By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: June 5th, 2026 / 09:01 PM

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Alice Eve, Eric Michael Cole, Elle Haymond, Sarah Siadat, Johnny Gaffney, Lisa Yaro, Jim Klock, Vince Jolivette, Stephen Oliver
Writers: Jonathan Zuck and Joe Leone, story by Dick Grunert and Ryan R. Johnson and James Kondelik
Director: Jonathan Zuck
Distributor: IFC
Release Date: June 5, 2026

CHUM is the latest entry in the shark-obsessed-psycho-with-a-boat subgenre. It also meshes, perhaps coincidentally, with the 2024 sharks-but-no-psycho-ruin-a-Mediterranean-destination-wedding SOMETHING IN THE WATER.

Our narrator is Roy (Jim Klock) who, in the opening sequence, loses his wife to an enormous Great White in the sea off Malta. He begins by saying in voiceover, “You took her from me.” This is followed by a monologue about how much Roy loves his wife and includes the line, “Her scream lost in the roar of the sea.”

There isn’t anything particularly wrong with the line, except that we see the whole incident and then some – CHUM is very gore-friendly in all its shark attacks – and the woman is already underwater when the attack occurs. There’s no scream.

So, are we supposed to think that Roy’s imagination is playing tricks, or that director Jonathan Zuck and his co-writer Joe Leone, working from a story by Dick Grunert and Ryan R. Johnson and James Kondelik, aren’t paying close attention to what they’re doing? 

Roy says he spent his life on the ocean, but “when you took her, I learned something new.”

Then we cut to a wedding banquet, where proud father Reginald (Stephen Oliver) is toasting his daughter the bride Tina (Alice Eve) and her groom Tom (Eric Michael Cole). Also in attendance are Tina’s irritable younger sister Sadie (Elle Haymond), bridesmaids Rachinda (Sarah Siadat) and Britney (Lisa Yaro), and Eric’s bro-ish best man Rick (Johnny Gaffney).

It’s a beautiful setting and a good-looking group, but it doesn’t take long for us to realize this union may not last. Tina and Tom have had a bitter fight about something that they seem unable to resolve. Tom winds up sleeping on the beach near the tide line, while Tina passes out on their hotel room bed in her wedding gown.

The nature of the dispute turns out to be one of the best aspects of CHUM. It’s real, it’s not the clichés that we too often get about onscreen marital disputes, and it’s wholly plausible that the timing is such that the couple haven’t had to confront it earlier.

Unaware of trouble in paradise, Rick has arranged a boat outing for the wedding party (sans Dad). Tina and Tom don’t want to go, but Rick guilts them into it – renting the boat for the day cost him a fortune.

The proprietor of The Tipsy Mermaid, Captain Mackey (Vince Jolivette), welcomes the six passengers aboard. He assures shark-averse Britney that there have never been attacks in these waters.

This again makes us wonder what’s happening on a meta level. We can see that The Tipsy Mermaid is out by the same coastline that we saw in the opening, so we know there’s been at least one shark attack here. Is Captain Mackey uninformed or lying?

A little later, we see that the microphone on the communications panel is severed. Our minds leap toward sabotage, but – spoiler alert – no, it’s just shoddy upkeep on The Tipsy Mermaid.

In reality (and easy to Google for Mackey or anyone in the group to who knew they’d be going out to sea that day), while they are rare, there have been shark attacks off Malta.

Furthermore, Tom, who is meant to be an expert on these matters, asserts that Great Whites are strangers to these waters, but are being driven north by climate change. It’s laudable that CHUM makes climate change part of the plot (and not just because of where the shark is), but again, there is a whole actual (albeit declining) subspecies of Great Whites in the Mediterranean.

We’re trying to figure out how all this will link up with Roy and what he’s learned, and we get to that, although perhaps not the way we expect, which is another CHUM asset.

Except for when the shark needs to interact with humans and/or vessels, the animal looks realistic, like footage of a genuine Great White. We also get a variety of fish in the underwater shots, which is a nice touch.

But there are the common-to-the-subgenre tropes of the shark looking way too big every time she breaches and eating way too much. Also, sharks do not growl.

