Summer movie season always sells itself on spectacle, but 2026 is arriving with a stranger spread than usual, one that stretches from giant-screen mythmaking and four-quadrant animation to smaller festival curios, political thrillers, horror oddities, music dramas, adult comedies, and modest genre counter-programming. The studio machinery is obviously here: Christopher Nolan goes full Homeric blockbuster with “The Odyssey,” Tom Holland returns to Peter Parker’s loneliest chapter in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” Pixar reopens the play bin with “Toy Story 5,” Milly Alcock gets her first major DC test with “Supergirl,” “The Mandalorian and Grogu” tries to turn a Disney+ phenomenon into a theatrical “Star Wars” event, and “Coyote vs. ACME” finally escapes the corporate vault after becoming an accidental symbol of the write-off era.
READ MORE: The 150 Most Anticipated Films Of 2026
But the calendar is not only franchise real estate. Auteurs have returned too. Boots Riley is back with another class-war provocation, Ildikó Enyedi has a centuries-spanning tree movie, Kent Jones returns with a late-life literary drama, Mark Jenkin is sending another haunted Cornish mystery out to sea, and Gregg Araki is bringing sex, art, and trouble back into the summer conversation. If last summer often felt like studios failing to learn from their mistakes, this one looks more like a messy collision between IP certainty and riskier, stranger bets.
Below are 53 films arriving between May and August, ordered by release date.
May
“The Devil Wears Prada 2”
Nearly 20 years after “The Devil Wears Prada” became one of the defining studio comedies of the mid-2000s, the fictional powerhouse fashion magazine Runway is reopening its doors. Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci return, with David Frankel back behind the camera, and Kenneth Branagh, Lucy Liu, and Justin Theroux joining the ensemble. The original endured because it understood ambition, humiliation, mentorship, workplace seduction, and abuse. With the media collapsing around us, pervasive influencer culture overtaking things, and mass layoffs abounding, maybe this belated sequel can do more than tap into the nostalgia pipe of girlboss mythmaking. (Read our review).
Premiere Date: May 1, 2026, via 20th Century Studios.
“Animal Farm”
Andy Serkis directs this animated adaptation of George Orwell’s political allegory, written by Nicholas Stoller and featuring the voices of Seth Rogen as Napoleon, Gaten Matarazzo as Lucky, Woody Harrelson as Boxer, Laverne Cox as Snowball, Kieran Culkin as Squealer, Glenn Close as Freida Pilkington, Steve Buscemi as Mr. Whymper, Jim Parsons, Kathleen Turner, Iman Vellani, and Serkis himself. The film follows the animals of Manor Farm as they overthrow their human owner and try to build a more equal society, only for the pigs to consolidate power. This version adds new characters and reshapes the Orwell story for a younger audience.
Premiere Date: May 1, 2026, via Angel Studios.
“Hokum”
Adam Scott checks into an Irish inn with a dangerous local history in “Hokum,” the new supernatural horror film from Damian McCarthy. Scott plays a reclusive novelist who travels to the inn to scatter his parents’ ashes and becomes entangled in stories about an ancient witch tied to the property’s honeymoon suite. McCarthy’s “Oddity” marked him as a horror filmmaker with a strong feel for dread, folklore, and warped domestic spaces. This setup has intriguing ingredients: grief, isolation, a remote location, a haunted room, and a protagonist whose anxiety may not be misplaced (Read our review).
Premiere Date: May 1, 2026, via NEON.
“The Sheep Detectives”
A cozy murder mystery told partly through a flock of sheep sounds like a children’s film premise that could go unbearably cute fast, but “The Sheep Detectives” has a stranger pedigree than the logline suggests. Kyle Balda directs from a script by Craig Mazin (“The Last Of Us,” “Chernobyl”), adapting Leonie Swann’s novel “Three Bags Full.” Hugh Jackman plays a shepherd whose mysterious death sends his sheep into detective mode, with Nicholas Braun, Nicholas Galitzine, Molly Gordon, Hong Chau, and Emma Thompson among the human cast. The voice ensemble includes Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart, Bella Ramsey, and Brett Goldstein (Read our review).
Premiere Date: May 8, 2026, via Amazon MGM Studios.
“Blue Film”
A single paid encounter becomes a disturbing confrontation in “Blue Film,” the feature from writer-director Elliot Tuttle. Kieron Moore stars as a fetish-catering camboy who agrees to spend the night with an anonymous client for a large sum of money. Reed Birney plays the masked man, whose connection to Aaron’s past makes the arrangement more dangerous. The film premiered at Edinburgh and has been positioned as a confrontational queer chamber piece about sex work, power, memory, and exposure. Birney’s gift for quiet menace makes the two-hander setup especially promising.
Premiere Date: May 8, 2026, via Obscured Releasing.
“Mortal Kombat II”
Karl Urban enters the arena as Johnny Cage in “Mortal Kombat II,” with Simon McQuoid returning to direct. Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin, Mehcad Brooks, Lewis Tan, Tati Gabrielle, Adeline Rudolph, Chin Han, Tadanobu Asano, Joe Taslim, and Hiroyuki Sanada are also in the cast. The sequel delves deeper into the franchise’s tournament mythology and the Earthrealm/Outworld conflict following the 2021 reboot. The appeal remains simple enough: fatalities, martial-arts spectacle, character entrances, and the R-rated “finish him!” video-game violence that has always defined the brand.
Premiere Date: May 8, 2026, via Warner Bros.
“Silent Friend”
Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi returns with “Silent Friend,” one of the stranger and more welcome summer entries: a film centered on a Ginkgo biloba tree inside a medieval German university town, observing human life across centuries. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Léa Seydoux, and Luna Wedler star, which already makes this feel like a festival-season import slipping into the summer noise through a side door.
Premiere Date: May 8, 2026, via 1-2 Special.
“The Wizard of the Kremlin”
Olivier Assayas takes on one of the summer’s more volatile subjects with “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a post-Soviet political drama about power, manipulation, and the rise of Vladimir Putin. Paul Dano plays a political strategist navigating the new order, with Jude Law as Putin, and Alicia Vikander and Jeffrey Wright also in the cast. Any dramatization of recent political history risks shrinking systems into personalities, but Assayas has long been drawn to networks of influence, performance, and manufactured narratives (Read our review).
Premiere Date: May 15, 2026, via Vertical.
“In the Grey”
Guy Ritchie returns to hard-boiled action territory with “In the Grey,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill, Eiza González, and Rosamund Pike as players in a covert-ops thriller about an elite team sent to recover a stolen billion-dollar fortune. That is Ritchie in a familiar lane: tactical banter, criminal logistics, international swagger, double-crosses, and danger as both business and sport. There’s baggage here; however, it’s been sitting on the shelf for a while. Lionsgate lost faith and sold it back to Black Bear, which conveniently entered the distribution game late last year.
Premiere Date: May 15, 2026, via Black Bear.
“Obsession”
YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Curry Barker (one half of internet sketch comedy duo “that’s a bad idea”) moves into features with “Obsession,” a supernatural horror film that turns romantic fantasy into a form of punishment. Michael Johnston plays a music-store employee who buys a mysterious toy and wishes for his childhood friend, played by Inde Navarrette, to fall in love with him. As monkey’s paw premises go, that one has a straightforward moral charge: desire becomes a curse here because consent was never part of the fantasy. Barker writes, directs, and edits, with Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, and Andy Richter in support.
Premiere Date: May 15, 2026, via Focus Features.
