OscarsOscarsCongratulations to ‘One Battle After Another.’ It’s now time to begin preparing for another stacked year of contenders.
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By Julianna RessMarch 20, 12:18 pm UTC • 15 min
We’ve reached the final edition of Statue Season. After tracking the closest races, the winningest narratives, and all of the plain old movie magic that led up to the 98th Oscars, we finally saw One Battle After Another take home the Academy’s top prize last Sunday night. But before we say goodbye to awards season, let’s take a way-too-early look ahead at what movies might be in next year’s Best Picture race.
After an unusually long awards season in which a number of key races came down to the wire, you might be ready to click out of Gold Derby and take a much-needed break from the Oscars. Or, if you’re anything like me, you might already be wondering what the One Battle After Another vs. Sinners of 2027 will be. The Odyssey vs. Dune: Part Three? Digger vs. the eventual Neon-distributed Palme d’Or winner? A five-way battle of all the movies Anne Hathaway is starring in? 2026 already looks to be packed with films that have Oscar glory in their sights—with everyone from Steven Spielberg to Aaron Sorkin to Luca Guadagnino hoping to follow in Paul Thomas Anderson’s footsteps. Here’s a comprehensive guide to the movies we’re tracking in the Best Picture race for the 2027 Academy Awards.
The Locks
The Odyssey (dir. Christopher Nolan)
Dune: Part Three (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
Disclosure Day (dir. Steven Spielberg)
If all three of these hit with critics and audiences, this blockbuster Best Picture triumvirate will make One Battle After Another vs. Sinners look like Thursday Night Football. Outside of movies featuring Marvel and Star Wars characters (two franchises you will not find on this list), these are the three most anticipated releases of the year.
The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to Oppenheimer, which dominated the 2023-24 awards season and won Best Picture. Like Oppenheimer, The Odyssey is scheduled for the peak of summer blockbuster season and has an absurdly stacked cast including Anne Hathaway (one of her five roles in 2026), Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, and Matt Damon leading the film as Odysseus. (And also, Travis Scott is in it? Wonder how close he and Timothée Chalamet will be seated at next year’s Oscars.)
Speaking of Chalamet, the first Dune: Part Three trailer dropped on Tuesday to much excitement, and it also featured some crossover with the Odyssey cast—including Pattinson as some kind of weird little oddball, a role we can assume he’ll excel at (and surely he’ll use an accent none of us are prepared to hear). The only roadblock ahead for Paul Atreides and Co. is that Dune: Part Three is currently slated to open against Avengers: Doomsday on December 18 (my thoughts are already with the multiplex employees who will be working that weekend), which could dip into Dune’s box office returns. Nevertheless, the Dune films have been auto-noms in the Best Picture field, and even though the franchise doesn’t have many statuettes to show for it, Part Three is being sold as the “epic conclusion” to the saga and could definitely have a Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King–esque coronation ahead of it.
Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day should be just as much of a guarantee—I mean, come on, it’s Spielberg plus aliens! That’s one of cinema’s undefeated combos. But while Spielberg is still a regular at the Oscars (The Fabelmans, West Side Story, and The Post are some of his recent Best Picture nominees), his last miss with the Academy was Ready Player One, which garnered only a Best Visual Effects nomination despite an impressive box office showing. The Academy might just prefer Spielberg’s more traditional prestige dramas these days. But, at the very least, Disclosure Day does appear to have greater awards bona fides than Ready Player One did—it’s got a great cast featuring Josh O’Connor, who’s coming off a fantastic 2025 and is zeroing in on his first Oscar nomination, as well as Emily Blunt and Colman Domingo, both of whom were nominated recently; it’s also slated for a summer release rather than spring. If it does all come together for Disclosure Day, expect the cinephile in your life to be delighted to see Spielberg’s UFOs back in the Oscars race.
Already on the Academy’s Radar
Digger (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu)
Wild Horse Nine (dir. Martin McDonagh)
Josephine (dir. Beth de Araújo)
Project Hail Mary (dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller)
Werwulf (dir. Robert Eggers)
Digger is my single biggest question mark of 2026. The black comedy will star Tom Cruise in his first nonaction role in over a decade, after reports in early 2024 stated that “he’d like to return to working with auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson” and was angling for a role in Quentin Tarantino’s new movie before it was scrapped. He ended up with Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who may not be PTA or Tarantino but was a multi-time nominee in the 2010s with Birdman and The Revenant. Both films are remembered as pretty polarizing Oscar players, although the former nabbed Best Picture in 2014. And then Iñárritu followed those up in 2022 with Bardo, which got some of the worst reviews of his career.