One key aspect of this subgenre is how intrigued we are by the human villain. Here, the link between motivation and action doesn’t stack up well against that of comparable characters (e.g., Quint in JAWS or Bruce Tucker in DANGEROUS ANIMALS).

As these kinds of movies go, CHUM is moderately diverting, but it’s easy to see where it could have been better.

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There’s a maybe half-hour stretch of Masters of the Universe that takes place in the real world, and I have no idea why. It isn’t something the original He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon felt compelled to do. The ’80s TV show, which was conceived of as an elaborate commercial for a Mattel action-figure line, was about the adventures of Adam, a brawny pageboy’d prince who transformed into the equally brawny hero of the title when he held his special sword aloft and intoned some magic words. Adam may have been half-Earthling on his mother’s side, but that was just a biographical footnote — he was an avowed citizen of Eternia, a planet where sword and sorcery elements exist alongside sci-fi ones like fighting robots and flying ships. It’s a setting made up of a bunch of shit a kid might like, mashed up together with no concern for internal logic, and the new movie can’t help but start there, too, even though that messes up its whole premise. Masters of the Universe kicks off with an introduction to Eternia in all of its kid–safe–Frank Frazetta glory, summarizing lore about the Sword of Power and its osteal resting place, Castle Grayskull, before exploring the angst of young Prince Adam (played as a child by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), who’s small for his age and easily pushed around during weapons training. Then it flings Adam off to Oklahoma City as a refugee from the attacks of perpetual villain Skeletor (Jared Leto, allegedly), and it becomes clear that no one involved in this project has a clue how to make a tolerable product out of this aging IP.

That’s the bar everyone involved in this movie was aiming to clear, and I’m not just saying that because the “fan screening event” I attended began with a heartwarming speech from a Mattel executive about how “Masters of the Universe was one of the most important brands we wanted to bring to life” (he mentioned Travis Knight only after a long ode to their corporate producing partners). The script for the movie, which is credited to Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and Dave Callaham, feels overwhelming, like something hastily patchworked together from different passes at the story over the years, rendering some aspects repetitive and others nonsensical. Take that sojourn in Oklahoma, in which we see a grown Adam, played by Nicholas Galitzine, go on a failed date, go to his job in human resources, and go home to the apartment he shares with a roommate. There was obviously an earlier version that started here, presenting Adam as either the exiled prince of a fantastical kingdom or an office drone who made up a grandiose backstory for himself to cover up the trauma of his parents’ death. But because the movie leaves no question about our hero’s identity, the Earth interlude is not just pointless but confusing. Like, what happened when a 10-year-old dropped out of the sky with no record of previously existing? Was he adopted, and does he have any investment in the people who raised him? And why does it take him so long to find a sword that appears to have been right down the block the whole time?

It’s possible to make a real movie out of the most dire of corporate circumstances — even a toy line, the way Greta Gerwig did with Barbie, and the way that Knight himself, best known for heading up the stop-motion studio Laika, did with the improbably charming Transformers spinoff Bumblebee. But Masters of the Universe isn’t a real movie. It’s a bunch of half-realized, semi-contradictory ideas accrued over years. It takes the rough shape of a comedy without ever really landing a joke, up to and including the potentially great one that Eternia warriors “Fisto” and “Ram Man” aren’t actually named that, that those are just the childish labels given to them by Adam as a kid. It never decides whether it’s fan service for nostalgic adults who’ll get some juice out of a cameo from Dolph Lundgren, star of the notorious 1987 Masters of the Universe movie, or an action-adventure for kids (Alison Brie, as henchwoman Evil-Lyn, is the only cast member who seems consistently aware she’s in a comedy). It cast Leto as its big bad, despite his reputational baggage and the character’s computer-generated skull for a face, then excised the actor from all promotional events. What was the point of shelling out for his participation in the first place? (He does trill his “Rs” impressively, I guess.)

