16 of the most exciting movies coming in 2026

12. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Harvest

With or without Jennifer Lawrence’s hero archer, Katniss Everdeen, audiences can’t get enough of The Hunger Games, so 2023’s The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows with another prequel adapted from a Suzanne Collins novel. This film is set 24 years before the first Hunger Games films, so it features younger versions of many of the main characters from Katniss’ saga. It should be fun to see how well the new actors get along with the old ones. Ralph Fiennes plays President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland as an older man; Jesse Plemons plays Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kieran Culkin plays Stanley Tucci, Elle Fanning plays Elizabeth Banks, and Joseph Zada ​​is the 20-something hero, who is destined to become a middle-aged alcoholic played by Woody Harrelson. The director is Francis Lawrence, who directed all the other Hunger Games films, as well as last year’s Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk, another thriller about young people who are murdered as a form of televised entertainment. (note)

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping will be released on November 20

13. Narnia: The wizard’s nephew

In the early 2000s, when every studio wanted a children’s fantasy adventure series to rival Harry Potter, there were three films adapted from C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia novels — and now, after a 16-year hiatus, comes a fourth. Confusingly, it’s actually based on Lewis’s sixth Narnia novel, the first if you follow the chronology of events in the story. In other words, The Magician’s Nephew is a prequel set over the course of 40 Earth years and 1,000 Narnian years before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Emma Mackie plays Jadis, the evil white witch, alongside Carey Mulligan and Daniel Craig, but the most interesting person in this film is writer-director Greta Gerwig. This is the first movie she’s directed since Barbie took over the world in 2023, so she’ll have the freedom and budget to do whatever she wants. However, as Wicked taught us, there’s definitely an audience for prequels with famous fictional witches. (note)

Narnia: The Wizard’s Nephew will be released on November 26

Universal Studios

14. Disclosure day

With ET, Steven Spielberg created one of the most beautiful aliens to ever visit Earth. But we’re not sure what kind of creatures are headed toward us in his latest film. Josh O’Connor plays a man who knows something about it, and is determined to tell the whole world at once. “People have a right to know the truth,” he says in the mysterious trailer. “It belongs to seven billion people.” Sometimes standing in a crop circle, it’s classic UFO evidence. Emily Blunt is a television meteorologist in Kansas who suddenly freezes and utters strange noises, Colin Firth’s eyes suddenly change color, and Eve Hewson, Wyatt Russell and Colman Domingo deal with the threat. The secrecy surrounding the film has inspired wild theories about what it is, including the idea that it could be a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What we know for sure is that no one does aliens better than Spielberg, whether they’re as benign as ET or as sinister as those in War of the Worlds. (CG)

Disclosure Day will be released on June 12

Universal Studios

15. Odyssey

It’s safe to assume that Homer’s ancient Greek poem isn’t the reason why this movie was so highly anticipated that tickets went on sale a year early. The attraction here is Christopher Nolan, who has adapted the classic film with its epic fantasy and star-studded cast, in the follow-up to his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer. Matt Damon stars as the warrior king Odysseus, on a surreal, dangerous journey home after the Trojan War. Anne Hathaway plays his eagerly awaited wife, Penelope, with Tom Holland as their son, Telemachus. Robert Pattinson is Antinous, Penelope’s fiancé and Zendaya plays the goddess Athena. Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, and a large group of actors also participate in the cast. One of Nolan’s talents is to combine large-scale action with distinct, lively characters, and this film promises to deliver action-packed battle scenes and character drama. “The genius of the character, the intelligence, the creativity that he had, was a big part of what interested me,” Nolan told Empire about Odysseus. A quick preview of some of the scenes revealed that there was definitely a Trojan. (CG)

The Odyssey will be released on July 17

16. Avengers: Doomsday

Avengers: Endgame is one of the highest-grossing films of all time, but since its release in 2019, none of Marvel’s superhero films have had as much impact. The solution in the studio? To turn back the clock and do everything Avengers: Endgame did — only more. First of all, the producers squeezed every potential Marvel superhero, including the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, who had previously been in separate cinematic universes. Second, they brought back many of their most popular characters, including Chris Evans’ Captain America, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man, and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. They also brought back the MCU’s most revered actor, Robert Downey Jr., only now he’s playing the villainous Doctor Doom instead of Iron Man. They also brought back Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo, whose post-Endgame films – Extraction, Cherry, The Gray Man and The Electric State – also didn’t set the world on fire. Will this new ending be a new beginning? (note)

Avengers: Judgment Day will be released on December 18

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