At Sundance 2026, Andrew Stanton’s In the Blink of an Eye debuts with a bold multi-timeline sci-fi tale examining human emotion in the past, present and future.
If you have been keeping up with the Sundance Film Festival 2026, you may have found yourself wondering what Andrew Stanton is doing these days. The Whiz behind Wall-E has at long last arrived back on live-action soil and he is doing so with uncertainty, not caution. His new film In the Blink of an Eye is not only a return to form it is a high concept, mindbending thrill ride.
| Feature | Details |
| Movie Title | In the Blink of an Eye |
| Director | Andrew Stanton |
| Writer | Colby Day |
| Genre | Science Fiction / Drama |
| Narrative Style | Triptych (3 interconnected stories) |
| Time Periods | 45,000 BC (Neanderthals), Present Day, and Far Future |
| Core Theme | Human connection across time, evolution, and technology |
| Story Approach | Visual storytelling & behavior over heavy dialogue |
| Structure | Non-linear and multi-timeline |
| Editing Style | Using “Emotional Sync Points” to link different eras |
| Premiere | Sundance Film Festival 2026 |
| Vibe | Thought-provoking, Sci-Fi With Emotional Depth |
| Standout Factor | Skips the “Hero’s Journey” to focus on shared human feelings |
So, what’s the deal? That’s not your average “aliens destroy the White House” science-fiction movie. It’s a triptych — which is just a fancy way of saying that it tells three separate stories that are all interconnected.
It is a narrative that leaps randomly back and forth over the course of thousands of years, from ancient Neanderthals to the current day, and then to the future.
It’s ambitious, it’s a little experimental, and it’s trying to suss out what really makes us “human” from era to era.
Andrew Stanton had long been working on big shows such as Stranger Things, 3 Body Problem, and he spent that time ‘hand-picking’ his dream team. He’s also leaning heavily on his animation roots.
Andrew Stanton’s biggest takeaway is the importance of imagination. He thinks the presence of a character — an expression, a movement, or maybe a choice can say more than dialogue ever could. The end product is a movie meant to make you feel first, leading emotion with images rather than explaining everything in words.
The author, Colby Day, confessed he was a little tired of the typical movie structure we get applied to everything. Rather than tracking a single protagonist on a familiar trajectory, he wanted to “blow up the world” and change the rules. He was inspired by films such as Cloud Atlas — those “big swings” that might be a little messy but way more interesting than a “safe” blockbuster.
Just think about what it would be like to edit three separate films into one. The editor Mollie Goldstein said they had to find “sync points.” They’re moments when a character in 45,000 BC is experiencing exactly what someone in the future is. It’s the emotional glue that holds the whole thing together.
Connectedness is the new spectacle: The age of hollow, effects-laden action-movies is waning. In the Blink of an Eye caters to a burgeoning demand for narratives with emotional connections — demonstrating that no matter how far technology evolves or centuries elapse, what really resonates is how intimately we are linked to one another.
The Comeback of the “Big Idea”: For a time, it seemed like movies were made by committee. This feels like a personal project and a risk. If this works, studios will once again trust directors with strange, “unfilmable” scripts.
Universal Struggles: By featuring Neanderthals, the film makes us aware that even as our phones evolve, our hearts don’t. We’re all still coming to grips with the same primal fears and loves that people had thousands of years ago.
Raed More:- Best Medical Drama Series Like ‘The Pitt’ to Binge Watch in 2026
Darkly In The Blink of an Eye is a quiet rebellion against all the sci-fi that has played it safe for far too long. Rather than pursuing bigger explosions and louder stakes, it looks inward – across centuries, across species, across futures – to consider what actually endures.
When the film connects Neanderthals, modern humans and future societies through shared feelings, it tells us our survival is not dependent on wiping out the other; rather it magnifies our humanity. If this movie sticks the landing like it promises, it won’t just be a standout at Sundance — it may indicate a turn toward even braver, more emotionally intelligent sci-fi, where connection matters more than spectacle.
Dive into the world of entertainment with Fandomfans to get deeper details from directors, stars, and industry insiders.
Godzilla vs Kong delves into Hollow Earth, Axis Mundi, and Titan ancestries. Find out how the MonsterVerse fuses ancient myth with contemporary science.
Think falling down a spiral of blue, where gravity inverts and ancient titans wander through an upside down world pulled from myth — welcome to the MonsterVerse’s Hollow Earth, first revealed in Godzilla vs Kong. This subterranean world combines ancient myths like Agartha with modern science, making Godzilla vs Kong epic clash into the equivalent of doorways for deep lore. Dive in to see how this secret universe reshapes the franchise’s mythology.
The MonsterVerse — the hugely profitable shared universe developed by Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. has found a genuinely smart way to work its mythology. It combined two concepts that have captivated human thought for ages, the Hollow Earth idea and the notion of the Axis Mundi, and molded them into the axis of its narrative. But it didn’t just take these ideas wholesale for the story. It turned them into something different.
