Bandwagon Nerds News Report (9/17/2026): Spider-Man Owns America, Lollipop Chainsaw Returns & Resident Evil Reloads

Spider-Man sets a domestic box-office record, Lollipop Chainsaw gets a sequel and Resident Evil eyes a franchise-best opening.

Wednesday was a good day for properties that refuse to stay dead.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day officially passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens to become the highest-grossing domestic movie in unadjusted box-office history, Lollipop Chainsaw returned with a full sequel announcement and Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot began tracking toward the biggest opening in franchise history.

Television had its own movement, with SNL expanding its Season 52 cast and Peacock committing to three more seasons of The Traitors.

It’s the Bandwagon Nerds News Report for September 17, 2026!

Spider-Man Sets the Domestic Box-Office Record

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has reached approximately $936 million in the United States and Canada, passing Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the highest unadjusted domestic box-office gross of all time.

That milestone is more impressive because it happened well after the opening-weekend conversation cooled. Brand New Day kept adding money through repeat business and long theatrical legs, which is increasingly unusual in an era where major studio movies often make enormous amounts immediately and then collapse quickly.

The result also complicates the conversation around superhero fatigue. Audiences may be more selective than they were five years ago, but Spider-Man is still demonstrating that the ceiling remains enormous when the character, marketing and movie all connect.

Lollipop Chainsaw 2: Back2Back Is Official

Dragami Games, Nada Holdings and JP Universe announced Lollipop Chainsaw 2: Back2Back for PlayStation 5, with a 2027 release planned. Juliet Starling returns in a rebuilt version of San Romero called Jaredwood, where she becomes trapped inside a twisted zombie movie created by a mysterious director.

The sequel also brings some interesting names behind the scenes. Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata is involved, while original Lollipop Chainsaw co-producer and scenario writer Masahiro Yuki returns as part of the new project.

This is exactly the kind of cult-property revival that makes sense in the current games market. Lollipop Chainsaw never needed to become a giant franchise to retain an audience, and RePOP proved there was still enough interest to justify asking what a real sequel might look like.

Resident Evil Could Set a Franchise Opening Record

Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil movie is tracking toward a domestic opening around $45 million, which would represent the biggest debut in the history of the film franchise. Early reactions have also been unusually positive, with the reboot being praised for leaning heavily into horror rather than trying to recreate the action-oriented identity of the previous live-action series.

That distinction matters because Resident Evil has always had a strange relationship with adaptation. The movies were commercially successful without ever really feeling like the games, while other attempts at closer translation struggled to find an audience.

Cregger appears to be approaching the property from a different direction by taking the core horror seriously while still allowing the movie to stand on its own. If the box-office projection holds, the franchise may finally have found a version that works both commercially and creatively.

Heart Machine Lays Off Nearly Its Entire Studio

Heart Machine, the developer behind Hyper Light Drifter, Solar Ash, Possessor(s) and Hyper Light Breaker, laid off nearly everyone at the studio following the cancellation of an unannounced project.

The timing is brutal because Heart Machine has spent years building a recognizable creative identity around visually distinctive games that do not look like they came from a large publisher assembly line. Losing most of the studio threatens more than one canceled project; it threatens the continuity of a development culture people already associated with a specific kind of game.

The games industry continues producing these stories often enough that they risk becoming background noise. They should not. Every mass layoff reduces the number of teams capable of making something outside the safest commercial categories.

SNL Adds Two New Cast Members

Saturday Night Live added Grace Reiter and Saidah Belo-Osagie to the Season 52 cast, while Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline have been promoted to the main ensemble.

SNL cast turnover always matters because it gradually changes what the show can do rather than transforming everything overnight. New performers bring different writing instincts, character ideas and chemistry, and sometimes the most important additions are the ones nobody recognizes when the season begins.

Season 52 already has a fairly eclectic host lineup, so the cast changes arrive at a useful moment for experimentation rather than after a year where everything already feels locked in.

The Traitors Gets Three More Seasons

Peacock renewed The Traitors for three additional seasons following its Emmy success, extending the celebrity competition series well beyond its current run. The network is also preparing the civilian spinoff The Traitors: New Blood.

The size of the renewal says more than another routine season pickup. Peacock is effectively treating The Traitors like one of its foundational unscripted brands, which makes sense given how effectively the format produces conversation beyond the actual episodes.

The civilian version may be the more interesting test. Celebrity casts provide instant personalities and built-in audiences, while unknown contestants force the format itself to prove it can remain compelling without recognizable names.

Final Fantasy Resonance Shows Off at Tokyo Game Show

Square Enix released a new Tokyo Game Show trailer for Final Fantasy Resonance, its upcoming HD-2D turn-based RPG. The showcase arrives as Tokyo Game Show begins its 2026 run and publishers start revealing another wave of fall updates and release information.

The HD-2D visual style has moved from novelty to an established design language, and Final Fantasy is a natural franchise to use it because so much of the series’ history exists in sprite-based worlds that benefit from modern lighting and depth.

Tokyo Game Show should produce enough announcements over the next several days that the gaming portion of these reports will probably get crowded quickly. Resonance is simply the first major flag planted.

What to Watch: Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

Netflix releases Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story today, with Ella Beatty starring as Borden in the latest installment of the anthology franchise. The season dramatizes the infamous axe murders and the Victorian household that preceded them.

The Monster brand has become increasingly flexible, moving between serial killers, notorious crimes and culturally embedded figures whose stories already exist somewhere between history and mythology.

Lizzie Borden fits that format almost too neatly. The name is already familiar enough that the series does not need to explain why the case matters, leaving more room to examine why it has remained culturally durable more than a century later.

Wednesday’s entertainment stories all revolve around endurance in different forms. Spider-Man has become the biggest domestic box-office performer ever, Resident Evil is attempting another reinvention and Lollipop Chainsaw has survived long enough to justify an actual sequel.

Even SNL and The Traitors are dealing with the same question at different scales: how do you keep a familiar thing active without making it feel exhausted?

This report includes information from: TheWrap.com, Variety.com, Gematsu.com, Netflix.com, Peacock-related reporting, and Tokyo Game Show coverage.