But does it even matter if Digger is good? Cruise has been a huge advocate for the cinematic experience during the industry’s most challenging times as it navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and the Hollywood strikes. Top Gun: Maverick was such a huge win for Hollywood that the Academy nominated it for Best Picture and, bafflingly, Best Adapted Screenplay. (There were also rumors at the time that Cruise was considered for a Best Actor nod, which would’ve been wildly atypical for a stunt-heavy action role.) Cruise has his sights set on the Oscar win that has long eluded him, and the Academy would probably love to give it to him Plus, have you seen the Digger cast list? Supporting Cruise are Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, and Emma D’Arcy—a who’s who of buzzy stars both past and present. Digger might have to be only halfway decent for the Academy to eat it up. It’s also being distributed by Warner Bros., who could be looking for another big awards push between Digger and Dune after a banner 2025 featuring One Battle and Sinners.
Rounding out this tier are Project Hail Mary, which comes out this weekend and has been the source of major hype that could translate to awards consideration; Werwulf, gothic horror maestro Robert Eggers’s follow-up to four-time Oscar nominee Nosferatu; and Josephine, the Gemma Chan– and Channing Tatum–led indie that won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance in January. Last, we have Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine—McDonagh has become an Oscars regular for better (The Banshees of Inisherin) or worse (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), so his new film will definitely be in awards conversations.
Picked Up by Neon (or Destined to Be)
Fjord (dir. Cristian Mungiu)
All of a Sudden (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
A Place in Hell (dir. Chloe Domont)
Bucking Fastard (dir. Werner Herzog)
Parallel Tales (dir. Asghar Farhadi)
Sheep in the Box (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)
The Cannes Film Festival lineup won’t be announced until April 9, so while we don’t yet know what will be in contention for the prestigious Palme d’Or, we do know that Neon will be there with a checkbook and a dream. The indie studio has acquired the North American rights to the past six Palme winners and this year it distributed four of the five Best International Feature nominees at the Oscars, two of which (The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value) broke into the Best Picture field. Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg recently reported that Neon started turning a profit only in 2024, with its biggest expense by far being distributing and marketing its films. The company is willing to shell out in pursuit of awards recognition, which in turn has led to gains from physical sales as well as licensing its catalog to streaming services and TV networks after its movies leave theaters With its strategy finally starting to pay dividends, Neon will certainly look to bolster its reputation as the prestige destination for independent and international fare.
Neon has already picked up All of a Sudden, A Place in Hell, and Sheep in the Box. All of a Sudden is directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who earned a Best Picture nod in 2022 with Drive My Car and nabbed Best International Feature. A Place in Hell is a thriller by Chloe Domont (Fair Play) that Neon snatched up back in May, and it stars Michelle Williams, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Andrew Scott. Sheep in the Box is a sci-fi drama with an AI-related premise, directed by former Palme winner Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters), who has two films coming out this year
The rest of this tier are likely Cannes premieres. Cristian Mungiu is a former Palme winne returning with a family drama starring Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan, two recent Oscar nominees whose last costarring picture, A Different Man, was a fringe awards player in 2024-25. Bucking Fastard will be Werner Herzog’s first feature since 2019, and it stars Kate and Rooney Mara as twin sisters, while Parallel Tales will be the latest effort from two-time Best International Feature winner Asghar Farhadi Of course, until we find out which films get ridiculously long standing ovations at Cannes, it’s hard to know what else could emerge in this category. Just know that if a movie gets picked up by Neon, it’s one to keep your eye on.
Sequels Associated With David Fincher
The Social Reckoning (dir. Aaron Sorkin)
The Adventures of Cliff Booth (dir. David Fincher)
David Fincher isn’t technically involved in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, but since it’s a companion piece to The Social Network, Fincher comparisons will be inevitable. The Social Reckoning chronicles the 2021 Facebook leaks, which proved that the company was aware of misinformation and harmful content promoted on its platforms and exempted high-profile users from its rules. Jeremy Strong will portray Mark Zuckerberg, and after his hammy performances in The Apprentice and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, it’s clear that Strong is in hot pursuit of an Oscar. Rounding out the cast are Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Bill Burr, and Wunmi Mosaku. I won’t lie, this movie sounds kind of made up—but it is happening! And while Sorkin’s directing career has been spotty at best, his films have still regularly earned Oscar nominations (Being the Ricardos, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Molly’s Game). But Sorkin did write a fantastic script for the original Social Network, and he will be writing Reckoning in addition to directing—maybe Zuckerberg just serves as his greatest muse?
