The best upcoming movies for July 2026 and beyond

After Oppenheimer bagged him his Oscars, Hollywood would have let Christopher Nolan make a movie about literally anything. He picked the oldest story in Western literature: Homer’s epic tale of one man’s nightmare commute home from work.

True to form, Nolan shot on location across Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and beyond, and has taken his characteristic approach to the supernatural, presenting the gods’ interventions as natural phenomena rather than outright magic. It looks extraordinary. Whether it’ll have the same emotional sweep as Oppenheimer remains to be seen, but if any filmmaker can make a 3,000-year-old poem feel relevant, it’s probably this one.

Matt Damon plays Odysseus, with Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as his long-suffering wife Penelope, Charlize Theron as the sorceress Circe, and Zendaya as the goddess Athena.

Release date: 17 July 2026

The trailer above should give you a little taste of this 1970s-set revenge thriller’s main quirk: an almost total lack of dialogue. Instead, director Potsy Ponciroli leans heavily on music and imagery to fill in the story, which seems to revolve around a working-class man (Reacher’s Alan Ritchson) being framed by a Detroit mobster with designs on his fiancée (Shalene Woodley). Sometimes action – gunshots, explosions and shattering glass, in this case – speaks a lot louder than words.

Release date: 24 July 2026

Tom Holland appears in a Christopher Nolan epic on 17 July, then swings back into action as Spider-Man just two weeks later. Mad respect. Four years on from No Way Home, Peter Parker is living a sad existence – alone and forgotten by everyone he loves, having wiped himself from the world’s memory in order to protect them. He’s devoted himself entirely to being Spider-Man, but something is changing in him physically, leading him to seek out his old Avengers pal Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo).

Brand New Day also brings back Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and introduces Sadie Sink in an as-yet-undisclosed role (but rumoured to be Jean Grey). The subtitle itself comes from a beloved 2008 comic book arc, and as with that story, the film apparently isn’t afraid to put Peter through the emotional wringer.

Release date: 31 July 2026

David Robert Mitchell, director of the fantastic indie horror classic It Follows, returns with his blockbusteriest, most J.J. Abrams-produced film to date. The premise is gloriously unhinged: a suburban family (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play the parents) wakes up to find that their entire neighbourhood has been yanked from its foundations by an unexplained cosmic event and deposited somewhere deeply, prehistorically wrong.

The 1980s setting, the Michael Giacchino score and the presence of what appear to be real-life dinosaurs all hint at something sitting between Spielberg and pure delirium. Mitchell is brilliant at using the mundane as a launching pad for dread, but the question is whether Warner Bros.’ monster budget and the film’s IMAX cinematography work with his instincts or bury them under empty spectacle.

Release date: 14 August 2026

The Resident Evil film franchise currently consists of no fewer than eight movies, of which one (the original, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson) remains a solid guilty pleasure, one (Welcome to Raccoon City) is largely a disaster, and six occupy a grey zone of loud but occasionally fun mediocrity. Zach Cregger, director of recent horror hits Barbarian and Weapons (and by his own admission someone who has never watched a single one of the previous films) makes for a bold choice to give the franchise yet another reboot.

Cregger’s version sets entirely new characters loose in Raccoon City during the T-virus outbreak, declining to touch beloved game protagonists like Leon Kennedy on the (very reasonable) grounds that the games already handle that better than any film could. Weapons’ Austin Abrams plays a medical courier having one hell of a shift, while semi-familiar faces like Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis and Zach Cherry round out the cast. Cregger describes the movie as “weird” and after what’s come before, that might be just the ticket to make Resident Evil interesting again.

Release date: 18 September 2026

 One of the BBC’s most beloved comedies of recent years, Ghosts ended in 2023 – but, much like one of the spectres that make up the bulk of its cast, it has returned from the dead. And in feature-length style, too.

We don’t know a great deal about this big-screen edition of Ghosts at the moment (and the embedded trailer above is very much a teaser rather than a plot-revealer) but the makers have confirmed that all six writer-performers – Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond – will return, alongside Charlotte Ritchie, Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Lolly Adefope. And, of course, Button House (aka Surrey’s West Horsley Place) is back as the location.

