great. Almost all the studios' CinemaCon presentations seemed to have gone down really well: Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., and Universal all had bangers, Disney showed Avengers: Doomsday, and even Amazon MGM did a decent job of persuading everyone it really does want to be a proper movie studio. (The less said about Paramount the better, and that goes for its impending acquisition of WB too, but never mind.) Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan were there! Tom Cruise and Ryan Gosling in the house! Dune: Part Three sounds sick! The Godzilla Minus One guy is making a........

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