Fincher himself is turning his attention to The Adventures of Cliff Booth, the sequel to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood that’s focused on Brad Pitt’s character. Tarantino wrote the script but, as he still tries to nail down his final directorial effort, decided to pass the director’s chair to Fincher. Again, I did not believe that this movie was really happening until I saw that Super Bowl trailer (and it actually didn’t look half bad!). Once Upon a Time earned 10 Oscar nominations in 2020—and won Pitt his first and only statuette—so we have to consider this an awards player until proven otherwise. Or at least until Netflix, who is distributing the film, bungles the awards campaign. Speaking of …
Could Get Nominated If They’re Not Buried on Netflix
Saturn Return (dir. Greg Kwedar)
Here Comes the Flood (dir. Fernando Meirelles)
Train Dreams was one of the biggest surprise Best Picture nominees of 2025—it wasn’t on a ton of prognosticators’ radars until it surged right before nominations were announced, and it ended up landing four nods altogether. The film was the fourth collaboration between writer-director team Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, who trade credits between films and also earned a Best Adapted Screenplay nod in 2023 with Sing Sing. Their growing reputation with the Academy immediately puts their next movie, the romantic drama Saturn Return, on Oscar watch. It will also be their second film for Netflix after Train Dreams, and between attempting to buy a studio and signing big-name directors, the company is still doggedly pursuing its first Best Picture Oscar.
Here Comes the Flood, on the other hand, doesn’t, on paper, appear to have the same awards aspirations—but as a heist film starring Robert Pattinson and Denzel Washington, it might just be sick as hell. Plus, simply having Denzel in your movie often leads to some awards clout.
Biopics We Have to Consider
Artificial (dir. Luca Guadagnino)
Being Heumann (dir. Sian Heder)
Ink (dir. Danny Boyle)
Tony (dir. Matt Johnson)
There wasn’t enough celebration about there not being a single biopic included in the 2026 Best Picture slate. The closest we got were Marty Supreme, which was inspired by a real ping-pong player but was largely an original story, and Hamnet, which was closer to Shakespeare fan fiction than it was to anything resembling a biography. That said, the next awards season will still have its fair share of biopics.
The only film in this slate that isn’t based on someone audiences are likely familiar with is Being Heumann, which is about disability activist Judith Heumann. This will be CODA director Sian Heder’s title defense after her film’s anomalous Best Picture win in 2021: CODA is still the only streaming movie to win the Academy’s top prize. Being Heumann will be another Apple distribution, with Ruth Madeley in the title role and Mark Ruffalo and Dylan O’Brien in supporting parts
The other three in this tier will feature big and buzzy performances: Artificial will cover the controversial firing and rehiring of OpenAI’s CEO in 2023, with Andrew Garfield starring as Sam Altman; Ink is about the newspaper rivalry that birthed Rupert Murdoch’s empire, with Guy Pearce playing the media magnate; and Tony is about the life and career of Anthony Bourdain, as portrayed by The Holdovers’ breakout Dominic Sessa These are huge personalities that people have very strong opinions about—an Oscar had to have crossed these actors’ minds when they accepted these roles. But these films will really have to hit to appeal to an Academy that’s becoming less amenable to the biopic genre.
Might Be Relegated to the Acting Categories
Cry to Heaven (dir. Tom Ford)
Prima Facie (dir. Susanna White)
Paper Tiger (dir. James Gray)
The Dog Stars (dir. Ridley Scott)
Get ready to learn the difference between Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and George MacKay because they’re all in Tom Ford’s ensemble historical drama, based on Anne Rice’s novel Cry to Heaven. (Also featured in the cast: Colin Firth, Paul Bettany, Owen Cooper, Hunter Schafer, and … Adele?!) Elsewhere, Ridley Scott and James Gray both have the directorial clout to put their films on Best Picture watch, but neither have had much luck with the Academy lately. The A-list casts they put together, however, might turn some heads: Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, and Benedict Wong helm the postapocalyptic The Dog Stars, while Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller take on the family crime drama Paper Tiger. Prima Facie, based on the one-woman play that won Jodie Comer a Tony Award in 2023, could similarly operate as an awards vehicle for Cynthia Erivo, who stars in the film adaptation and will be looking to recover from the fallout of Wicked: For Good’s Oscar shutout.
Long Shots We’re Excited About
I Love Boosters (dir. Boots Riley)
Look Back (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)
The Drama (dir. Kristoffer Borgli)
Coyote vs. Acme (dir. Dave Green)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
We’re in purely hopeful territory here—you’re probably more likely to find these on your favorite critics’ year-end lists than in the 2027 Oscar nomination slate. But I hope to be proved wrong! Between Boots Riley’s colorful comeback, Coyote vs. Acme’s escape from David Zaslav jail, and The Drama’s, well, drama, there’s plenty to be excited about at the cinema in 2026, Oscars aside. But it wouldn’t hurt if that excitement builds enough to warrant some attention from the Academy.
