San Diego Comic-Con is coming up soon, and the showbiz news is coming on strong. Time for another round-up!

Ticket sales for the second weekend of Thor: Love and Thunder dropped 68% to $46 million, according to Variety, an unusually sharp decline for a Marvel movie. Despite the decline, its big opening weekend (see "’Thor’ Opens Big") and strong first week still puts the film at $232 million in domestic box office receipts, and $498 million worldwide.

This latest release in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 4 has elicited an unusually negative round of press articles on the MCU. The Daily Beast called Phase 4 "a total train wreck," noting that three of the four Marvel movies with the lowest CinemaScore ratings were released in the last 12 months, and arguing that the Phase 4 films center on second-tier characters and lack a connecting narrative and interesting villains. Meanwhile, The Guardian asks if we’ve "gone from Marvel fatigue to Marvel exhaustion," calling the recent string of films "what might be the franchise’s worst era." Will things change? The writer notes that with the films’ financial success, "there’s little incentive [for Marvel] to slow down its assembly line, or even to pay much attention to the individual quality of the entries dropping off it."

Amazon’s Prime Video released the main teaser trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (see teaser below). This new teaser focuses on a younger Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) as she alludes to a new threat emerging from the depths of Middle-earth. The teaser also reveals the look in this age of several of the landscapes in Middle-earth, including the Misty Mountains and the elf-capital of Lindon. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power begins streaming on September 2, 2022 (see "Trailers for 'Lord of the Rings: The Ring of Power'").

Universal Pictures revealed a teaser trailer for Rob Zombie's The Munsters (see trailer below). The trailer sheds some light on the plotline of the movie, which turns out to be a love story about the courtship of Herman and Lily. It also essentially explains why Eddie (originally played by Butch Patrick) and Marilyn (originally played by Beverley Owen, then Pat Priest) have yet to be seen in any of the movie promos (see "'Munsters' Key Art"), as Eddie hasn't been born yet in the timeline and Lily and Herman don't yet live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane (so Marilyn can't move in). This movie is slated to arrive in late 2022.

Paramount+ released a trailer for Mike Judge's Beavis and Butt-Head TV series (see trailer below). The two characters, both voiced by Judge, return to an episodic format to torment each other after doing the universe in their most recent feature length film (see "'Beavis and Butthead'"). The new series starts streaming on August 4, 2022.

HBO Max, Cartoon Network, and Lion Forge Animation are adapting Iyanu: Child of Wonder, a Dark Horse Comics/YouNeek Studios graphic novel series, into a 2D Children’s animated series, the companies announced. Dark Horse began publishing the series with YouNeek last fall (see "YouNeek Studios Ties Up with Dark Horse"). Brandon Easton (Marvel’s Agent Carter) will head the writers room, with comic creator Roye Okupe as executive producer, writer, and director of multiple episodes.  Lion Forge Head of Production and two-time Emmy winner Saxton Moore will be supervising director. The story features a teenage orphan who discovers that she has abilities like those of ancient deities from the folklore of her people, and must use them to save a world on the brink of destruction. Lion Forge Animation is a subsidiary of Polarity Ltd., the majority owner of the publisher Oni Lion Forge.