It’s been a strange and surprisingly good year at the movies. Strange because three of the five films below were made by people who started on YouTube. Good because the industry needed exactly that — a reminder that audiences haven’t stopped caring about cinema, they’ve just stopped tolerating films that condescend to them. Here’s what the first half of 2026 got right.
1. Project Hail Mary
Directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller | Amazon MGM Studios | March 20
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel follows middle school science teacher Ryland Grace, who wakes from an induced coma aboard an interstellar spacecraft with no memory of how he got there. As his memory gradually returns, he pieces together his mission: travel to the Tau Ceti system, 11.9 light-years from Earth, to understand why a mysterious sun-feeding organism hasn’t destroyed its star the way it’s slowly destroying ours — and to bring back whatever knowledge might save humanity.
The film holds a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes from over 400 critics, with audiences giving it an “A” CinemaScore, and it has grossed $683 million worldwide, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2026 so far. The trailer alone made history: it accumulated 400 million views globally in its first week, the most-viewed trailer for any original film in that window.
What makes Project Hail Mary the year’s most satisfying blockbuster isn’t the survival mechanics or the dazzling Greig Fraser cinematography — it’s Rocky. Gosling’s character spends a significant portion of the film alone on a spacecraft, but the film’s great invention is a first-contact story told as a buddy comedy: two scientists from different worlds, unable to initially communicate, working out a common language through music and problem-solving. The script by Drew Goddard balances world-ending stakes with enough humor, charm, and heartbreak to keep the audience perpetually off balance, and the emotional payoff hits harder precisely because it’s been earned.
The hotly debated topic isn’t whether the film is good — it plainly is — but whether Lord and Miller played it safe. The film takes Weir’s existential source material and tilts it toward warmth and comedy, and for some critics the last fifteen minutes overstay their welcome, serving up a series of neat conclusions that slightly deflate the emotional peak that precedes them. That’s a fair read, but it misses the bigger picture: in a year when audiences are repeatedly being sold the familiar, Project Hail Mary is a two-and-a-half-hour original science fiction film with genuine ideas about loneliness, sacrifice, and the limits of heroism — and it cost over $100 million to make. The fact that it worked, critically and commercially, matters.
2. Obsession
Directed by Curry Barker | Focus Features | May 15
Bear, a painfully shy music store employee played by Michael Johnston, nurses a quiet crush on his coworker Nikki. When he uses a cheap novelty trinket called a One Wish Willow to wish that she would love him more than anything in the world, she immediately does — and everything goes badly, irreversibly wrong.
The film was shot in Los Angeles in October 2024 for $750,000 and premiered at TIFF the following September. By the time it opened wide, it had crossed $370 million at the worldwide box office — making it, by any reasonable measure, one of the more extraordinary commercial stories in recent horror history.
Obsession is many things: a horror movie, a comedy, a love story. Most of all, it’s a tragedy. The conversation it’s generated has been equally layered. The film reads as being not-so-secretly about the loss of free will, and specifically about women being subjugated by their partners — a lineage that runs through Ruby Sparks and Companion, but that Barker pushes further into genuine horror than either of those films dared. The discourse around whether Bear is the film’s protagonist or its real villain has been running hot online since May, and it’s exactly the kind of argument great horror generates.
The true star is Inde Navarrette. Once Nikki falls under the curse, her entire body language transforms — the confidence vanishes, replaced by an anxious, pleading presence whose physicality grows increasingly disturbing. Critics have compared the performance to Isabelle Adjani’s work in Possession for its commitment to extreme emotional and physical intensity. It’s a breakout performance in every sense of the word, and the conversation it’s sparked about coercion dressed up as devotion lands differently in an era consumed with manosphere rhetoric and AI girlfriends. Barker reportedly drew inspiration partly from a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment, which says something about his ability to find genuine dread in the most mundane materials.
3. The Drama
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli | A24 | April 3
A happily engaged couple — Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) — find their wedding week derailed by a shocking revelation that Emma confesses during an innocent game among friends. The film follows the emotional wreckage in the days that follow.
On a budget of $28 million, it has grossed $132.5 million worldwide and became the fifth film in A24’s history to cross $100 million globally. It holds a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a consensus that credits “career-highlight performances by Robert Pattinson and Zendaya.”