Starring Anne Hathaway
Mother Mary (dir. David Lowery)
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (dir. David Frankel)
The End of Oak Street (dir. David Robert Mitchell)
Verity (dir. Michael Showalter)
Throw in The Odyssey, in which Hathaway takes on the role of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, and 2026 is bound to be a Hathaissance. I imagine she’ll be running for a Best Supporting Actress nod for Nolan’s film—or maybe even aiming for lead depending on how big the part is—but Mother Mary and The End of Oak Street also both have potential for a Weapons-esque awards push if they are well received this year. The former is a psychological thriller from the director of The Green Knight that assembles the cool girl Avengers: Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, FKA Twigs, and Kaia Gerber all have supporting parts. The latter is David Robert Mitchell’s (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake) debut with a major studio—a sci-fi flick coproduced and distributed by Warner Bros. If anything, Hathaway’s prolific 2026 might just serve to bolster her Odyssey campaign, but it’s also always fun to root for the rare double acting nomination—it’s happened only 12 times!
The 2028 Oscars
The Entertainment System Is Down (dir. Ruben Ostlund)
Jack of Spades (dir. Joel Coen)
Death of a Salesman (dir. Chinonye Chukwu)
1949 (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski)
The Riders (dir. Edward Berger)
Behemoth! (dir. Tony Gilroy)
If anyone out there is in an Oscars dynasty league—first of all, how can I join? And second, these are some potential 2026 titles that might get pushed to 2027 and therefore could serve as good keepers. Of these, I’m most excited for Jack of Spades, which teams up the more pensive Coen brother with Josh O’Connor in what’s been described as a “Gothic mystery” that they shot in Scotland last fall. If the film does get slated for next year, back-to-back O’Connor noms for Disclosure Day and Jack of Spades isn’t a bad bet, either.
LOL, What If These Get Nominated?
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew (dir. Greta Gerwig)
Untitled Jesse Eisenberg musical comedy
The Great Beyond (dir. J.J. Abrams)
Klara and the Sun (dir. Taika Waititi)
I know many people underestimated Greta Gerwig’s Barbie before it smashed at the box office and notched eight Academy Award nominations, and here I am possibly making the same mistake again. But I just don’t know what to make of Gerwig’s Narnia. This will be her first film since it was reported that she aspires to be a “big studio director” and move away from the smaller-scale pictures she built her name on, yet Narnia is set for a Christmas release on Netflix—which feels paradoxical! Plus, the last effort at bringing C.S. Lewis’s series to the screen resulted in diminishing returns before the franchise was ultimately abandoned. Gerwig’s solo directorial features have all earned Best Picture nods (Little Women and Lady Bird in addition to Barbie), so ostensibly, she should be on the Academy’s radar once again. Still, the obstacles around Narnia make me think that her path to a fourth Oscars ceremony won’t simply be a walk through the wardrobe.
Jesse Eisenberg similarly should be considered an Oscar contender after his last directed film, A Real Pain, earned a few nods, but the phrase “Untitled Jesse Eisenberg musical comedy starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti” just raises too many questions for me to immediately place it in contention. (The first one you’re probably wondering: Who is writing the songs? The answer: Eisenberg himself!) Elsewhere, we have two Jenna Ortega vehicles, and the actress has an … inconsistent filmography, to put it kindly. Teaming up with J.J. Abrams, who’s coming off the derided Rise of Skywalker, and Taika Waititi, who’s coming off of everyone turning their backs on him, doesn’t inspire hope that she’ll be righting the ship this year.
Leave Me out of This
Michael (dir. Antoine Fuqua)
Madden (dir. David O. Russell)
Also known as the Extra Cursed Biopic tier. Matt Belloni reported in early 2025 that Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic underwent extensive reshoots after scenes chronicling the child sexual abuse allegations against Jackson in the ’90s were deemed unusable because they depicted one of the survivors, Jordan Chandler, despite a signed agreement prohibiting the Jackson estate from dramatizing the Chandler family in any such film. Belloni wrote that the script originally portrayed Jackson “as the naive victim of the money-grubbing Chandlers” and that the story line made up the bulk of the film’s third act. Madden—in which Nicolas Cage and Christian Bale star as John Madden and Al Davis, respectively—was directed by David O. Russell, whose niece said in 2011, when she was 19, that he sexually assaulted her. Russell has also been accused of physically and verbally abusing his cast and crew on movie sets. His work on Madden has also had its own controversy: In May, TMZ reported that a supporting actor and others walked off the set after the director used the n-word. (The report also said that studio sources maintained that Russell did not use the word.)
Ultimately, I want nothing to do with either of these movies. I’m holding out hope that the Academy won’t, either.
Julianna Ress
Julianna is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. She covers music and film and has written about sped-up songs, Willy Wonka, and Charli XCX. She can often be found watching the Criterion Channel or the Sacramento Kings.