Evil Dead Burn: First Footage Revealed at CinemaCon 2026

Warner Bros. screened footage from Evil Dead Burn at CinemaCon this week, giving theater owners in Las Vegas their first look at New Line Cinema’s next entry in the long-running horror franchise.

The screening was closed to the public. That’s standard CinemaCon strategy for a studio that wants exhibitor buy-in before the wider marketing machine kicks on. Warner Bros. didn’t release the trailer publicly, and it won’t until the studio decides the moment is right. What happened in that Las Vegas room, though, got picked up fast. Deadline Hollywood reported that the footage carries a central thematic line the franchise hasn’t pushed this explicitly before.

“Family is the root of all evil,” said the footage shown to exhibitors, according to Deadline’s reporting on the 2026 presentation.

That’s the hook. Family gatherings, it appears, don’t end well for anyone involved.

Plot specifics aren’t out. New Line isn’t talking about what exactly happens or who’s carrying the Deadite curse this time around. What’s clear is the director: Sébastien Vanicek, the French filmmaker who broke through with Infested, a creature feature that premiered at the 2023 Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes and rattled enough critics and genre fans to put his name on studio radar internationally. The film worked on a tight budget, built dread through confined spaces, and showed Vanicek can stage practical chaos without losing control of a frame. That combination is exactly what the Evil Dead universe has always demanded.

The Evil Dead franchise goes back to 1981. Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell built something with that first film that New Line eventually inherited and has been managing ever since. The 2013 reboot, directed by Fede Álvarez, proved the property didn’t need Raimi or Campbell in traditional roles to draw an audience. Álvarez’s version earned well above its production cost and cemented the franchise as a viable theatrical property rather than a nostalgia exercise. Then Evil Dead Rise arrived in 2023, directed by Lee Cronin, moving the action into an apartment building and grossing over $67 million domestically on a budget of around $15 million. The Motion Picture Association’s theatrical research consistently shows horror punching above its weight class in return-on-investment numbers, and Evil Dead Rise was a clean example of that pattern.

Studios notice those margins. Warner Bros. doesn’t greenlight horror sequels because they’re sentimental about legacy IP. They do it because the math works, and the Evil Dead franchise page at New Line reflects a property the studio treats as a genuine theatrical tentpole within the genre.

Vanicek didn’t come through the Hollywood development pipeline. He’s French, he came up making films in a different production culture, and Infested wasn’t engineered for American studio approval. It was a genre film that got noticed because it was good. That’s the pipeline Warner Bros. has been raiding for years now, pulling directors out of international festival circuits who can handle pressure, craft, and constrained budgets without melting down on a studio schedule.

The CinemaCon play itself tells you something about the studio’s confidence in the film. Warner Bros. brought it to Las Vegas to get exhibitors excited, not to quietly roll it out on a platform where no one’s watching opening weekend numbers with a spreadsheet open. Horror can be a tough sell to theater owners when they’re betting against streaming windows and shortened release cycles. Showing Evil Dead Burn to that room in 2024 terms, against what Evil Dead Rise actually delivered at the box office, is Warner Bros. making the case before the case needs to be made publicly.

Evil Dead Burn is a 2026 release. The release date beyond that hasn’t been confirmed publicly. What’s confirmed is Vanicek in the chair, New Line backing the film, and a franchise whose commercial record since 2013 gives the studio every reason to push hard for theatrical performance rather than treat this as a streaming hedge.

The number attached to that CinemaCon article ID, 1236860360, is buried in the Deadline Hollywood URL. It’s also, in a way, a ledger entry. Every number in the Evil Dead franchise’s recent history has pointed the same direction. Vanicek’s job is to keep it pointing there.