David Fear
Contact David Fear on X View all posts by David Fear September 1, 2026
Left to right: ‘Dune: Part 3,’ ‘Misty Green,’ ‘Digger,’ ‘Heart of the Beast,’ ‘Avengers: Doomsday,’ ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.’ Photo Illustration by MATTHEW COOLEY Every fall, studios trot out their big prestige-drama titles, film festivals roll out the red carpet for gala premiers, and big-name talent starts hitting the for-your-consideration circuit. For the next few months, a lot of oxygen will get sucked up over whether this title or that has a good chance of going all the way, or whether a veteran actor is campaigning enough to nab a long overdue Oscar. Do a lot of great films, the kind that populate best-of lists, come out in the back fourth of any given year? Yes. Is the experience of having to consume all pumped-up serious movies more or less back-to-back exhausting? Also yes. Forget it, Jake, it’s awards season.
2026 is no different — and from Labor Day to Christmas Day, viewers will indeed get the chance to check out biopics, social-issue explorations, A-list period dramas and procedurals, and hoity-toity literary adaptations. But you’ll also get the chance to see a few long-awaited sequels, a couple of star-studded franchise blockbusters (ready or not, here comes Dune 3 and Avengers: Doomsday, both being released on the same day!), some nutty sounding genre exercises, and few once-in-a-lifetime collaborations. Seriously, it’s not like David Fincher directing Brad Pitt in a movie written by Quentin Tarantino is, like, a normal everyday occurrence.
There are a lot of things hitting theaters (and/or streaming services) near you before the end of the year, but we’ve singled out 50 titles that are likely to generate chatter and necessitate the clearing of calendars. From Ali G to Godzilla, the MCU to TCAP, Timothée Chalamet, Interstellar Messiah to Tom Cruise, Superstar — it’s going to be an interesting autumn. Buckle up.
-
‘Onslaught’ (September 4)
Image Credit: Richard Foreman, Jr SMPSP/A24 Now that Focus is gunning to be the new A24 (see: Obsession), A24 may be pivoting to toward becoming Lionsgate 2.0. Case in point: This pulpy-as-fuck thriller about a former Army sniper (Adria Arjona) who lives near a military base conducting some off-the-books experiments. The end result of this black-ops project — basically, super-soldiers who are “the human equivalent of a heat-seeking missile” — decide to go rogue and attack the locals, however. Which means our hero has to battle both genetically modified killing machines and some government “fixers” who have been dispatched to clean up the mess and leave zero witnesses. All this, plus Dan Stevens rocking a crazy German accent! Rebecca Hall, Queer‘s Drew Starkey and The Terminator‘s Michael Biehn costar.
