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Calling October the beginning of awards season almost feels quaint. The month now has to accommodate prestige dramas, international festival winners, streaming swings, horror movies, IP plays, documentaries, and the kind of star-driven adult films Hollywood supposedly no longer makes. October 2026 has all of them, often arriving on the same weekend.
Tom Cruise finally escapes the franchise machine for Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Aaron Sorkin returns to Facebook without David Fincher, Lee Chang-dong releases his first feature since “Burning,” and Paweł Pawlikowski finally follows “Cold War.” New films from Cristian Mungiu, Ben Affleck, Chris Rock, Romain Gavras, Marie Kreutzer, Alex Gibney, Taika Waititi, Anton Corbijn, and Rachel Morrison also arrive, alongside studio swings like “Street Fighter” and DC Studios’ grotesque-looking “Clayface.”
“Digger”
After spending much of the last decade saving the world as Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise gets to help destroy it instead. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s apocalyptic black comedy casts Cruise as billionaire oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, desperately trying to solve an ecological catastrophe he helped create. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde, and Emma D’Arcy round out the ensemble, while longtime Iñárritu collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki shot the film entirely in VistaVision. A satire about greed, power, responsibility, and humanity becoming its own worst enemy, the film also gives Cruise a rare chance to go broad, ugly, and comic (read our review).
Release Date: In theaters and IMAX October 2 via Warner Bros. Pictures.
“Verity”
The increasingly lucrative Colleen Hoover movie business takes a darker turn with Michael Showalter’s adaptation of her psychosexual thriller. Dakota Johnson stars as Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer hired to complete a bestselling series after its author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), suffers a mysterious accident. Living with Verity and her husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), Lowen discovers a disturbing unfinished manuscript that may be fiction, confession, or something in between. “Channel Zero” and “Brand New Cherry Flavor” creator Nick Antosca wrote the screenplay, giving this glossy literary phenomenon an intriguing genre pedigree (read our review).
Release Date: In theaters October 2 via Amazon MGM Studios.
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“Love Of Your Life”
Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison follows “The Fire Inside” with a romantic drama starring Margaret Qualley as Maya, whose relationship with Charlie (Gabriel Basso) opens up an unexpected future before devastating loss forces her to rebuild her life. “Nyad” screenwriter Julia Cox wrote the film, while Aaron Pierre, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Catherine Keener, Tamara Lawrence, and Corey Johnson co-star. Morrison’s visual instincts make a sweeping romance an appealing next step after the grounded intimacy of her feature debut (read our review).
Release Date: In select theaters October 7 and streaming October 14 on Prime Video.
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“Fjord”
Cristian Mungiu won his second Palme d’Or for this severe family drama about faith, parenting, cultural difference, and communal suspicion. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play a devout Romanian-Norwegian couple whose move to a remote coastal village turns fraught after their adolescent daughter appears at school with bruises. Mungiu once again transforms an intimate moral dispute into a larger social confrontation, with Stan and Reinsve anchoring the deliberately chilly drama. The Playlist’s Cannes review found the film fascinating if distancing, but its provocations remain difficult to shake (read our review).
Release Date: In theaters October 9 via NEON.
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“The Social Reckoning”
Sixteen years after “The Social Network,” Aaron Sorkin returns to Facebook, this time writing and directing. Mikey Madison plays engineer Frances Haugen, who brings internal documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), leading to “The Facebook Files” investigation. Jeremy Strong takes over as Mark Zuckerberg, while Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr, and Gbenga Akinnagbe co-star. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth provides one notable connection to Fincher’s original, but Sorkin is treating the film as a companion piece rather than a conventional sequel.
Release Date: In theaters October 9 via Sony Pictures.
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