With the content wars more competitive than ever, Hollywood is trying even harder to get film fans to fork out for regular cinema tickets. Here are 20 mouthwatering movies coming in 2026 that stand a very decent chance of packing out your local multiplex or arthouse theatre.
Release date: December 18
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh
This is the final part in Denis Villeneuve’s visually breathtaking Dune trilogy. It’s based on Frank Herbert’s second novel in the series, 1969’s Dune Messiah, which David Lynch never got to adapt, so there’s potential for Villeneuve to make it even more mindblowing. Which is really saying something given that parts one and two were largely masterful.
Release date: July 31
Starring: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink
In which Tom Holland goes one better than Tobey Maguire by heading up a fourth Spidey movie. Director Destin Daniel Cretton previously made a really fun Marvel blockbuster, 2021’s Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, so he should have fresh ideas to keep the webslinger on his very springy toes.
Release date: December 18
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Mackie, Florence Pugh
The fifth Avengers film is a dazzlingly ambitious affair uniting – deep breath! – the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Wakandans, the new Avengers introduced in this year’s Thunderbolts* and the OG X-Men. Returning directors Anthony and Joe Russo are MCU mainstays at this point, so if anyone can bring them all together coherently, it’s them.
Release date: May 22
Starring: Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
In a way, the latest Star Wars flick is a happy accident. When the 2023 Hollywood strikes delayed season four of The Mandalorian, Lucasfilm decided to retool it into a feature film. Super-cute Grogu getting top billing alongside Pedro Pascal’s titular bounty hunter surely cements his status as the Gen Z Yoda. However this film fares, the merch will be next level.
Release date: January 30
Starring: Charli XCX, Alexander Skarsgård, Jamie Demetriou
Where other pop stars chronicle their tours with sanitised behind-the-scenes docs, Charli XCX is sending up the medium (and herself) with this meta mockumentary about her zeitgeist-grabbing ‘Brat Tour’. With super-cool music video director Aidan Zamiri at the helm, this could be like Spinal Tap on poppers.
Release date: May 1
Starring: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt
Meryl Streep reprises her iconic role as Wintour-y fashion editor Miranda Priestly in this belated sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. This time around, Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs is no longer her petrified assistant, but a high-powered executive whose advertising revenue Miranda desperately needs. Let the stylish zingers fly.
Release date: April 3
Starring: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim
Hailing from ice-cool indie studio A24, this intriguing confection looks like a kind of hipster anti-romcom. Zendaya and Pattinson (what a pairing) play a couple whose impending nuptials are disrupted when unsettling secrets leap from one of their closets. Don’t expect a Richard Curtis-style meet-cute.
Release date: July 17
Starring: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland
Christopher Nolan‘s follow-up to 2023’s Oscar-gobbling Oppenheimer is a lavish adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic The Odyssey. Even by his standards, the Anglo-American auteur has assembled a ridiculously stacked cast – Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron and Lupita Nyong’o all have supporting roles – for what promises to be a thinking person’s swords-and-sandals story.
Release date: February 11
Starring: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi
This is not just an Emily Brontë adaptation; it’s an Emily Brontë adaptation from Emerald Fennell, the disruptive director of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman. She’s described it as a “primal, sexual” take on Brontë’s Gothic romance and hired Charli XCX to write the soundtrack. Buttons will be pushed and pearls will be clutched.
Release date: January 9
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal
Directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), this devastating period drama is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel about the family tragedy that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Paul Mescal is brilliantly impish as the iconic playwright and Jessie Buckley’s shattering performance as his stoic wife Agnes is building serious Oscar buzz.
Release date: March 6
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Rebecca Ferguson, Barry Keoghan
The long-awaited Peaky Blinders film takes place in 1940, around six years after the TV series left off. Writer-creator Steven Knight has described it as “full-on Peaky Blinders at war”, so it should add cinematic grandeur to the already very stylish world of the Shelby crime clan.
Release date: 2026 TBC
Starring: Brad Pitt, Scott Caan, Elizabeth Debicki
This sequel to Quentin Tarantino‘s 2019 smash Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by QT himself. It’s set in 1977, eight years after the original, with Brad Pitt reprising his Oscar-winning role as faded Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth. It’s got a lot to live up to, but this $200million (yes, really) dramedy has the makings of a top-tier sequel.
Release date: April 24
Starring: Jaafar Jackson, Colman Domingo, Miles Teller
This film about Michael Jackson‘s stratospheric rise is already mired in controversy, mainly over the way it might handle the allegations of child sexual assault that hang over him. Jackson’s nephew Jaafar steps into the King Of Pop’s moonwalking shoes and the great Colman Domingo portrays his domineering father Joe. This will definitely be one of the year’s most talked-about movies.
Release date: October 9
Starring: Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Allen White, Mikey Madison
This sort-of-sequel to The Social Network tells the story of the 2021 Facebook leak, which revealed that Silicon Valley bigwigs were acutely aware of the societal damage their app can cause. Succession‘s Jeremy Strong takes over from Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, while Aaron Sorkin directs from his own screenplay. This should be blistering.
Release date: January 16
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Cillian Murphy
Though it was shot back-to-back with last year’s 28 Years Later, the second film in a planned trilogy has a different director: Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, Hedda). Danny Boyle remains on board as a producer, though, and Alex Garland once again supplies the screenplay, so expect a fresh but reassuringly freakish spin on the ravages of the Rage Virus.
Release date: February 27
Starring: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox
Another Scream movie? Absolutely – and this one should win over some lapsed fans. Neve Campbell returns to Woodsboro after skipping 2023’s Scream 6 – well, if anyone deserved a break, it was poor old Sidney Prescott – and franchise creator Kevin Williamson takes over the director’s chair. At this point, even Ghostface couldn’t kill off the Scream saga.
Release date: March 6
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Jake Gyllenhaal,
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second feature film as director (after 2021’s excellent The Lost Daughter) is a revisionist riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Gyllenhaal has transplanted the action to mob-ridden 1930s Chicago and made Jessie Buckley’s demonic Bride the unequivocal focal point. It’s a big swing with a potentially monstrous payoff.
Release date: October TBC
Starring: David Howard Thornton, Lauren LaVera, Elliott Fullam
Less looking forward to, more dreading. Depraved serial killer Art The Clown has stabbed, sliced and disemboweled his way through three blood-soaked b-movies so far, to increasingly bigger box office success. This fourth entry, expected around Halloween, promises yet more relentlessly graphic violence. At the press screening for Terrifier 3, several people left to vomit. Come prepared with a sick bag.
Release date: December 25
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe
Nosferatu and The Witch director Robert Eggers has said this werewolf movie is the “darkest thing” he’s ever written, so expect to leave with nerves shredded like an Olympic swimmer. It’s set in the remote countryside of 13th-century England: a suitably gloomy locale for Eggers to cast his spine-chilling spell.
Release date: 2026 TBC
Starring: TBC
Following 2023’s belated sequel The Exorcist: Believer, horror maestros Blumhouse have decided to go down the reboot route. We know that Mike Flanagan (The Haunting Of Hill House) is directing, but there’s no word on casting yet. At 93, OG star Ellen Burstyn can probably name her price.
*All release dates for UK
The post 20 unmissable movies to look forward to in 2026 appeared first on NME.
