Hirokazu Kore-eda brings his customary warmth and generosity of spirit to the seemingly cold presence of GenAI in our lives in Sheep in the Box (Hako no naka no hitsuji), in which grieving parents hope to ease their pain by embracing a humanoid built in their dead son’s image. The Japanese director has no shortage of ideas — chief among them the potential for advanced robotics to bring closure to the bereaved. But too few of those ideas yield satisfying conclusions, resulting in a drama that becomes treacly and insubstantial, reaching for a profundity that remains elusive.

Family dynamics have frequently been at the heart of Kore-eda’s films, invariably distinguished by his exceptional direction of children. Something of a motif in his work is the resilience and resourcefulness of kids, which continues here with a robot that outgrows the need for his adoptive parents, just as flesh-and-blood children do when it’s time to seek independence. But these and other thematic threads lack both definition and emotional heft, making the movie feel flimsy, especially considering its two-hours-plus run time.

Despite occasional detours into fantasy like 1998’s sublime After Life, Kore-eda is fundamentally a naturalistic filmmaker with a marked humanist vein that has often tagged him as an Ozu descendant. Which makes the prospect of him tackling a near-future sci-fi scenario sound of interest. The droll futuristic touches of the opening scenes — a delivery drone that could pass for a mini-UFO carrying parcels high above a city coastline; a robot crossing guard trailed by a string of children — hold the promise of low-key humor.

That drone touches down at the address of architect Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase), who designed her family’s modernist home, an arrangement of overlapping boxes stacked around a garden courtyard. It was built by her carpentry and construction tradesman husband Kensuke (Japanese TV comic Daigo). When the camera pans to a framed photo of their 7-year-old boy Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), composer Yuta Bandoh’s melancholy score provides an unsubtle hint that the boy is no longer with them.

One of the parcels delivered contains a heart-shaped package that opens to release a hologram of a luna moth, the logo of a company called REbirth that specializes in generative AI humanoid replicas of deceased loved ones. It turns out the Komotos were first approached by a rep two years earlier at their son’s funeral and are eligible for a free promotional trial. 

Otone is somewhat curious, given how acutely she still feels Kakeru’s absence, but Kensuke is more skeptical. They make an appointment at the REbirth offices and listen to the sales pitch but remain uncertain until a young boy around their son’s age when he died approaches them in the cafeteria. Astonished by how lifelike the robot child is, they sign up for the program, submitting photos, videos and other info on Kakeru to be fed into his design.

When the new model Kakeru is delivered, Otone is overjoyed, even if the boy’s communication skills are basic, at first limited to “Mama, I’m home.” But “papa” is tougher to convince, dismissing the new arrival with cracks about Tamagotchis and Roombas before heading out to play baseball for the day. 

Most directors would look for conflict in the inevitable incompatibilities between grieving parents with human feelings and a humanoid with no emotions and no needs beyond his overnight charging station. But Kore-eda dawdles over all that without ever finding much dramatic nuance, making for a dullish midsection.

Things come briefly to life when Otone’s judgy mother shows up uninvited, faints at the sight of her dead grandson and then scoffs at the folly of replacing the boy with a machine, reminding Otone that she’s still young enough to have another child. But even that fails to generate tangible drama, as do ongoing tensions about the circumstances of the real Kakeru’s death.

More intriguing is the appearance of a youth in black, followed by a handful of other children with whom Kakeru finds kinship as they spend time each day in an abandoned warehouse making mysterious plans. 

While Kore-eda’s take on the existential threat of AI is refreshingly free of violence, rebellion and gloom, it’s also a bit predictable in its conclusion that the humanoids’ accelerated learning capabilities will soon make their human families superfluous. And the writer-director tips his hand by having Kakeru collect the offcuts from Otone’s architectural models and start building his own model in secret.

The film’s most original idea is the instinctual connection of robots to aspects of nature like the networks of trees nourished and protected by a “mother tree” that functions like a central computer hub. Sure, there are dystopian shadings in the inference that robots will form their own communities, leaving people behind. But Kore-eda is more interested in a smiley-happy outcome of mutual accord, which is pushed into sentimental overdrive by increasingly cloying slatherings of Bandoh’s score.

