Tim Curry, Peter Cullen, and Ridley Scott's Quiet Apocalypse

Both of the people the movies lost this week spent their careers hidden. One was usually under a mountain of latex or a wig or several pounds of white greasepaint. The other was never on screen at all. And yet if you are reading this, both of them are permanently installed somewhere in your head, and you probably could not pick either out of a crowd.

Tim Curry died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles at 80. Peter Cullen died at 85. It is a bad week, and it is a strange kind of bad, because the grief is for two men most people would have walked past on the street.

The rest of the week is smaller and worth getting to. Ridley Scott put out a film about the end of the world that is mostly about a dog. HBO has a superhero show that is not really a superhero show and it is quietly the best new thing on television. And a cartoon coyote finally got his day in court.

Curry's range was genuinely absurd, and the reason it never reads that way is that he vanished into all of it. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the performance that made him permanent, a piece of work so complete that a movie which flopped on release has been playing at midnight somewhere in the world every weekend for fifty years. But the trick of Curry is that Frank-N-Furter is not even the most impressive thing on the list.

He was Wadsworth in Clue, holding an entire farce together at a sprint, explaining three separate endings while barely stopping to breathe. He was the Lord of Darkness in Ridley Scott's Legend, buried under prosthetics so extreme that the makeup is usually the only thing anyone remembers, which rather misses that there is a real, seductive, purring performance underneath it. He was the concierge in Home Alone 2, doing more with a raised eyebrow than the script deserved. And he was Pennywise in the 1990 television version of IT, which did lasting psychological damage to a generation of children who were absolutely not supposed to be watching it. When the 2017 film came around it had to spend its entire runtime climbing out from under him. Three Tony nominations, too. Most actors would take any single one of these and call it a career.

Peter Cullen never showed his face and got to the same place. He was Optimus Prime, starting with the original cartoon in 1984 and carrying it all the way through the live-action films, and there is a whole generation for whom that voice is the definitional sound of authority and decency. He was also Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh. Consider that for a second. The same throat produced the most reassuring voice in children's entertainment and the most depressed one, and did both so well that neither has ever been convincingly replaced.

Three genuinely strange things arrived this week and none of them went to theaters.

Buddy is ninety-five minutes of horror-comedy about a singing orange unicorn who takes his own children's-television cast hostage inside their unreal little dimension and gets progressively more unhinged. The premise works because kids' TV is already uncanny and only needs a shove. Batman: Knightfall Part 1 went straight to digital on Monday, adapting the arc where Bane empties Arkham and grinds Batman down deliberately rather than just beating him. Seventy-nine minutes, and it is holding an unusually high early score, which tends to happen when an animated adaptation nails the tone of a beloved run. And Disney+ dropped Yellow Mirror, a Simpsons anthology of two dark little tales, one about a defective lamp and one about an AI tablet that gets far too interested in Maggie.

Lanterns is the story here. HBO premiered it on August 16, it is two episodes into an eight-episode run, and it is already sitting at one of the highest audience scores on television. It pairs new recruit John Stewart with Lantern veteran Hal Jordan and then, instead of sending them to space, drops them into a murder investigation in the American heartland. It is a small-town crime show that happens to have space cops in it, which is a much better idea than another origin story, and it is the rare comic adaptation people are discussing on its merits rather than its continuity.

Everything else worth your Thursday: Silo is one episode from the end of season three, with the finale landing September 3, and it remains the only puzzle box on television that convincingly knows its own ending. Reacher is five episodes into season four and has stopped pretending to be anything other than the most efficient large-man-solves-problem delivery system ever built, which is a compliment. Lioness is midway through season three for anyone who wants the moral arithmetic uglier. Ted Lasso is four episodes into a fourth season nobody was sure it needed and the audience has turned up anyway.

Worth noting for the people still waiting on it: House of the Dragon finished season three on August 9, so the Targaryen civil war is now officially between courses. Good week to settle old business and rank every era of Game of Thrones.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is heading for a fifth weekend at number one on 3,678 screens, and The Odyssey crossed 547 million dollars domestic while becoming the fastest film to eight million admissions in South Korea this year. The 2026 domestic box office passed seven billion dollars this week, which is worth remembering the next time somebody tells you nobody goes to the movies.

September starts properly in two weeks. Practical Magic 2 arrives on the eleventh with the Owens sisters facing down the curse the 1998 original left dangling, aimed squarely at an audience that has rewatched the first one every October for twenty-eight years. A week later, Resident Evil reboots on the eighteenth with a medical courier trapped inside one extremely bad night, following a Fantastic Fest premiere the night before.

Also mid-month: Forgotten Island, a portal fantasy with a genuinely cruel hook, where two best friends find their way into another world and learn the toll for going home is every memory they have of each other. And Toy Story 5 hits Disney+ on September 23 for anyone who missed the theatrical run.

Xbox is reportedly shopping a bulk licensing package covering more than a dozen game properties, Elder Scrolls and Halo included, with Netflix, Paramount and Universal circling and at least one of them balking at a price north of three hundred million dollars. Emmy voting closed, producing the yearly round of anonymous ballot confessions from voters admitting they cannot possibly watch everything. A Quiet Place Part III wrapped filming. And Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk announced his return to features with a dystopian thriller about the wealthy buying their way into longer lives, which may be the least surprising sentence written this year.

If you are going out, The Dog Stars is the one, and it is the one precisely because it will not be the one for most people this weekend. Ridley Scott doing quiet is rarer than Ridley Scott doing loud, and it is better than it has any commercial right to be. If you want to be in a full room instead, Coyote vs. Acme earned its audience the hard way.

If you are staying in, start Lanterns before everyone else catches up to it.

And at some point this weekend, put on Rocky Horror, or Clue, or the Pooh shorts, or the 1984 Transformers cartoon. It costs nothing, and it is the only sort of goodbye that actually works.

Not sure what to pick? Tell us your mood and we will point you somewhere.