Films To Look Forward To In 2026

If 2025 was about steady recovery, 2026 looks like a year of confident excess and quiet rebellion in equal measure. For the first time since the pandemic shutdowns of 2020 and 2021, and the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023, the film industry is entering a year that is no longer defined by backlog, delay or emergency recalibration.

2025 functioned as a transitional year, with studios cautiously returning to scale while still leaning heavily on recognisable IP, with risk aversion still evident in release schedules. In 2026, this focus on pre-existing stories definitely persists, with a packed schedule of franchise offerings attempting to lure fans back to the cinema.

For starters, there’s Toy Story 5, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Avengers: Doomsday, Dune: Part Three, Supergirl and The Hunger Games: Sunrise Of The Reaping. Add in Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and The Devil Wears Prada 2, and it all suggests an industry doubling down on familiarity as a survival strategy.

But alongside this flood of familiar IP, 2026 is shaping up to be a rich year for original cinema. Independent dramas, bold auteur projects and challenging adaptations promise emotional depth, risk and conversation.

These offerings will speak to audiences seeking emotionally rich and artistically innovative storytelling as an antidote to the shortform, attention-grabbing, dopamine-fuelled world around us. As ever, some films will soar, some will divide opinion, and some will be more fun to argue about than watch.

Here are the films we’re most interested in as 2026 comes into focus, with special attention paid to non-franchise offerings that deserve your attention.

Hamnet

Directed by Chloé Zhao, Hamnet adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s celebrated novel into a quiet, emotionally exacting period drama. Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes, a woman whose independent spirit and deep connection with nature have left her living on the margins of her Elizabethan community, but who finds love with budding wordsmith Will (Paul Mescal).

Despite the spark and passion of young love, Agnes’ marriage and inner life are reshaped by the sudden death of her young son. Rather than centring on the literary legacy of William Shakespeare, the film focuses on domestic grief and maternal endurance, tracing how loss lingers in gestures, silences and memory.

Zhao’s naturalistic style and sensitivity to landscape lend the story a hushed but primal intimacy, making for a powerful viewing experience.

Hamnet

The Chronology Of Water

Kristen Stewart makes her directorial debut with an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s raw memoir. Imogen Poots stars as a woman navigating childhood abuse, addiction, sexual exploration and creative self-discovery, with the narrative unfolding in fragments rather than linear progression.

The film treats memory as something physical, shaped by sensation and survival rather than reflection. Stewart leans into dissonance, fragmentation and vulnerability, crafting a portrait of identity built through rupture rather than healing.

Fans of Yuknavitch’s stunning writing will know that this is an uncompromising work that resists sentimentality, instead framing art as an act of resistance and self-authorship in the aftermath of damage.

H Is For Hawk

Based on Helen Macdonald’s memoir, H Is For Hawk is directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, and stars Claire Foy as a woman retreating from human connection following the death of her father (Brendan Gleeson). Seeking control in the natural world, she immerses herself in the demanding practice of training a goshawk, finding both solace and danger in the bird’s wildness.

The film unfolds slowly, prioritising observation over explanation, and using landscape and silence to reflect emotional isolation. Lowthorpe, known for her work on documentaries as well as projects like The Crown, and female-centred stories like Misbehaviour, brings warmth, emotion and an understanding of humanity’s fragile relationship to nature.

H is for Hawk

Wuthering Heights

Emerald Fennell directs this provocative reimagining of Emily Brontë’s gothic novel, starring Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Stripping away romantic idealism, the film leans into the story’s cruelty, sexual tension and class resentment, presenting love as something corrosive rather than redemptive.

Fennell’s heightened aesthetic, which feels like a blend of Sofia Coppola and a Charlie XCX music video (the latter also wrote a song for the film), is sure to enrage literary purists. But if you let yourself be immersed, the film also promises to amplify the novel’s emotional extremity, foregrounding obsession, desire, power and inherited violence.

Wuthering Heights emerges as a study of desire unchecked, and of characters who would rather destroy each other than relinquish control.

Wuthering Heights

The Drama

A24 has become synonymous with intriguing, original stories, often with an edge, and the opaque trailer for The Drama hints at style, subterfuge and something sinister.

Directed by Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, the film stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in a tightly wound exploration of performance, manipulation and emotional authenticity. Set largely within intimate interiors, the film follows a couple preparing for their wedding – but as secrets emerge, it quickly becomes evident that all is not as it seems.

The Drama examines how people rehearse versions of themselves for love, art and validation, and questions whether vulnerability is ever entirely genuine, or simply another role learned over time.

The Bride!

