🔸 THE FINAL CUT 🔸
INDUSTRY NEWS FOR VISUAL STORYTELLERS
The Final Cut · June 26, 2026
Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline
Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.
It was Annecy week, and the festival delivered. The biggest news: Genndy Tartakovsky is officially making a Conan the Barbarian animated series for Prime Video. The show is called Queen of the Black Coast, it centers on Conan and the pirate queen Bêlit, and it marks Tartakovsky’s first IP adaptation since the Clone Wars micro-series in 2003. He’s been pitching a Conan project since 2008. That it’s finally happening — and that it’s going to a streamer with the runway to let him do it right — is the kind of news worth stopping to appreciate.
Also out of Annecy: the final film of Richard Williams — the animator who spent his career chasing an impossible standard of craft — will have its world premiere Saturday night as the festival’s closing film. Lysistrata is a posthumous short. That it exists at all is something worth marking. Plus: Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn has a release date, Adventure Time has another spinoff on the way, Hollywood writers are training the AI that’s competing with them for work, and the DGA wrapped its negotiations without a strike. Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.
Animation — Industry
Genndy Tartakovsky Is Finally Making His Conan the Barbarian Series — for Prime Video
Announced at Annecy 2026, Genndy Tartakovsky and Cartoon Network Studios are developing Conan the Barbarian: Queen of the Black Coast for Prime Video. This is Tartakovsky’s first IP adaptation since the Star Wars: Clone Wars micro-series in 2003, and a project he’s been trying to get made since 2008. The show’s logline: “After finding love in the pirate queen, Bêlit, a battle-hardened Conan defies gods, fate and even death to save her from a dark sorcery that threatens to destroy everything.”
Tartakovsky’s visual vocabulary — built across Samurai Jack, Primal, and the Hotel Transylvania films — runs on economy of movement, weight, and negative space. Robert E. Howard’s Conan material is pulp in the best sense: mythic violence, strange gods, elemental emotion. Watching Tartakovsky apply that language to Howard’s world is the kind of creative pairing that makes you actually look forward to something. This one has been a long time coming.
Source: Polygon · Also: The Wrap
Short Film — Legacy
Richard Williams’ Final Film, Lysistrata, Will Have Its World Premiere at Annecy
The 2026 Annecy Animation Festival closes Saturday with the world premiere of Lysistrata — the last, posthumous work of Richard Williams, the animator behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the unfinished masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler. Williams died in 2019 at age 86. Anyone who’s read The Animator’s Survival Kit — still the clearest, most demanding text on animation as a craft — knows what he stood for. A standard that never moved, regardless of whether the industry was willing to meet it.
The Thief and the Cobbler was taken from Williams before it could be completed, and he spent his final years working independently. That Lysistrata exists and is receiving a proper world premiere at the festival that has long honored serious animation work is genuinely worth noting. The closing night slot at Annecy is not given lightly.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Animation — Feature Film
Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn Gets a December 18 Netflix Date — and Annecy Saw the First 7 Minutes
Netflix has set December 18, 2026 as the release date for Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn. The announcement came at Annecy, where the 1,400-capacity Bonlieu theatre got a full clip and the first seven minutes of the film — introducing private eye Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) in the city of Metropia, an alternate-future metropolis viewed through a 1939 lens. Scarlett Johansson voices Venus Nova, a multimedia star at the center of a murder case; Tom Waits plays Gunn’s alien sidekick Eyera. Peter Lord of Aardman interviewed Bird onstage.
Bird explained the film’s origin as a “goofy misunderstanding” — mistaking the B52s’ “Planet Claire” for Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme — and described it as “film noir and a hard-boiled detective story, but with a lot more comedy and action than the average film noir.” The project spent years in a Warner Bros. filing cabinet before Bird negotiated to get it back. It’s a Skydance Animation production with John Lasseter producing. December 18 is a serious release slot.