Shot by Ryuto Kondo, who also served as cinematographer on Kore-eda’s wonderful Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters and the more recent Monster, the film looks sharp, with lots of striking aerial shots and gorgeous natural light in the many outdoors scenes. It’s also well-acted, notably by Ayase, the lead in Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister, whose gentle disposition and unforced sweetness are an ideal match for the director’s sensibility.

But Sheep in the Box (the title comes from The Little Prince, another motif) is unquestionably a minor entry in the Kore-eda canon. If you want to see a stimulating meditation on humanoid-human interaction that’s genuinely moving, seek out Kogonada’s criminally under-appreciated After Yang, from 2021.

In a moonwalk for the box office history books, Antoine Fuqua’s record-smashing Michael Jackson biopic is returning to No. 1 in its fourth weekend with as much as $27 million domestically, only days after dancing past the $600 million mark globally. And last weekend, it became the top-grossing music biopic of all time ahead of Bohemian Rhapsody in North America, not adjusted for inflation.

Michael, from Lionsgate and producer Graham King, is benefiting from the failure of the video game adaptation Mortal Kombat II to turn into a crowd pleaser beyond its core fanbase.

Last weekend, almost all Imax screens went to New Line’s Mortal Kombat, but the martial arts sequel has underwhelmed and ceded much of its Imax footprint to Michael and a 20th anniversary celebration of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun franchise that includes screenings of both the first film and the more recent Top Gun: Maverick (the double billing is expected to earn an estimated $2.6 million).

David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 also continues to dominate even as it cedes first place to Michael domestically. And on Friday, the 20th Century and Disney sequel sashayed past the $500 million mark globally to become the top-grossing female-fueled pic since Barbie, not adjusted.

Prada 2 is expected to gross another $20 million or so domestically in its third outing for a North American tally of around $178 million through Sunday (while it has access to a number of premium large-format screens, it was never remastered to play in Imax). But Disney’s film empire will soon be the ruler of all premium-large format auditoriums when Memorial Day tentpole Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu opens around the world this week.

Another title performing nicely in the lull before Grogu: emerging director Curry Barker‘s supernatural horror film Obsession, which is headed for a third-place finish this weekend with $15 million after costing a mere $1 million to produce. That’s well ahead of a $10 million to $12 million debut. Obsession has won over both critics and audiences in equal measure, boasting a coveted 94 percent score among both categories on Rotten Tomatoes as of midday Saturday.

Barker, 26, has spent the past few years amassing an avid fan base on YouTube with his sketch comedy channel, That’s a Bad Idea. He next made the $800 found-footage serial killer feature Milk & Serial, which went viral. Almost overnight, everyone in town was trying to win him over; he ultimately signed UTA.

Obsession, which Focus Features acquired out of TIFF for around $15 million, stars Michael Johnston as a young man who has long been in love with a friend Nikki (played by Inde Navarrette), and hopes that she will one day feel the same. But disastrous consequences ensue when he buys a One Wish Willow, which promises its users it will grant one wish upon splitting it in half, and wishes for his friend to love him. Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless and Andy Richter also star.

Mortal Kombat II could tumble as much as 67 percent for a domestic gross of $12 million to $13 million after opening to a tepid $38 million last weekend.

Amazon MGM’s family-friendly film The Sheep Detectives, likewise a critical and audience favorite, is expected to round out the top five with $10 million in its sophomore outing. The comedy-mystery follows a flock of talking sheep who are determined to solve the suspicious death of their beloved shepherd, played by Hugh Jackman, who read them detective novels on a regular basis despite having no idea they could understand him. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, directors of the 2026 box office hit Project Hail Mary, are among the film’s executive producers.

In a special three-part series — including All the Presidents’ Men and Taxi Driver — Deadline is looking back a half-century at 1976, an incredible year for movies.