In older lore, hollow or subterranean worlds are spiritual ones meaning they’re afterlives, secret havens for the truly enlightened, or mystical planes along the lines of the fabled Agartha where timeless wisdom is maintained.
The MonsterVerse takes out the theology and puts in biology. Its subterranean world is not a souls’ destination after death, or a place where secret masters find quiet meditation. It’s a living, breathing, wildly energetic system — the original home of the Titans, those massive beasts like Godzilla vs Kong that dwarf skyscrapers and carve coastlines simply by walking across them.
Within the franchise’s own internal logic, this subterranean world is more than just the monsters’ home territory. Kabbalistic perceptions describe being as layers or levels of planes of existence. The MonsterVerse does the same thing, but replaces divine judgment and mystical energy with speculative science, evolutionary biology and astrophysics.
The subterranean landscape of the MonsterVerse isn’t just one giant cavern. It’s some very specific portions of the United States divided into three zones, each with its character and function.
It starts with the caverns — the vast, global system of tunnels hollowed out of the Earth’s crust. In a technical sense, you could go from the surface down through these tunnels all the way to the lower regions, but it would take a very long time and push any traveler to his or her limit. They’re more like connective tissue than a thoroughfare.
The second layer is what Monarch: Legacy of Monsters calls the Axis Mundi and now we’re off the rails. Consider it a no-man’s-land, in between the world of the surface and the world of the true underground beneath. Gravity isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do here.
Physics is contorting in ways that they shouldn’t. Time is slithering and bending all around us. It’s a volatile limbo, not really one world, not really the other, and crossing it requires that you have either special equipment or a willingness to emerge the other side quite rattled.
The third and final layer is the Hollow Earth core itself, where the franchise takes its imagination into overdrive. It’s a reverse landscape of terrifying scope — a world upside down, with its own weather, its own ancient forests and oceans, its own prehistoric creatures, and at its core, a radiant energy source that acts like a mini sun. It’s where the Titans were born, where their ancient civilizations rose and fell, and where the deepest roots of the MonsterVerse’s world lie hidden and waiting.
Travelling from the surface to the depths of the Hollow Earth is not simply a matter of excavating. The distances are immense, and the geology between is basically toxic to anything attempting to make its way through. So how do Titans the size of mountains go under the ocean and come up on the other side of the world? The MonsterVerse’s solution is simple: they don’t go through the rock. They Go Around It.
There are natural spatial rifts scattered across the earth, which the franchise terms Vile Vortices, places where spacetime itself doubles in on itself, allowing one to traverse thousands of miles in just seconds. These are not tunnels or caves. They are worm holes, geological in creation but functioning more like holes in the fabric of space. In that regard, they are the MonsterVerse’s most straightforward representation of the Axis Mundi.
Where Eliade conceived the Axis Mundi as a spiritual pathway, a channel through which shamans can travel through time and space in trance states, the Vile Vortices take that journey literal and physical. The revered track between the worlds turns into a quantifiable, trackable, scientific classified event.
What makes these portal locations in particular brilliant from a narrative perspective is simply where the writers decided to locate them. Instead of creating fictional geography, the MonsterVerse embeds its gateways within real locations that have already grabbed the human imagination, if for very different reasons.
The Bermuda Triangle, a geographical mystery best known in pop culture, is in the MonsterVerse a region with the highest accumulation of Vile Vortices — which explains a few decades of folklore about ships and planes vanishing into thin air.
Antarctica, which has been linked with conspiracy theories about polar access to inner Earth and Cold War conspiracies for ages, is the primary gateway in Godzilla vs Kong that the humans first cross that line and go down to the core.
The Mariana Trench, the deepest part of any ocean, and a location that even now feels alien to most of the people who look at it, is Godzilla vs Kong personal transit hub — the underwater gate he crosses to reach his ancient temple deep below.
Skull Island, which anchors Kong’s origin story, lies at the center of a web of vortices that had already begun to destabilize when the films took place. Area 51, that longstanding nexus of governmental conspiracy mythology, has been recast not as a secret hangar for alien spacecraft but as a Monarch observation post, monitoring Titan activity underground. Infant Island retains its significance from the original Toho films, effectively keeping Mothra’s mythological home intact from the original continuity within the new one.
Egypt, Kazakhstan and Japan are added to the portal scattering across the globe, reinforcing the idea this subterranean line runs worldwide – under ancient civilizations and modern cities, alike.
The motif here is intentional. By basing its fictional geography on place people have preexisting fears of or find weird, the MonsterVerse establishes a reality it seems like has just been under the surface of the real world all along.