Borgli, who made Dream Scenario with Nicolas Cage, has a gift for placing ordinary people inside socially unbearable situations and watching them thrash. The Drama is his most mainstream project, but it doesn’t feel defanged. The film invites nervous laughter as often as it does discomfort, and leaves audiences debating its meaning long after the credits roll. The twist at the center — A24 requested journalists not reveal it ahead of release, and that embargo held surprisingly well — is genuinely divisive, with some critics calling it a sharp piece of American satire and others finding it gratuitously provocative. The film generated criticism for its depiction of school shootings, with gun violence advocacy groups calling A24’s marketing misleading.
What isn’t divisive is Pattinson. He plays the revelation’s aftermath as a kind of manic unraveling — increasingly off the rails as the weight of Emma’s confession has him questioning everything he thought he knew about the woman he loves. Zendaya, characteristically, does more with restraint — her performance is about what she keeps from showing. The film belongs to the long tradition of comedies about the performance of couplehood, but it’s angrier than most. It asks whether love can survive the full truth of who someone is, and it doesn’t offer a clean answer.
4. Backrooms
Directed by Kane Parsons | A24 | May 29
Clark, a furniture store owner played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, discovers a strange doorway in his store’s basement that leads to an apparently endless dimension of liminal spaces — buzzing fluorescent rooms with yellowed carpets, no exits, and increasingly wrong things lurking inside them. When he disappears, his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) ventures in to find him.
The film opened to $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide in its opening weekend, setting a new A24 record and the largest original horror debut in history. Kane Parsons, 20 years old, became the youngest filmmaker to open a film at number one at the global box office.
The cultural substrate here matters enormously. The Backrooms began as a 2019 4chan post — a single image of an unsettling empty office, captioned with the feeling of having “noclipped” out of reality — and grew into one of the internet’s most prolific shared mythologies. Parsons was 17 when he began uploading short films exploring the concept, eventually accumulating millions of views and catching the attention of multiple studios. For the generation that grew up on this material, the film carries a weight that critics who encountered it cold didn’t always feel. A24 embraced that dynamic entirely — social media analytics showed audiences treating the film less like a studio release and more like the culmination of a long-running cultural phenomenon, with online buzz arriving 48% ahead of original horror norms.
What Parsons proves as a director is a mastery of mood — critics compared his approach to early David Lynch, particularly in his use of industrial sound design and the terror of enclosure. As an atmospheric horror film, Backrooms is extraordinarily effective. Ejiofor’s Clark is a broken-down man whose life doesn’t make sense to him, and his presence grounds the film’s more surreal elements in something recognizably human. The fact that it earned a B- CinemaScore — the traditional horror audience found it strange and slow — while still breaking A24’s all-time box office record is its own kind of achievement. It’s a film for a specific generation, and that generation showed up in enormous numbers.
5. Toy Story 5
Directed by Andrew Stanton | Disney/Pixar | June 20
Directed by Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton, the fifth installment follows Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and the rest of the toys as their owner Bonnie becomes consumed by a new AI-powered tablet called Lilypad — a device with its own ideas about what children should want.
It opened to $160 million domestically and $312 million worldwide in its opening weekend, the biggest debut of 2026 and the highest-ever opening for a Toy Story film. It holds a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned an “A” CinemaScore from audiences.
The pre-release skepticism was real and understandable. After the narrative closure of Toy Story 3, each subsequent entry has had to justify its own existence, and audiences were braced for a cash-grab. What they got instead was a film that takes the franchise’s oldest anxiety — the fear of being replaced, of being no longer wanted — and transplants it into a debate that parents and children are actively having right now. The trailer discourse was revealing: viewers who initially dreaded another sequel softened once the anti-tech angle became clear, with comments like “I thought this was gonna feel like a soulless cash grab but I like the traditional play versus tech angle” and “at first I thought ugh not another Toy Story but the plot is perfect, raise awareness on iPad babies.”
That’s an unusual reception for a Pixar film — not pure nostalgia, but something closer to recognition. One critic noted that the film charges at the question of technology and childhood with enough force that adults might actually want to talk to their children as they leave the theater. Whether you read Lilypad as a villain or merely a mirror, the choice to make it the antagonist of a Toy Story film is the kind of creative decision that only works when the execution is strong enough to hold the weight. Here, it is. Stanton — who made Wall-E, the most poignant film Pixar has ever produced about technology and human disconnection — turns out to be exactly the right person for this material.
If there’s a thread running through all five of these films, it’s that audiences in 2026 have proven unusually responsive to movies that take a clear position on something — about love as control, about loneliness across infinite space, about what happens to childhood in the age of the algorithm. The films that tried to please everyone mostly didn’t. The ones that committed to an idea, regardless of budget or pedigree, largely did.
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