The best upcoming movies for May 2026 and beyond

Mortal Kombat II

Usually, when a film is delayed it’s a bad sign – perhaps restive actors, post-production hell, reshoots or negative test screenings have spooked the studio. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here; after originally being slated for an October 2025 release, Warner Bros. eventually decided Mortal Kombat II was simply too big, bold and brilliant to be a fall movie – and consequently pushed it back to May of 2026 where it can bask in summer blockbuster status.

With Karl Urban joining the cast as action star turned fighter Johnny Cage, it’s time for another brutal, no-holds barred tournament featuring a roster of martial artists, monsters and demigods. Expect gallons of gore as Cage, Sonia Blade, Kitana and more battle it out in an attempt to dethrone the evil emperor Shao Khan.

Release date: 8 May 2026

The Mandalorian and Grogu

Star Wars is coming back to where it belongs: the big screen. The Rebellion has succeeded in toppling the Empire, but Imperial warlords still plague the galaxy, and the fledgling New Republic needs muscle. Enter Din Djarin and his young apprentice Grogu (aka Baby Yoda).

Sigourney Weaver joins the cast as Colonel Ward, a senior New Republic figure, while The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White lends his voice to Rotta the Hutt, son of the late (and unlamented) Jabba. Pedro Pascal, of course, returns as the outwardly steely but ultimately soft-hearted Mando, and with Jon Favreau once more directing and Ludwig Göransson back on musical duties, the creative DNA of the beloved Disney+ series seems very much intact – just supersized for IMAX.

Incredibly, this will be the first Lucasfilm project to hit theatres in almost seven years, and if the trailers are anything to go by – alien brawls, AT-AT battles, Grogu being cute – it’s been worth every second of the wait. We’re very aware of the spottiness of Star Wars’ recent efforts, but if the creators can harness the energy of the first and second seasons of The Mandalorian, the Force really could be with this one.

Release date: 22 May 2026

Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg’s back up to his old tricks in this mystery-shrouded movie that seems to be all about the existence of extraterrestrials – and how the world finally discovers that those lights in the sky aren’t just errant weather balloons or wafts of swamp gas.

Emily Blunt’s weather girl gets possessed mid-broadcast, Josh O’Connor’s determined to spill the truth to seven billion people at once, and behind the scenes we’ve got John Williams cooking up his 30th (!) Spielberg score.

Four decades after Close Encounters launched the modern UFO movie, the master returns to his stomping ground with David Koepp scripting and a cast that also includes Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo. Hold tight, because there’s some IMAX-ready cosmic panic incoming.

Release date: 12 June 2026

Jackass: Best and Last

26 years after a group of skate-punk idiots first persuaded MTV to let them film each other getting hurt, the Jackass franchise is going out on its own terms. That means new stunts, a greatest-hits reel from the archives and Spike Jonze directing the opening and closing sequences. Johnny Knoxville has said that this will be the last one, and this time it probably means it.

Bam Margera will appear only in archive footage, following his well-documented falling-out with the rest of the bunch, while Knoxville himself is barred from any stunt that risks another concussion, having sustained a brain haemorrhage during the production of Jackass Forever – which I suppose rather puts paid to the argument that these men have no sense of self-preservation. They do – it just took about a quarter of a century to find it.

Release date: 26 June 2026

The Odyssey

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

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

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

The End of Oak Street

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

Resident Evil

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

The Adventures of Cliff Booth

David Fincher directing a Quentin Tarantino-written movie in which Brad Pitt revisits his role as stuntman Cliff Booth from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? It sounds like fever dream fan fiction but, incredibly, it’s a real thing.

Pitt will be joined by Timothy Olyphant (reprising his OUATIH role as James Stacy), Elizabeth Debicki, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Carla Gugino, Scott Caan and Holt McCallany in the film, which will be set in 1977 and is reportedly working off a budget of around $200 million – far more than any Tarantino or Fincher film to date. It’ll be getting a release in selected theatres prior to streaming on Netflix later on.

We know next to nothing about the plot as yet, but with all that Hollywood royalty involved, we’re extremely excited about what’s in store.

Release date: Summer 2026

Dune: Part Three

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