Back in February 2024, this was a hot package that sparked a bidding war between Netflix, Paramount and Warner Bros. The level of competition underscored just how much confidence studios had in the project from the outset. Even at that early stage, it was clear this wouldn’t be a small, under-the-radar thriller, but something with real potential.
“Panic Carefully” is set to reunite director Sam Esmail (“Mr. Robot”) with his “Leave the World Behind” star Julia Roberts. The film is now officially at Warner Bros. The cast includes Julia Roberts, Eddie Redmayne, Brian Tyree Henry, Joe Alwyn, and Elizabeth Olsen.
Now, just an update on this one — “Panic Carefully” was set to hit theaters on Feb. 26, 2027, but has now been delayed, the good kind of delay, to April 2027. No more February dump, and I can confirm what I’ve been hearing from test screenings has been incredibly positive. A 160-minute-ish assembly cut was shown last fall, and it’s since been trimmed in subsequent screenings.
“Panic Carefully” was shot in January 2025 and has been in post-production since mid-2025. Most of us thought that, given the timeline, Esmail’s film might come out this year—but by all accounts, post production work is taking quite a bit of time, and the positive feedback from test audiences has gotten Warner Bros to blink, and position it more favorably in the calendar.
There are currently no plot details for the film, but it is being touted as a “paranoid thriller” in the vein of “The Silence of the Lambs,” involving a masked cyberterrorist, reminiscent of the Joker, who plots to dismantle the global economy and the powerful figures who sustain it. Olsen has an experimental idea to figure out who it is, and needs Roberts’ expertise to help.
Redmayne portrays an imprisoned, Hannibal Lecter–like figure who possesses crucial insight that Roberts and Olsen rely on to uncover the masked criminal’s identity and predict his next moves. They communicate with him via a screen as he remains confined in a high-security U.S. prison.
This latest effort is coming off Esmail’s “Leave the World Behind,” which also tackled a cyberattack. The apocalyptic thriller, an adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s novel, was a streaming phenomenon, the No. 1 movie in the U.S. on Netflix for three weeks. In fact, it was the most streamed film of 2023, beating out “Super Mario Bros Movie” (#2), “Barbie” (#3) and “Oppenheimer” (#4).
Esmail, who broke out as the creator of “Mr. Robot,” a television series that aired on USA Network from 2015 to 2019 over four seasons, already has another project lined up, Glen Powell is teaming up with him for a sci-fi film titled “Tesseract,” which recently landed at Amazon/MGM and United Artists. Like most Esmail projects, the plot is being kept under wraps. “Tesseract” is eyeing a summer shoot in London and Hungary, which means Esmail might maybe have two movies coming out in 2027. The man is hot these days.