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second feature as director after the brilliant The Lost Daughter, The Bride! sees her again work with Irish actress Jessie Buckley, in a genre-defying reworking of the Frankenstein myth, set in 1930s Chicago.

Christian Bale plays the Monster, who enlists Dr. Euphronius, portrayed by Annette Bening, to create him a companion. Buckley meanwhile stars as the Bride, whose emergence quickly disrupts the intentions of her creators. Part musical, part satire, the film explores autonomy, desire and social rebellion through heightened stylisation.

The Bride!

Project Hail Mary

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Project Hail Mary adapts Andy Weir’s science fiction novel into a high concept survival story with emotional warmth. Ryan Gosling stars as a man who awakens alone aboard a spacecraft with no memory of his mission, only to discover he may be humanity’s last chance for survival.

As his memories return, the film balances scientific problem solving with humour and human connection. Lord and Miller’s kinetic style brings levity to complex ideas, while Gosling grounds the story in vulnerability. The result is an optimistic sci-fi adventure driven by curiosity, cooperation and quiet heroism.

Lord and Miller’s work on Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and The Last Man On Earth have proven their ability to blend great visuals and high concepts with emotion and humour, so this is set to be a blast.

Project Hail Mary

The Resurrected

Following Evil Dead Rise, Irish director Lee Cronin brings a stripped-back horror sensibility to The Resurrected – originally called The Mummy. Rejecting glossy adventure in favour of dread, the film reframes the ancient curse as a story of bodily decay and moral transgression.

Produced by horror masters Jason Blum and James Wan, the film will star Ireland’s Jack Reynor and The Wheel Of Time’s Laia Costa. The film explores how a respectable family is shaken by an ancestral terror when their young daughter, Katie, mysteriously disappears after accepting a sinister gift from a strange woman.

Eight years later, hope and fear reunite at the site of an airplane crash, where a damaged sarcophagus is discovered. The body found inside, which eerily resembles the missing girl, awakens and brings with it an evil curse and a supernatural force that defies all logic.

This reimagining aims to restore fear to a monster long associated with camp excess, treating myth as something rotten, persistent and impossible to fully bury.

The resurrected

The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan directs this large-scale adaptation of Homer’s epic, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca, embarking on a long and perilous journey home after the Trojan War as he attempts to reunite with his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway).

Rather than presenting the hero’s journey as triumphant myth, the film interrogates endurance, cunning and the psychological cost of survival. Nolan’s interest in time, memory and moral compromise finds fertile ground in a story defined by delay and displacement.

With a vast physical production and sprawling ensemble cast including Tom Holland, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron and Jon Bernthal, The Odyssey promises spectacle, but its emotional core lies in longing and consequence rather than conquest.

With an estimated budget of €250 million, the film is set to be the most expensive of Nolan’s career and will be hoping to do big business.

Untitled Tom Cruise / Iñárritu Movie

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, Birdman, The Revenant), this still-untitled project marks Tom Cruise’s first original film in nearly a decade. Shot in VistaVision and described as a dark comedy, the story reportedly follows a man attempting to redeem humanity after pushing it toward catastrophe.

Cruise leads an ensemble cast that includes Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma D’arcy and Riz Ahmed. Little is known about the story, but at Cannes, Iñárritu promised an unpredictable and wildly entertaining movie.

“This is a wild comedy of catastrophic proportions,” said the director. “It’s insane. He makes me laugh every day. The range that I discovered working with Tom is unprecedented for me as a director... It’s a wild comedy of human nature. It’s scary and funny. It’s beautiful.”

Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg returns to science fiction with an original story based on his own concept, scripted by longtime collaborator David Koepp. Starring Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo, Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth, the film reportedly explores humanity’s relationship with unexplained phenomena.

Earlier marketing material featured a UFO and a hint of a connection to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, with some people speculating it may function as a “stealth sequel”. Unlike Spielberg’s earlier genre classics, this project arrives in a more sceptical cultural moment, raising questions about wonder, belief and fear.

Whether contemplative or spectacular, the film promises a return to the themes of curiosity and connection that have defined the director’s most enduring work.

Disclosure Day

Werwulf

Written and directed by Robert Eggers, Werwulf is an original period horror set in 13th-century England. Following The Witch, The Lighthouse and Nosferatu, the filmmaker once again immerses audiences in a world shaped by superstition, disease and brutality.

Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe, the film approaches lycanthropy not as fantasy, but as a manifestation of fear, violence and bodily corruption. Language, setting and physicality are central, grounding the horror in historical texture rather than mythology alone. Eggers has described the project as his darkest to date, which is frankly saying something.

Werwulf