Its action sequences are marked by endless pratfalls as Adam sorts out his He-Man powers and also endless pratfalls as his former weapons teacher Duncan (Idris Elba) tries to recover from his years as a depressed drunk. This gives their scenes together the feel of two different drafts that were document merged incorrectly. (As Duncan’s hypercompetent daughter Teela, Camila Mendes is left to roll her eyes.) The movie never really decides whether its source material is to be mocked or to be approached with a more wry affection. Worst of all, Masters of the Universe is under the impression it has something to say about masculinity without deciding what that is, exactly. It’s not difficult to see how Knight and company arrived at this thesis, when working with a main character who transforms into a bulgy warrior in a loincloth wielding, as Skeletor himself points out, an incredibly phallic weapon. But it’s exasperatingly impossible to sort out how the movie delineates good masculinity from the toxic kind. The movie wants to free up its hypertough characters to talk about their feelings but also has a clear contempt for the HR speak it presents as the alternative. In his regular-guy garb, Adam acts humiliatingly out of place at the gym and then weird on a date with a model-beautiful woman, despite looking like a handsome if charmless actor who’s been training intensely for months. In his He-Man form, Adam makes a show of reluctance about embracing brute force, then rips his foes’ arms off and beats them to death.

Masters of the Universe ends by making fun of the blunt moral lessons the original animated series punctuated its episodes with but couldn’t come up with even a joking conclusion of its own if pressed. There’s something appropriate about the movie coming out in the wake of two horror movies from 20-something YouTubers that have been setting box-office records. Obsession and Backrooms may not be perfect, but they are both, thrillingly, the visions of their respective young auteurs, while Masters of the Universe belongs to no one — a project engineered at enormous cost from the needs of IP.

SAG-AFTRA members overwhelmingly approved a four-year TV and film deal with major studios including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery on Thursday night, increasing minimum wages and addressing concerns about the use of AI performers.

The deal, which was expected to be approved, received the support of 91% of SAG-AFTRA members who voted on the agreement, which starts July 1 and ends June 30, 2030. The union represents 160,000 performers, including actors, stunt performers and influencers.

“This agreement builds on the foundation members fought to establish and carries that work into the next chapter of our industry,” said SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin in a statement. “It delivers meaningful gains in compensation, strengthens protections around artificial intelligence and digital identity, reinforces the long-term security of members’ benefit plans and recognizes the realities of how performers work today.”

Under the new deal, the length of the agreement between SAG-AFTRA and major studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expands from three years to four years.

It also boosts minimum wage by 3% annually, increases contributions to the health plan by 1% and expands the bonus to the union’s Success Bonus Distribution Fund based on residuals that performers get for popular streaming programs.

The contract also addresses concerns about the growing use of artificial intelligence in TV and film and its impact on actor jobs. Last year, many actors spoke out about Tilly Norwood, a computer-generated “actor” and whether synthetic characters like her could threaten their livelihoods. Some performers have also advocated for getting paid if their likenesses are used to create such characters made through AI systems.

Not all members were in favor of the contract, saying it did not go far enough in protecting performers against AI.

“It normalizes the use of AI replicas and synthetic performers rather than drawing a firm line protecting human performers and their jobs,” said Chuck Slavin, a background actor and performer.

Slavin, a former New England local board member, ran against Astin for SAG-AFTRA president last year.

Producers agreed to “a principle strongly favoring human performances” and that producers would only use a synthetic if it “brings significant additional value to the motion picture.” If a producer decided to use a synthetic in a role that could be done by a human, they would need to notify the union and bargain in good faith.

Additionally, the contract merges the pension plans of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which were previously separate but combined in 2012 to form SAG-AFTRA.

Their health plans were consolidated in 2017, but the pensions have remained separate . That was a major sticking point with members, some of whom couldn’t qualify for benefits as their contributions were split between two plans. Studios agreed to boost their overall contributions to the combined plan by 1%.

SAG-AFTRA’s deal comes after the Writers Guild of America members also approved an agreement with the AMPTP in April.

The groups were able to agree on contracts this year, without striking as they did in 2023.

“SAG-AFTRA’s leadership brought a genuine commitment to partnership, and together with the WGA agreement, these deals demonstrate what is possible when the industry works toward practical solutions that support its long-term stability,” AMPTP said in a statement.

The Directors Guild of America began negotiations with AMPTP last month, with its contract expiring on June 30.

Staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.