Hello everyone, and welcome to Slash Film Weekly. It's Wednesday, February 11th, 2026. On today's episode of the show, we're going to be talking about the latest film and TV news. We'll have a discussion about HBO's A Night of the Seven Kingdoms and play a few clips from interviews with the people behind that series. We'll talk about The Moment and play an interview with that film's director. And then we'll talk about Varanasi and play interviews with that film's cast and director as well. My name is Ben Pearson. I'm an editor at slashfilm.com.

The Super Bowl was this past Sunday. I just wanted to say that I thought the ads were atrocious,

basically across the board. And the ones that used digital de-aging tech did not make the actors

look younger. It just made them look

like smooth-faced AI nightmares. So that didn't go over well. As for the trailers, I was

intrigued by the Cliff Booth trailer. I thought the one for Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day

was only okay. I did not care for the Mandalorian and Grogu thing, and I sighed very heavily

when I saw the one for Scream 7. So there we are. We have a bunch of Super Bowl coverage up on the

site, so check that out if you're interested in any of that. I'll just run through a few news items

real quick. Lawrence Fishburn is one of the latest people to join the cast of The Exorcist,

which is the new movie that Mike Flanagan is working on, and Scarlett Johansson is in that

cast, several other people, Diane Lane, Jacoby Jube Joub from Hamnitz, Chubesel Edgiofor is also in

the cast now. So that's shaping up to be a very, very impressive

group of actors there. So I'm excited to see what Flanagan can do with that property.

Speaking of properties, we found out that Dan Tractonberg, the director of several

predator franchise entries, has set a new deal over at Paramount, like a first look deal over

there.

And Jermaine Lucere, the former Slash Film contributor who works at I-09 Gizmodo,

asked Tractonberg recently if this new Paramount deal means that he won't be actually involved in directing new Predator movies anymore because Predator is a 20th century studios thing.

And Tractenberg said, that is not true. So we're still not exactly clear about what the future

of the Predator franchise looks like. The exact level of Tractenberg's involvement, is he going to

remain on as a producer or something and kind of pass the reins to other

...