Hollywood’s fall 2026 slate is so crowded that Vanity Fair’s season preview runs to 60 titles — and September alone delivers a Practical Magic sequel 28 years in the making, Zach Cregger’s original take on Resident Evil, a Paul Greengrass medieval epic, and Robert Pattinson playing To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen. Beyond that, the season builds toward Dune: Part Three, a new Hunger Games, and what Vanity Fair identifies as the year’s strangest trend: three separate films about “insanely powerful tech overlords.” Here’s the calendar that matters, September first.
Key Takeaways
- Vanity Fair's fall preview runs to 60 titles, and September carries the load: Practical Magic 2 (Sept. 11), Zach Cregger's Resident Evil (Sept. 18), and A24's Primetime (Sept. 25).
- Robert Pattinson plays To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in Primetime, which premieres at Venice on September 5 before going wide.
- Three separate films are about tech moguls: Guadagnino's Artificial with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, Alex Gibney's Musk documentary, and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning on October 9.
- Netflix's November headliner is David Fincher's The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth (Nov. 25), with Dune: Part Three and The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping looming over the whole season.
September’s big five
Mayday (September 4, Apple TV). Ryan Reynolds is a stranded Cold War fighter pilot; Kenneth Branagh — yes, that Kenneth Branagh — is the Russian ex-KGB carpenter helping him escape, in an ‘80s-set buddy action-comedy from Game Night directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. Vanity Fair’s read: “both actors look like they’re having a whole lot of fun.” Same day in theaters: By Any Means, Paramount’s crime thriller pairing a Mafia hitman with a young Black FBI agent investigating murders of civil rights leaders in 1966 Mississippi, per FilmGordon.
Hope (September 9). Vanity Fair calls Na Hong-jin’s alien-invasion spectacle “the craziest movie at Cannes” — a Korean box-office hit starring Hwang Jung-min, Squid Game’s Hoyeon, and real-life couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as the aliens. Distributor Neon is betting the “wholly original if not totally nuts” word of mouth translates stateside.
Practical Magic 2 (September 11). Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as the Owens sisters nearly three decades after the 1998 cult favorite, with Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest back as the aunts and Joey King and Maisie Williams as the next generation of witches, directed by Susanne Bier, per Vanity Fair. Expect midnight margaritas.
Resident Evil (September 18). Fresh off Barbarian and Weapons, horror’s hottest director Zach Cregger reboots the franchise with an original story — no returning characters, no game adaptation. Austin Abrams stars as a medical courier whose routine job becomes a survival run through the zombie-infested universe, with Severance’s Zach Cherry and Paul Walter Hauser along for the ride, per Vanity Fair. It’s the first live-action Resident Evil film in five years.
Primetime (September 25, A24). The season’s most talked-about wild card: Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen in Lance Oppenheim’s drama about the making of To Catch a Predator, based on the 2007 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die.” Merritt Wever plays a producer, and Phoebe Bridgers makes her acting debut, per Vanity Fair, which reports the trailer “set the internet ablaze.” It premieres at Venice on September 5 before going wide.
Also on the September calendar: Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising (September 11), with Andrew Garfield leading the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt that inspired the Robin Hood legend — a story of “a few powerful men oppressing the many” that Vanity Fair suspects will feel eerily current.
The tech-mogul trilogy
The fall’s defining cluster, per Vanity Fair: three films about tech power. Luca Guadagnino’s “already-controversial” Artificial stars Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — a company whose real-life news cycle is moving faster than any screenplay, as OpenAI’s unreleased Astra model shows. Alex Gibney’s documentary Musk needs no explanation. And Aaron Sorkin returns to Facebook with The Social Reckoning (October 9, Sony), which FilmGordon describes as whistleblowers and insiders confronting “the consequences of a platform that transformed how the world communicates.” Twenty years after The Social Network, the sequel arrives in a very different mood.
October and November: the awards machine spins up
FilmGordon’s season hub flags the next wave: Digger (October 2, Warner Bros.), about “the world’s most powerful man” racing to contain a catastrophe he caused; A24’s Misty Green (October 9), a faded-actress comeback story; Wild Horse Nine (November 6, Searchlight), a CIA-officers-on-Easter-Island drama set against Chile’s 1973 coup; and I Play Rocky (November 20, Amazon MGM), the true story of Sylvester Stallone refusing to sell his Rocky screenplay unless he starred.
The November headliner comes from Netflix: The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth (November 25), the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follow-up with Brad Pitt’s stuntman — now directed by David Fincher, per ScreenCrush and FilmGordon. ScreenCrush’s Netflix fall preview also promises a new Brad Bird animated feature, a Norm Macdonald documentary, and two Tyler Perry films, in keeping with the streamer’s quantity-first strategy.
And looming over the whole season: Dune: Part Three and The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, the “visually lush blockbusters” Vanity Fair expects to dominate the box office.
The festival gauntlet decides everything
Some of these films already have festival receipts — Fjord (Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve at Cannes) and Wicker (Olivia Colman falling for “a man made from twigs” at Sundance, per Vanity Fair). But the real sorting happens in the next three weeks, as Venice, Telluride, and Toronto screen the contenders. Primetime’s Venice premiere on September 5 is the one to watch: Vanity Fair notes Pattinson — fresh off The Drama and The Odyssey, and currently shooting his Batman sequel — could be building “a hat trick” of acclaimed performances heading into awards season.
What happens next
September’s theatrical calendar starts fast — Mayday and By Any Means land Labor Day weekend, with Practical Magic 2 as the month’s biggest nostalgic draw and Resident Evil as its box-office test of Cregger’s brand. Festival verdicts from Venice and Toronto will crown the season’s awards frontrunners by mid-September, and the tech-trilogy discourse (Artificial especially) is guaranteed to outrun the films themselves. If the fall delivers even half of what the 60-title preview promises, the October-through-Christmas corridor will be the most competitive theatrical stretch in years.
Movies aren’t the only fall draw fighting for the same weekends: Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights 2026 is already open with its own horror lineup, and the season’s loudest streaming argument isn’t about a film at all — it’s whether Stranger Things is actually finished.
Quick poll
Which September movie are you seeing first?
Vanity Fair reports Primetime's trailer "set the internet ablaze" — it premieres at Venice on September 5, three weeks before its wide release.
FAQ
What are the biggest movies coming out in September 2026? Practical Magic 2 (September 11), Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil (September 18), Primetime with Robert Pattinson (September 25), the Korean alien hit Hope (September 9), and Apple TV’s Mayday with Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh (September 4).
Is Practical Magic 2 really happening? Yes — Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return, with Joey King and Maisie Williams joining as the next generation, directed by Susanne Bier. It opens September 11, per Vanity Fair.
What is Primetime about? The making of To Catch a Predator: Robert Pattinson plays host Chris Hansen in A24’s drama, premiering at Venice September 5 and opening September 25.
Who plays Sam Altman in the Artificial movie? Andrew Garfield stars as the OpenAI CEO in Luca Guadagnino’s film — one of three fall titles about tech moguls, alongside Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning.