Things could have gone very differently for Sylvester Stallone in the year he broke out; by 1976, he was just a jobbing actor with seven years of minor credits to his name. Though it would later be re-released as The Italian Stallion to cash in on his subsequent superstardom, Stallone’s first major role was a soft-porn romance called The Party at Kitty and Stud’s (in which he played Stud). It didn’t exactly make him an overnight sensation, and his scenery-chewing performance as Tommy gun-wielding bad guy Joe “Machine Gun” Viterbo in Roger Corman’s ultraviolent 1975 cult classic Death Race 2000 could have easily stereotyped the actor for life.

Good reviews for his part in the rock’n’roll-era coming-of-age story The Lords of Flatbush (1974) — for which he wrote some additional dialogue — encouraged Stallone to sit down in March 1975 and write a movie for himself to star in. Three days later, he had a script called Rocky. Inspired by the then-recent story of boxer Chuck Wepner — who lasted nearly 15 rounds in a fight with Muhammad Ali, even knocking him down — it was an underdog story about an unknown Philadelphia southpaw, Rocky Balboa, who is picked from obscurity to go up against world heavyweight champion Apollo Creed.

United Artists loved the script, but they weren’t so hot on Stallone’s demand to play the lead, offering him serious money to walk away. With just $106 in the bank, Stallone refused, and after the studio gave in, that determination was rewarded big-time.

When Stallone looks back on the Oscar night that changed his life 50 years ago, he counts it as a career pinnacle rivaled only by being recognized in the Kennedy Center Honors last year. For the screenwriter and star of the Best Picture-winning Rocky, that Oscar night was just as surreal and unlikely as his hungry journey from playing the muscle in The Lords of Flatbush to global superstar.

First off, he was surprised by the number of diminutive people looking to take a punch at him, the way Apollo Creed did his alter-ego Rocky Balboa — starting with Paddy Chayefsky, the playwright and Network screenwriter who was up against Stallone for Best Screenplay. Network and All the President’s Men were the favorites, and Chayefsky wasn’t above talking some trash to the wide-eyed newcomer Stallone.

“He’s a tiny guy, very brazen, and he comes up to me and says, ‘You’re new in this town,’” Stallone recalls. “‘First of all, your screenplay is never going to win.’ I go, ‘Why do you say that?’ He says, ‘Because I’m the president of The Writers Guild, and mine is going to win.’”

That wound up happening, and after spending so much time studying boxing for his breakout turn, Stallone couldn’t help but wonder if the fix was in.

Then Chayefsky landed a second blow. “He goes, ‘You’re not winning Best Picture either, because Network is going to win Best Picture.’ I thought, ‘Holy crap!’ I’d never been hit with such blunt force, and then he walked away. He got Best Screenplay, but we got the big one.”

Others were kinder, including some of the actors he’d grown up loving. Kirk Douglas was effusive in his praise, but this was long before he and Stallone would clash on First Blood (Douglas dropped out of the role of Colonel Sam Trautman after Stallone balked at allowing his Rambo character to be killed by him). Network star William Holden was also encouraging, Stallone recalls. It was a lot to take in.  

“Me being me, it was all quite profound, and after we won, I thought, ‘The good news is, I’ve peaked — and the bad news is, I’ve peaked.’ I’d just turned 30 years old and was like, ‘How are you going to top this?’ But here we are, 50 years later, and we’re still talking about it.

“I’m really starting to embrace just how f*ucking lucky I’ve been, now that I’m getting closer to the end of the line. I had written about 22 screenplays before Rocky, so I had been practicing, but I never concentrated on the kind of messaging or politics those other films had. I just channeled what I was living through, what I was thinking and the way I philosophized life. I just put it in the body of a boxer because the body of an actor is not necessarily interesting. It was not narcissistic or cynical, and that’s what people responded to. It was apolitical and humanizing.

Me being me, it was all quite profound, and after we won, I thought, ‘The good news is, I’ve peaked — and the bad news is, I’ve peaked.’