In most myths the term Axis Mundi is used to refer to a giant cosmic tree or pillar which connects various levels of the universe as a central point for the organization of the cosmos. The Apple TV+ show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters does something different. It’s using that term to designate a unique and horrible place in the MonsterVerse’s subterranean landscape. In so doing, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters pulls off one of the franchise’s most intellectually daring aims: it synthesizes ancient cosmological symbolism with the actual mathematics of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
In Monarch, the Axis Mundi, well, it’s not the luxurious, panoramic underground world reminiscent of Godzilla vs Kong. That place is the central core of Hollow Earth, with its inverted terrain and miniature sun that is a whole other ball of place, much deeper and far more stable.
The Axis Mundi is what lies between. It is a shadowy, unpredictable spate of underground pockets trapped between the surface world above and the core beneath in a gravitational standoff. Godzilla vs Kong-sized Titans consistently and seamlessly pass through it as if it were just an airport that everyone must go through like a requisite checkpoint on the journey to somewhere. But for them, that does not become a mere transit stop, it becomes much worse.
No one who goes to the Axis Mundi does so intentionally. It is what goes wrong when crossing a Vile Vortex. “The mechanics of these things, as explained by the show, are just trajectory,” to navigate a vortex successfully, you must keep moving constantly downward through the gravitational inversion at its Heart. This sustained direction is what takes you through to the other side, into the Hollow Earth core.
But if that trajectory is disrupted, the traveler doesn’t bounce back its origin or stop, which means they are stuck there forever. They don’t come out the way they went in. Instead they get ejected sideways, spat out through a horizontal portal into the Axis Mundi instead. It’s not like there’s a dramatic warning. One second you’re plummeting down toward the core. Then all of a sudden you’re someplace else entirely, and getting out isn’t exactly straightforward.
It’s a brilliant piece of spatial storytelling. The difference between making it out safely or being trapped for all eternity is basically just a question of angle.
The worst thing about the Axis Mundi isn’t the dark or the shaking. It is what it does to time.
Since the plane is located at the center of conflicting gravitation fields of the surface Earth and the Hollow Earth core, there is a great deal of spacetime warping in that place. This is where Monarch: Legacy of Monsters plucks real physics for its scares.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity also tells us that time runs more slowly in stronger gravitational fields — the deeper you are in a gravity well, the more slowly your clock runs relative to someone in weaker gravity. The Axis Mundi takes that principle and turns it into a human tragedy.
Time within the Axis Mundi moves at a pace close to non-existence compared with the surface world.
The series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters actually makes this concrete with two characters whose narratives are involuntarily shattering when you discern what really is happening to them. Dr. Keiko Miura is Fallen into the Axis Mundi in 1959 on a mission that goes disastrously wrong. When she is finally located by the series’ contemporary other leads, she remains unaged. From her point of view, only a handful of weeks have elapsed. From the view of the world, almost sixty years have passed.
They’re all old or dead. She had her era and it had moved on without her. She is physically unaltered and temporally marooned, living in the wrong era through no fault of her own.
Lee Shaw has a similar experience, believing he’s briefly visited the realm, only to reemerge to find that two decades have been wrenched from his life, transforming everything he’d left behind without his input.
Read More:- Avengers The Kang Dynasty Not Only Changes Its Title But Also Superheroes Powers
What makes the whole thing feel scientifically sound rather than arbitrary is that the main Hollow Earth core doesn’t do that. In Godzilla vs Kong the characters take time to explore that world for hours and come back to the surface with no temporal disturbance at all. The reason is that within the universe’s logic, gravity in the core has equalized. Encased within the Earth’s mantle on all sides, the pull of gravity cancels out and time runs at a normal rate compared to the surface.
But the Axis Mundi has no such balance. That is the uneasy midpoint, pinned between the attraction of two huge gravitational forces, and this formless tension is just what makes it so dangerous.
To the effects that time dilation creates has an even mythological resonance. A place where people cease to age, where centuries pass outside as moments pass inside is the old legend of Agartha, the subterranean world where ancient, enlightened beings reside exempt from the flow of time on the surface above.
The MonsterVerse reaches that same figure through physics rather than allowed Mysticism, that’s exactly the kind of translation that makes its world-building seem genuinely layered. Godzilla vs Kong translates myth into physics.
It’s a film about two giant monsters fighting it out on neon lit city streets at a quick glance. But if you look at what the MonsterVerse has been quietly constructing under all the spectacle, there’s something much bigger going on here.
Godzilla vs Kong film is what ancient myth would look like if you rebuilt it using the language of science. It’s spiritual cosmology redrawn with physics. It takes the oldest stories humanity has ever told — stories about gods, underworlds, sacred centers of the universe and reimagines them in a world where those things are real, just not in the way any religion ever told stories about them. The fantasy is still there but it’s been anchored in something that feels almost believable, a kind of speculative realism that makes the world feel simultaneously primitive and futuristic.
