Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew

I doubt very much that 2026 will see anything in the Marty Supreme league, but here’s hoping one of the most bizarre side-steps of the decade turns out as interesting as it hopes. Short of Christopher Nolan signing on to the new Mr Men movie, I didn’t think much would throw the industry a loop as when Greta Gerwig decided to follow up bubblegum blockbuster Barbie with …… a Narnia movie. More specifically, Gerwig – previously a skilled purveyor of achingly hip alt-indie comedy with Lady Bird, Frances Ha and Damsels in Distress – is restarting the Narnia series, which had got through three of CS Lewis’s series before Netflix took over the rights. To my mind, though, The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis’s origins/prequel to the Wardrobe/Caspian/Dawn Treader narrative, is the most interesting of the entire Narnia canon, with its Edenic fall, “deplorable word” and mystical apple. We know some of the cast: Emma Mackey is the future White Witch, Carey Mulligan the terminally ill mother of one of the main kids, and Daniel Craig might be Aslan or mad inventor Uncle Andrew – or both, or neither. All eyes will be naturally be on Gerwig, but I have confidence she will pull it off in style. Andrew Pulver

Dune: Messiah

After claiming that he was going to focus on other projects and maybe even abandon Dune after two laborious half-book adaptations, Denis Villeneuve, inspired by how Part Two was “received by cinephiles around the world” (LOL), fast-tracked Dune: Messiah. The final chapter in the epic sci-fi trilogy is now due this December (though given that it’s slated to compete against the newest Avengers, that is likely subject to change.) And thank God for that – as the Guardian’s resident Dunehead, I must report that I have been counting down the days to Messiah since Zendaya’s heartbroken Chani fled the scene of her boyfriend’s genocidal freak metamorphosis via sandworm. It does not matter that Frank Herbert’s far weirder sequel may actually be, as some charged of the first book, unadaptable; that the plot devolves into resurrected zombie warriors and worm gods and required Timothée Chalamet to shave his head. Villeneuve’s vision for the first two films – gloriously strange and wonderfully vast, from the infrared Black Sun to the desert mouse – is so commanding, so thrilling to behold on the big screen, that I simply trust he will land the spaceship and give us one more round of heady yet extremely hype-y interplanetary escapism in 2026. Adrian Horton

The Moment

It seems like an eternity since then, but a mere 18 months ago Charli xcx turned the summer lime green and dared us all to find our inner brat. Now, pop’s smudged-eyeliner princess promises to again dominate in 2026 – she has an original soundtrack to a reimagined Wuthering Heights arriving in February and this charming mockumentary popping out at the end of January. Detailing a wonderfully deranged alternate history of the artist’s 2024 rampage of a summer tour, The Moment was reportedly born out of a confessional text of “word vomit” that the singer made to her music video collaborator Aidan Zamiri (directing his first feature film). The movie will hopefully channel the madcap energy of the delightfully cracked visuals that the pair put together for tracks 360 and Guess (with Billie Eilish), giving us all something that doesn’t lose its shine after an hour sets in. With a starring role from Alexander Skarsgård and a score from longtime Charli collaborator AG Cook, the promise is there – hopefully it meets The Moment. Veronica Esposito

A Place in Hell

Back at Sundance 2023, I was lucky enough to secure a seat for the world premiere of battle of the sexes thriller Fair Play, a question mark of a film that suddenly became popular enough to see crowds turned away at the door. It was the kind of communal experience I crave at festivals: an electric wave of audible anger and excitement, and as has become depressingly commonplace, one that very few people were able to replicate in the real world. It was bought by Netflix and so a juicy, glossily made crowd-provoker was dumped on smartphones, a fate that’s set to be avoided for writer-director Chloe Domont’s follow-up, another corporate thriller called A Place in Hell. The film, which stars Michelle Williams, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Andrew Scott, has been picked up by Neon, and while little is known about the plot (although the title suggests this time, the fight will be between two women), we at least know we’ll all get to see it on the big screen. Benjamin Lee