Sylvester Stallone

“There was this total shift in filmmaking for a while where we started going for the different types of stories, more escapism and less message. It was 1976, the country’s birthday. People were getting tired of dark, nihilistic films. They were looking for something life-affirming, and I just happened to catch that wave. But writers by nature are inward people, existing in their own heads, and that night… I try to be a more outward person now, and maybe my biggest regret was I was unable to just be in the moment, to really relish all the incredible sights and sounds.”

That would have been asking a lot of a young man with a script about an underdog boxer who suddenly rises up to the world heavyweight championship. It was as unlikely as the underdog path Stallone traveled to get his Rocky script turned into a movie with himself in the titular role. He still shudders when he thinks of the numerous times he could have taken a much-needed payday in exchange for letting go of the Rocky Balboa role. He turned down the telepic deal at ABC his Lords of Flatbush co-star Henry Winkler used his Happy Days clout to get for him. There’s also this story: The studio execs that finally gave the movie the go-ahead with Stallone starring had mistakenly thought he was Perry King, the handsome lead actor from The Lords of Flatbush.

But back to Oscar night. Rocky got 10 nominations. Although it was up against some of the most revered movies that year, the film KO’d them all at the box office. Rocky was 1976’s top-grossing film with $225 million in worldwide ticket tales. It was one of the very first films shot with a Steadicam — an innovation that lent a visceral reality to the boxing scenes and had audiences following the rounds of the fight as though it was a sporting event.  

“Rocky was done in 24 days, and we just happened to be in Philadelphia because that’s where the story took place,” Stallone says. “Garrett Brown, the inventor of the Steadicam, happened to live there, and he was doing things with the cam, and I don’t think people knew what was going on. They were just being taken on this journey visually, and they couldn’t figure out why. And Bill Conti’s music elevated the film as much as any camera work or acting. They wanted to use rock music like Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, and I begged them to do something unexpected: ‘Why don’t we have romantic classicism?’ They said the movie was ‘streety’ and that was the sound, but I said, ‘I understand, but the story is generational. So, let’s not just use something from one generation. Let’s use something that will cross all those generations.’”

Maybe all that seat-of-the-pants success made him a target for the elite in a shifting Hollywood. At the Oscars that night, Stallone found himself being pummeled by Mr. Blackwell, who was more famous for his Worst Dressed List than his own fashion designs. Blackwell was outraged that Stallone was fashioning himself into a style rebel by breaking tradition and showing up collar open, with no bow tie. But the truth was a little more prosaic.

“As I’m in the backseat, driving up to the front door, my tie breaks,” Stallone says. “I’m so naive at this point, because a year earlier I was destitute. I didn’t own a tie. This was a rented tux, like a prom tux, a real beauty with the ruffled shirt. The driver sees my tie break and says, ‘Hey, you want to borrow my bowtie?’ I go, ‘Nah, it’s OK. No one will really notice.’

“I opened the shirt up like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever and put the collar on the outside of my tux. And from that moment on, I get out of the car and it became a very, very bizarre night. I’m sitting in the theater and watching Burgess Meredith lose. I thought he was a shoo-in for his role as Mickey [in Rocky]. Bill Conti — who wrote this unbelievably iconic music in one day and recorded it in less than one other day for under $25,000 — he loses. And then Talia Shire didn’t win. I figured it was because all these other films are very intellectual and political with a vast message. Mine really had no message other than personal fulfillment, standing up and challenging your fears. And of course, the final piece was the love and support of a woman, which was something Rocky never had and why winning the fight didn’t mean as much as making her proud.”

Since it didn’t win Best Actor, Screenplay, or six of the other categories it was nominated in, he figured Rocky would end the night as a bridesmaid. But when Avildsen won Best Director, his mood changed. When Jack Nicholson got up to announce Best Picture, the producers of all the other nominated films looked supremely confident. And then Nicholson opened the envelope…

“When we won, I was so stunned, I just went, ‘Oh my god,’ Stallone says. “If I wasn’t holding onto the chair, I probably would’ve just done a back flip.”

He took the stage between producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, and they gave Stallone the last word.

“I got up there and then realized, with my Tony Manero look the world might be thinking, if this Guido is taking home the trophy, I don’t know what to think of the future. What a wonderful night it was.”