What the MonsterVerse has created isn’t fantasy — it’s a parallel cosmogony. Gods are made biological, myths become historical, and divinity converts to energy. The so-called “monsters” were never invaders but they were the planet’s first rulers, shaping Earth for years before humanity came into being.
And that changes everything. The difference is that the true battle in Godzilla vs Kong isn’t Godzilla and Kong — it’s humanity and the reality of who really owns this world.
Dive into the world of the monsterverse with Fandomfans to get the latest updates on theories, characters and facts from movies and series.
The Michael biopic trailer is out. Jaafar Jackson stars in the film, which follows Michael Jackson's ascent, his challenges, his music legacy and iconic shows.
Michael Biopic Trailer the long-awaited biopic of the King of Pop, and this is the first Lionsgate world paused for a moment as Lionsgate finally released the official trailer for Michael, the eagerly anticipated biopic of the King of Pop.
For decades, fans have muttered, speculated, and debated whether anyone could really go toe-to-toe with the lightning-in-a-bottle magic that was Michael Jackson. The answer to that seems to be an overwhelming “yes.”
The Michael’s trailer introduces us to Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s nephew in real life, and whose likeness and vocals so chillingly accurate has set the internet alight.
This is not merely a movie – it’s a worldwide event that’s guaranteed to take us back to the moonwalks, the glove and the man behind the myth.
Save the date and get your glitter gloves ready. Michael will light up the big screen on 24 April. The film will open wide, with a giant IMAX rollout, so that the concert scenes and larger-than-life music numbers will be seen and heard at full blast.
The film is solidly grounded in the musical biopic and drama genres, covering decades of music history. From the soulful, gritty streets of Gary, Ind., the Jackson 5 were formed, to the breathtaking stadiums of the Bad and Dangerous world tours, the locale is as thrilling as the man himself. The key theme delves into the dualities of genius – the public superstar and the private (and often isolated) person.
Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Equalizer) directs, who is renowned for gritty, intimate storytelling. Writing the screenplay is three-time Oscar nominated John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator), the narrative is anticipated to be a true story beyond a Wikipedia page.
Gary King of GK Films is producing the film, the producer who brought us the chart topping Bohemian Rhapsody, which certainly guarantees the musical numbers will be spectacular.
Michael Biopic Trailer is an attempt to bring a breathtakingly honest and riveting portrayal of the charismatic, complex man who became the King of Pop. The trailer suggests a full arc, from the authoritarian hand of his father Joe Jackson to the stratospheric success of the Jackson 5 all the way to Michael’s domination of global pop culture. It claims to lift the curtain on his artistic process and personal pain, humanising a man who is often idolised or vilified.
Read More 👉 Best Sci-Fi Fantasy Movies of 20th Century with High-Concept Philosophy
Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson (whose performance is already generating Oscar buzz).
Colman Domingo as the complicated patriarch, Joe Jackson.
Nia Long is the warm but firm Katherine Jackson.
Miles Teller as Michael’s longtime manager and attorney, John Branca.
Juliano Krue Valdi as the young Michael, captures his early innocence and raw talent.
Probably the biggest team-up is that of the Michael Jackson Estate. The partnership allowed the producers unprecedented access to Michael’s music, clothing and personal archives. Among the highlights of the trailer are re-creations of the iconic “Thriller” video, the Motown 25 moonwalk and “Man in the Mirror” – all executed with historical accuracy.
Production filmed throughout California and other significant locations in MJ’s life on an estimated $155 million budget. The production design and costumes are designed to represent the specific period of time in Michael’s life and runs from 70s afros and bell-bottom jeans to 90s military-style jackets.
Although the official rating is now TBA, vanilla industry speculation is that it will be rated PG-13. This would keep the film available to younger audiences while dealing with the dark and violent subjects of Michael’s later years.
Universal is distributing in the US globally, Lionsgate in the US domestically. The film will head to major streaming platforms (perhaps Starz or Peacock first) once its theatrical run ends, no dates have been announced.
Expectations are stratospheric. The Michael Biopic Trailer has now shattered record viewership numbers for a biopic, showing that the demand for Michael Jackson’s story is as strong as ever worldwide. For the more than 40,000 people who are likely to see the concerts but also want to learn about the man being watched under the most rigorous microscope in history, it can help to comprehend what they are hoping for beyond tribute concerts.
Read More 👉 Bridgerton Season 4 Take a Top Place on Streaming Charts
Michael Biopic Trailer is shaping up to be the movie event of the year. Moonwalker devotees and casual film fans alike, Antoine Fuqua and Jaafar Jackson appear intent on once again Michael Biopic Trailer showcasing to the world why Michael Jackson is the greatest entertainer of all time. Be ready to watch this film in theatres on April 24.
Fandomfans gather reports to deliver conclusions from upcoming movies directly to you. Get more updates from here.