A quick note for readers outside of the British Isles: at the moment, the movie is slated only for a UK and Ireland theatrical run, and we’re not sure it’ll come to cinemas elsewhere.

Release date: 23 October 2026 (UK)

The last big-screen Cat in the Hat was a 2003 live-action disaster starring Mike Myers that Dr. Seuss fans would rather forget, so there’s a fairly low bar to clear with this new adaptation. The animated reboot takes a slightly expanded approach to the original material: the Cat is now a magical agent for the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration LLC – a well-meaning but consistently bungling operative given one last chance to prove himself by cheering up two miserable siblings.

Bill Hader voices the chapeau-sporting Cat himself, while Matt Berry plays the Fish, the siblings’ talking pet who takes a dim view of the whole situation.

Release date: 6 November 2026

The 50th Hunger Games comes with a particularly cruel twist: each district must send twice the usual number of tributes, meaning 48 children enter the arena for a double-sized blood bath. That’s the backdrop for this sixth Hunger Games film, which follows Haymitch Abernathy (the character played by Woody Harrelson in the original series), Katniss Everdeen’s eventual mentor, from the morning of his own reaping.

Francis Lawrence is back in the director’s chair (he’s now helmed four of the six Hunger Games films), which should at least guarantee some visual and tonal consistency despite this new setting. The supporting cast is extremely impressive, featuring Jesse Plemons, Elle Fanning, Maya Hawke, Lili Taylor, Kieran Culkin and Glenn Close alongside Ralph Fiennes stepping into the role of a younger President Snow (a part previously owned by the late Donald Sutherland).

Release date: 20 November 2026

The MCU’s long-telegraphed multiverse endgame has arrived, and it comes with a big twist: Robert Downey Jr. is back, but not as Tony “Iron Man” Stark – this time he’s playing supervillain Doctor Doom, with the movie scrapping its previously planned Kang Dynasty storyline to make him the big bad. So, superheroes from three distinct universes are set on a collision course with something none of them have faced before.

As you’d expect from Marvel’s summer super-blockbuster, the cast is epic in scale. Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Mackie, Florence Pugh, Paul Rudd, Sebastian Stan, Letitia Wright and Simu Liu are joined by Chris Evans reprising Steve Rogers in a story that apparently picks up from his Endgame ending. The X-Men contingent arrives via Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, James Marsden, Alan Cumming and Rebecca Romijn, while the Fantastic Four are represented by Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards and Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm.

It’s also sharing a release date with Dune 3, which means cinemagoers are going to have to a tricky decision to make in the weeks before Christmas.

Release date: 18 December 2026

Director Denis Villeneuve calls Dune Messiah his favourite of Frank Herbert’s series of novels, and describes this film adaptation as “one of my most personal.” If you know what happens in that book, that’s either thrillingly exciting or faintly alarming – possibly both.

Set 17 years after Part Two, the third and final film in Villeneuve’s trilogy sees Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) ruling the known universe and reckoning with the consequences of his holy war. Robert Pattinson joins the cast as Scytale, a shape-shifting antagonist with murky allegiances, while Anya Taylor-Joy appears as Paul’s sister Alia and Florence Pugh returns as Princess Irulan.

Villeneuve has described this film as more of a thriller than its predecessors, but I’d be shocked if it doesn’t have its fair share of IMAX-worthy moments. It also opens on the same day as Avengers: Doctor Doom – which both Chalamet and Robert Downey Jr. are already calling “Dunesday”. May the best pre-Christmas blockbuster win.

Release date: 18 December 2026

Robert Eggers’ follow-up to Nosferatu takes place in 13^th-century England, with era-appropriate Middle English dialogue and a grim, gritty and gloomy aesthetic that should suit his lycanthropy yarn perfectly. Notably, Eggers describes the movie as “the darkest thing I’ve ever written” and has reportedly chosen to set the story before the werewolf mythology we’re all familiar with – so don’t expect any silver bullets or similarly campy tropes here.

Former Eggers’ collaborators return in the form of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe and Lily-Rose Depp in the cast and Icelandic novelist Sjón (his Northman collaborator) on script-writing duties.

Release date: Christmas 2026