Flowervale Street

In the past 16 years, David Robert Mitchell has made just three feature films. It was probably the third of these, 2019’s hallucinatory Under the Silver Lake, that ensured these numbers would not continue to grow. Silver Lake, a dark rabbit-hole comedy of unsettling conspiracy brain, was a barely released bomb for A24, an embarrassment just as the company was finding its footing as the hippest indie studio of the new century. It’s also a terrific movie and only amplified my desire to see what Mitchell would do next. The most exciting thing about Flowervale Street, Mitchell’s fourth film, is that I’m still not sure what exactly that is. Supposedly it’s an uncharacteristically family-friendly project, as well as a bigger-budget movie than he has previously made. (It has held several different high-profile release dates and is now penciled into August 2026.) It definitely co-stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. It may involve dinosaurs. But if it even remotely tones with the eerie, evocative It Follows, the lovely the Myth of the American Sleepover, or the hilarious, unsparing Under the Silver Lake, it will be one of the most distinctive big-studio fantasies of the year. Jesse Hassenger

The Adventures of Cliff Booth

Quentin Tarantino’s movies are playfully pulpy, indulgent and in your face with the writer-director’s verbosity, his personality dripping off every syllable. David Fincher, by contrast, favours cool, stealthy and cerebral; his trademark being what appears to be an invisible hand in complete control. Both are among the US’s most revered auteurs with styles so distinct you wouldn’t think they could exist in the same universe, which is why Fincher serving as the surrogate shepherding a Tarantino project to the screen is as tantalizing as it is confounding. Brad Pitt brought Tarantino’s script for The Adventures of Cliff Booth, a sequel to Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, to Fincher, when the former decided he didn’t want his 10th (and, as he insists, final) film to keep him in familiar terrain. (Or maybe he’d rather spend his downtime on podcasts, talking smack about Paul Dano, while dwelling on what his curtain call will be.) Whatever the reasoning, I can’t wait to see Fincher’s bastardized version and what he makes of Pitt’s Cliff Booth, the Hollywood stunt man who doesn’t quite fit in with the old guard or the counterculture, his penchant for violence and alpha male swagger at delicious odds with his zen-like calm and curious taste for free love and LSD. Cliff Booth is a beautiful contradiction, which is what I’m counting on Fincher’s Tarantino project to be. Radheyan Simonpillai

I Love Boosters

Boots Riley has a knack for writing stories that live on in my mind well after I’ve seen them play out on screen. I still wonder what became of Sorry to Bother You’s Equisapiens, and think about I Am a Virgo using a 13ft protagonist to personify the American fascination with Black genetic marvels from hardscrabble backgrounds. All the while, I’ve been holding space for Riley’s next brainteaser: I Love Boosters. Described as a “sci-fi heist comedy”, I Love Boosters follows a crew of professional shoplifters who go from boosting luxury goods to taking down a ruthless fashion designer. Keke Palmer, Demi Moore and Sorry to Bother You lead LaKeith Stanfield star in what figures to be a trenchant, if trippy, commentary on the fashion industry and consumerism writ large – and the timing (read: this precarious economic moment) couldn’t be better. Andrew Lawrence

Digger

Pretty much nothing is known about the plot of this film, but it’s high on my most-anticipated list because of the people who made it. Alejandro González Iñárritu directed and co-wrote the film, and while I don’t always love his work – not The Revenant’s aggressive brutality, not Birdman’s scratchy solipsism, certainly not whatever Bardo is – they are nonetheless ornate, meticulously crafted objects worth contending with. But it’s the film’s star, Tom Cruise, who is the real draw here. It’s been nine years since Cruise did a non-franchise film, and even longer since he’s worked with a lauded auteur like Iñárritu. Cruise starring in a $125m, studio-backed dark comedy from an Oscar-winning director – alongside Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed and more – sounds like something that would have happened 20 years ago, not in 2026. That’s pretty exciting. Richard Lawson

Untitled Jesse Eisenberg musical comedy

A Real Pain was the actual best film of last Oscars season; the best film of the season after this one is likely to be the untitled Jesse Eisenberg musical project. Bankrolled by A24 and set in “the high-stakes world of community theatre”, his third film as writer-director stars Julianne Moore as a shy housewife who takes acting classes, gets into it, then goes full method and takes a job as the superintendent of an apartment building so she can better realise her performance. Paul Giamatti plays her unlikely mentor; Eisenberg has a bit-part, likewise Halle Bailey and Bernadette Peters. A leaked report from a test screening this summer said “what begins as an eccentric character study quickly shifts into a dark comedy – imagine Woody Allen’s version of Black Swan. The audience roared with laughter.” It’s not at Sundance – a bit odd, given how great a launchpad that proved for A Real Pain. Still, wherever this washes up, I’m in. Catherine Shoard