Our film editor casts a critical eye over the big movies coming out this year and gives you his top picks.
2026 is shaping up to be a hell of a year for cinema, with plenty of likely bangers coming from all corners. There’s bunch of blockbusters en route, an army of arthouse darlings on the march, a slew of gnarly horror movies coming our way, some excellent international offerings, some great looking local features… not much in the way of comedy, though, because that’s a dead genre at the multiplex (streaming is the home of comedy now, it seems).
Winnowing through that lot, casting aside the chaff to present you only with the finest wheat, is a big job. So I thought I’d break it down category by category, picking 10 films from each broad genre that will probably be worth your time. No guarantees, though – I’ve been burnt before. We all have.
“Blockbuster”, of course, isn’t really a genre; it’s just code for “big, four quadrant pictures the studios have cannonballed money and talent into”. These days that mostly means action, more or less, or something action-adjacent. Your Marvels, your Star Warses, your Missions Impossible and so on. You know the drill. Here’s what’s looking good to me.
Supergirl (June 25)
Director: Craig Gillespie.
Cast: Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham, and Jason Momoa.
Having made her first appearance in this year’s Superman, Milly Alcock’s Supergirl makes her first solo outing in a space-spanning adventure loosely adapted from the pretty great comic series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely. Also, fan fave Lobo is in this, played by Jason Momoa, which is just perfect.
The Odyssey (July 16)
Director: Christopher Nolan.
Cast: Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, and a ton more.
The current king of the smart blockbuster ring trains his IMAX cameras on one of humanity’s earliest narratives, to no doubt loud and overpowering effect. Matt Damon is the titular sly sea dog, a Greek king trying to get home after 10 years of war against the Trojans. Turns out it takes a bit.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (July 31)
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton.
Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Sadie Sink, Liza Colón-Zayas, Jon Bernthal, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Mando, Tramell Tillman, and Marvin Jones III.
No image, no trailer, no hint of a plot, but we’re getting another Spider-Man film with Tom Holland, most likely drawing from the comics of the same name. Personally, I like dirt poor, hard up against it Peter Parker way more than billionaire’s morality pet Peter Parker, so if we get that, I’m sold. Think “street level blockbuster” for this one, I’m told.
Project Hail Mary (March 19)
Directors: Phil Lord and Chris Miller.
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, and Milana Vayntrub.
The Goz is an astronaut who wakes up on a ship in deep space with no memory of why he’s there. When he remembers, things don’t improve – he’s on a last ditch mission to save the entire Earth, which is a lot of pressure for a former high school teacher. But there’s something else out there with him… This one’s based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir (The Martian), which is an absolute banger, so I’m expecting good things.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian And Grogu (May 21)
Director: Jon Favreau.
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White, and Jonny Coyne.
Everyone’s second favourite helmeted bounty hunter and his tiny puppet son are off on another space adventure, this time on the big screen. All we know about the plot is that they’re off on some mission for the New Republic, and that’ll probably require some kinda deep knowledge of the Clone Wars cartoons to really get your head around, so that’s me at a disadvantage. But I’ll show up for Star Wars in the cinema every time – I’m gullible that way.
Masters of the Universe (June 5)
Director: Travis Knight
Cast: Nicholas Galitzine, Jared Leto, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, Idris Elba, Kristen Wiig
Nicholas Galitzine is He-Man, Jared Leto is Skeletor, and there’s not much we can do about that, and everyone else is probably going to struggle to keep a straight face in the second big screen adaptation of Mattel’s muscular boys’ toys of the ’80s. But, here’s a couple reasons to be hopeful: Travis Knight (Transformers: Bumblebee) is a pretty great, director, and this is Mattel’s first toy adaptation since the mammoth hit that was Barbie, so I’d expect this is going to be bigger and weirder than we anticipate.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping (Nov 19)
Director: Francis Lawrence.
Cast: Joseph Zada, Jesse Plemons, Ralph Fiennes, Kieran Culkin, Elle Fanning, Mckenna Grace, Maya Hawke, Whitney Peak, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Glenn Close.
Francis Lawrence loves killin’ kids in dystopian settings, so he’s back after The Long Walk for another long drink from the Hunger Games well. Joseph Zada is the younger version of Haymitch Abernathy, played by Woody Harrelson in the original films, as we see what turned him into a broken down, self loathing drunk. Sounds fun!
Avengers: Doomsday (December 17)
Director: The Russo brothers.
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Vanessa Kirby, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Letitia Wright, Paul Rudd, Wyatt Russell, Tenoch Huerta Mejía, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Simu Liu, Florence Pugh, Kelsey Grammer, Lewis Pullman, Danny Ramirez, Joseph Quinn, David Harbour, Winston Duke, Hannah John-Kamen, Tom Hiddleston, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, Channing Tatum, Pedro Pascal, and Robert Downey Jr. And more. Bloody hell.
The gang gets back together both to battle RDJ’s Doctor Doom and to save the Marvel Cinematic Universe from it’s current doldrums. It may be a desperate Hail Mary pass to revive what was quite recently a self-sustaining money machine – you know they had to back the cash truck up more than once to get some of these guys back. It’ll probably be the biggest movie of the year. Will it be good? Coin flip.
Dune: Part Three (December 17)
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh, Jason Momoa, Josh Brolin, Rebecca Ferguson and Anya Taylor-Joy and Robert Pattinson.
Oh, we don’t even have a logo for this one yet, but everyone’s back for another trip to Arrakis – including Jason Momoa, who died in the first film. If you’ve read Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah (and you should – it rips) you know why. How closely they’re gonna cleave to the plot of the novel is an interesting question, though – it’s a weird one.
Disclosure Day (TBD)
Director: Steven Spielberg.
Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo.
The ‘Berg returns to sci-fi for this enigmatic thriller, in which a small group of people, including Emily Blunt’s weather presenter, are clued into some mind-blowing secret that affects everyone on the planet. The popular opinion holds that it’s aliens, but that strikes me as a little too obvious – besides, he’s made three alien encounter movies already. Living in a simulation? The biblical apocalypse? Something far stranger? Your guess is as good as mine.
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