What is coming to cinemas in October, November and December 2026

The last quarter of 2026 has a collision at the end of it. Dune: Part Three opens in IMAX on 14 December and goes wide on 18 December. Avengers: Doomsday opens on 18 December. Two of the largest releases of the year are sharing a weekend, and every exhibitor in the world now has a screen allocation problem.

Here is the dated schedule for the three months, with the pattern underneath it.

October: horror, adaptations and one very crowded middle weekend

The month opens on 2 October with Verity, Rolling Loud: The Movie, Beware Boiuna, and Inarritu's Digger.

9 October brings The Social Reckoning, The Beast, Other Mommy, and Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother — the Mahershala Ali film that premiered on the festival circuit earlier this month.

16 October is the busiest date of the month: Street Fighter, Whalefall, Sense and Sensibility, Crawlers, Musk, and Trust Me I'm a Doctor. Six wide releases on one Friday is a lot of screens for one weekend to absorb, and at least one of these will be the quarter's first casualty.

23 October has Clayface, Klara and the Sun and Wildwood — a DC horror-leaning title, a Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation and a fantasy, which is about as clean a three-way audience split as a release calendar ever manages.

30 October closes with Wicker, The Mongoose, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York and Christmas at the Kringles, the last of which is starting the holiday season a full two months early.

November: franchises return

6 November is the month's heavy date: The Hunger Games prequel's rival for attention is not one film but four. Godzilla Minus Zero, Ramayana, Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, Drummer Boy and Jimmy all open together.

Godzilla Minus Zero follows one of the most acclaimed entries in that franchise's history, and Ramayana arrives as one of the largest Indian productions ever mounted. Both carry expectations that have very little to do with the North American market, which is worth remembering when the domestic weekend numbers get read as a verdict.

13 November brings Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, How to Rob a Bank and Victorian Psycho.

20 November is The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, alongside I Play Rocky and Paper Tiger. The Hunger Games prequel has the November corridor largely to itself, which is the sort of scheduling that usually signals confidence.

25 November, the Thanksgiving slot, has Focker In-Law, Hershey and Hexed.

December: the collision

4 December: Violent Night 2 and Above the Below.

11 December: Zero A.D.: The Birth of Christ.

14 December: Dune: Part Three in IMAX only.

18 December: Dune: Part Three wide, and Avengers: Doomsday.

23 December: The Angry Birds Movie 3.

25 December: Jumanji: Open World, Mr. Irrelevant and Werwulf.

The IMAX-first strategy for Dune is the interesting move. Giving the film four days in premium formats before the wide opening lets it bank the large-format grosses that Avengers will otherwise take on the 18th, and it turns a head-to-head weekend into something closer to a staggered one. Whether four days is enough separation is the question the quarter will answer.

What to watch

Three things will decide how this quarter reads by January.

The first is whether the 16 October pile-up thins out. Six titles on one date rarely survives contact with the calendar; expect at least one move.

The second is the international weighting in November. Two of the biggest films of that month are not aimed primarily at North America, and the headlines will almost certainly be written as though they were.

The third is the December split. If Dune's IMAX head start works, it becomes a template, and studios stop treating a shared date as a fight to be avoided. If it does not, the next two years of release scheduling get more conservative, not less.

Release dates change. Every one of these is subject to a studio deciding otherwise, and the further out the date, the more likely that is.