Welcome to 2026! I hope you are enjoying the final dribblings of the festive break, before reality bites on Monday. As is now tradition (well, we did it once before), this first newsletter of the new year looks at some of the big questions we hope will be answered in the next 12 months, across film, TV, music and games. Hopefully it will double up as a decent primer for the year ahead too, though for a more exhaustive rundown check the Guardian’s 2026 previews for film, music, TV, gaming, stage and art. Right, let’s get on with it:

Can the Odyssey save cinema? (no pressure or anything, Chris)

A storyline likely to rumble on through the year is the proposed purchase of Warner Bros by Netflix, which will require government approval (certainly not a given), not to mention all manner of contractual fine-tuning, before that big red N gets stamped on Warners’ famous water tower. Just enough time then for Hollywood’s greatest wrangler of spectacle, and newly installed head of the Director’s Guild, Christopher Nolan to demonstrate the value to Netflix of putting mass-market movies on the biggest screens possible. His Oppenheimer followup is a giant adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey (17 July) featuring a preposterous cast: Matt Damon! Tom Holland! Lupita Nyong’o! Robert Pattinson! Anne Hathaway! Zendaya as the goddess Athena! Charlize Theron turning people into pigs as Circe! The only thing it is missing is a Barbenheimer style foil.

Other impending biggies will also help underscore the magic of the cinema: Project Hail Mary (20 March) blasts Ryan Gosling into outer space on a mission to save Earth (the trailer looks very promising); Disclosure Day (12 June) sees Steven Spielberg go back to the ‘alien life’ almost 50 years on from Close Encounters; Denis Villeneuve will tackle the wildest of Frank Herbert’s series of novels with Dune: Part Three (18 December); Avengers: Doomsday (also 18 December – let’s see how that one plays out!) is the first mega marvel teamup since Endgame, and will see Chris Evans return to the role of Captain America, and Robert Downey Jr head to the dark side as Doctor Doom. Most intriguing of all is Alejandro Iñárritu’s first English language film since The Revenant, Digger (2 October). Little is known about the film beyond its intriguing one-line description – “The most powerful man in the world causes a disaster and embarks on a mission to prove that he is the savior of humanity” – and the fact that the powerful man in question is played by one T Cruise. Could be very special indeed.

Who will do an Oasis and conquer summer?

So in the end the Gallaghers didn’t have the tour-ending scrap on the first night that everyone predicted, and instead delivered the year’s most euphoric, not to mention lucrative, cultural event. But those expected 2026 Knebworth dates are now looking unlikely, so someone else will have to rule 2026’s summer season. Early contenders include: My Chemical Romance, playing a series of vast reunion gigs at Anfield and Wembley stadiums and Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park; Ariana Grande, embarking on a crackers 10-night residency at London’s O2; Lewis Capaldi, now back into the swing of touring and headlining two Hyde Park gigs as well as the Isle of Wight festival; Tyler the Creator, taking over east London’s All Points East festival over two nights; and Bad Bunny, heading over to the Tottenham Hotspur stadium in July.

Are we about to get a genuinely good Game of Thrones spin-off?

There arguably hasn’t been a decent season of a show set in Westeros since the penultimate Game of Thrones back in 2017, given how underwhelming the show’s actual final run in 2019 was, and the dour stodge of prequel series House of the Dragon. But on the horizon is a GoT spin-off that might actually buck that negative trend. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (19 January, Sky/Now) has a lot going for it: it is drawn from George RR Martin’s much-liked Dunk and Egg novellas; its first series runs to a tight six episodes; and it won’t be weighed down by endless scenes of CGI dragons – instead focusing on the lower-stakes adventures of a hedge knight and his squire. And if that spin-off does end up underwhelming, later this year there’s another chance for House of The Dragon to redeem itself with a third season that boasts the addition of James Norton.

Will Grand Theft Auto VI live up to lofty expectations (if it even arrives)?

The last time Rockstar released a Grand Theft Auto game, GTA V in September 2013, the coalition government were still in power in the UK and Apprentice host Donald Trump was mulling his first foray into politics with a run at governor of New York. Following up on one of the most celebrated and successful video games in history has proved quite the undertaking, and the Grand Theft Auto VI ’s release date has already been bumped back several times. Currently pencilled in for a 19 November arrival, it will return to the franchise’s fictional Miami stand-in of Vice City, and will boast the series’ first female protagonist, though little is known beyond those details and the briefest of teaser trailers. Given the long wait, it will be fascinating to see if it can still capture the frenzied identity of an America that has changed a fair bit since the last game.

Will Wuthering Heights be the most beloved film of 2026, or the most reviled?

Who better to entrust the adaptation one of literature’s most celebrated works to than Miss Marmite herself, Emerald Fennell? Well, arguably many, many people, but there is a certain boldness from Warner Bros in handing the Saltburn director the reins to their Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi-starring Wuthering Heights (13 February) – not least because she has immediately used them in an S&M bondage scene. Expect that and plenty of other moments that will make the Brontë purists blanche in a movie event that will dominate the discourse like no other. If nothing else, its soundtrack should be strong, featuring a suite of glowering gothic songs from Charli xcx, part of a big movie year for the hyperpop star: she’s also acting in a number of upcoming dramas, including The Moment, a mockumentary loosely based on her Brat tour.

Is 2026 the year the sprawling series strikes back?

In recent years TV shows have tended to arrive on our screens for a good time, rather than a long time. Streamers like Netflix have lost their appetite for sprawling multi-seasoned dramas, and instead the limited, one-and-done series, which can lure in big acting names who don’t want to commit to years-long assignments, now seems to be the default mode of delivery. The fact that many of the shows that do run longer than a single season tend to have large gaps between outings, only adds to a sense that there’s something missing. So all hail Industry (BBC iPlayer 12 January), a genuinely ambitious, sprawling swaggering, multi-series show, which returns for a fourth season this month, just over a year since its third outing. Slow Horses and The Bear should be back, like clockwork, at some point this year too, and – less than a year after the conclusion of The Handmaid’s Tale – there’s a return to Gilead with an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s followup novel The Testaments. And this will hopefully be the year we finally get to see much-hyped real-time medical drama The Pitt in the UK: its first series should be included as part of the launch of HBO Max, right as its second outing is airing in the States.

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