Ice Cream Man arrives in theatres on Friday 7 August, seven days from now. Eli Roth's newest film sends an ice cream truck through a picture postcard American summer town, and by the time the jingle stops, that town has completely lost its mind.
The premise is simple and nasty. A mysterious ice cream man serves up sweet treats to the local kids, and something in the recipe turns them from ordinary summer kids into instruments of horror. Roth directs from a script he wrote with longtime collaborator Noah Belson. Ari Millen takes the title role, leading a young cast dropped into an increasingly feral small town.
Ice Cream Man is the first release under The Horror Section, the horror label Roth launched in 2025, and it is arriving with an unusually large footprint for the genre. Iconic Events Releasing is opening it on more than two thousand North American screens, a wide bet on a splatter movie built entirely around an ice cream truck. Rapper Nas serves as an executive producer, and composer Brandon Roberts scores the film with additional music from Snoop Dogg, another sign Roth is treating this premise as a full theatrical event rather than a genre afterthought.
That scale is the real story here. Roth built his name on Cabin Fever and Hostel, then spent recent years alternating slasher throwbacks like Thanksgiving with producing work. Ice Cream Man finds him returning to an unashamedly high concept hook and putting a genuinely wide theatrical rollout behind it, rather than treating horror as a niche afterthought.
What is confirmed: the August 7 date, the cast led by Millen, and a wide release across thousands of screens rather than a limited one. What nobody outside the production knows yet is how the film plays for a paying crowd, since Ice Cream Man has not screened for critics or audiences ahead of release. Whether it holds up as more than a gnarly premise is still an open question, and one this countdown cannot answer for you.