Source: Deadline
Animation — Industry
Adventure Time: Bubblegum and Marceline Gets a 10-Episode Straight-to-Series Order on HBO Max
Also announced at Annecy: HBO Max has given a 10-episode straight-to-series order to Adventure Time: Bubblegum and Marceline, a new spinoff centered on Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen. Adam Muto — who served as showrunner on the original series and on Fionna & Cake — returns in the same role. The logline: the two characters “journey across the farthest reaches of Ooo, encountering familiar faces and new dangers.” It’s being produced by Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network Studios.
Bubblegum and Marceline have been fan favorites for over a decade, with their relationship confirmed (via a kiss in the 2018 series finale) after years of fan advocacy. The show is the fourth Adventure Time spinoff, following Distant Lands, Fionna & Cake, and Side Quests (debuting June 29 on Disney+/Hulu). The franchise continues to expand, with Muto at the center of it.
Source: Variety
Tools & Pipeline — Industry
Hollywood Creatives Are Moonlighting as AI Trainers as Traditional Jobs Dry Up
The Hollywood Reporter profiles writers, musicians, visual artists and other entertainment workers who are supplementing thin income by doing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) gigs through platforms like Handshake — training the AI systems that are reshaping the same industry they worked in. Writers can earn up to $44/hour; music professionals with advanced degrees can earn up to $100/hour. The share of arts-category job postings that require AI skills doubled from roughly 5% to 11% between May 2025 and April 2026.
Reporting this one neutrally and letting the situation speak: the economic pressure is real enough that some working creatives are now helping refine the systems competing with them for work. It doesn’t get any more meta than this. The piece doesn’t advocate or moralize, and neither will this newsletter. It’s worth reading, particularly if you’re thinking about where the labor market is heading for people who work in and around visual storytelling.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Industry — Film & TV
The DGA Has Reached a Tentative Four-Year Deal With the Major Studios
The Directors Guild of America reached a tentative four-year agreement with the AMPTP in June, completing this year’s major labor negotiations following the WGA (approved April) and SAG-AFTRA (ratified last month). The deal includes AI protections and provisions around the health fund, which has run deficits in recent years. As with the other guilds, specific terms won’t be made public until the DGA National Board completes its review and sends the contract to membership for ratification.
All three above-the-line guilds settled on four-year terms — longer than the standard three-year contracts that have been the norm since the 1980s, driven by studios’ stated goal of securing a longer period of labor stability after the 2023 strikes. The contracts won’t stop the industry from changing, but four years without a strike threat is a meaningful runway for everyone trying to build or greenlight something.
Source: Variety
From the Community — Worth a Restack
Three posts from visual storytelling Substackers published this week — all worth your time and a restack.
Animation Obsessive · 72,000+ subscribers
Pixar’s Believable People
Animation Obsessive digs into Pixar’s long and often-underappreciated struggle with human characters — from the early experiments of Toy Story through the advances in The Incredibles, Up, Brave, and beyond. A technical history with craft implications. If you’ve ever wondered why animated humans are so much harder to get right than animals or toys, this is a good place to start.
Published June 21, 2026 · 159 likes, 18 restacks
Creating Comics · K. Woodman-Maynard
The Things I’ll Do For a Graphic Novel
Woodman-Maynard writes about what research actually looks like when you’re making a graphic novel — the trips, the deep dives, the weird rabbit holes that most readers will never know about but that show up in the work anyway. An honest look at the effort behind visual accuracy and authentic place.
Published June 21, 2026 · 56 likes
Gurney Journey · James Gurney
More Dazzling Dexterity
Gurney continues his look at technical mastery in painting — the kind of physical command over a medium that comes from years of practice and isn’t replaceable by shortcuts. His posts have a way of making you want to pick up a brush. Practical observations about what skilled execution actually looks like, and why it still matters.
Published June 22, 2026 · 45 likes
And that’s a wrap for this week.
Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.
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