On the Early Year Radar…

Happy New Year! For those of you, who, hypothetically, are changing careers after getting into a dispute with your boss and find yourself with some additional free time on your hands starting tomorrow, why not take the opportunity to enjoy the new releases coming out early in 2026?

DEAD MAN’S WIRE – In Theaters January 9

Directed by Gus Van Sant

Starring Bill Skarsgård, with Dacre Montgomery and Cary Elwes

What is it about? The true story of Tony Kiritsis, who kidnapped his bank mortgager in 1977 and held him for ransom in exchange for money and an apology.

How am I feelin’ about this one? Stop me if this premise seems familiar to you: a financially desperate and emotionally volatile man in 1970s America decides to stage a poorly-thought-out crime that spirals out of control into a tense hostage situation that captivates the nation and brings societal tensions of the era to a boiling point. If that description sounds similar to Dog Day Afternoon, congratulations, you’re thinking along the same lines I was when I first saw the trailer for this movie. Not that inviting similarities to Dog Day Afternoon is a bad thing! I happen to be a huge fan of Sidney Lumet’s exhilarating classic, and if Gus Van Sant wants to do his own take on such a knockout formula, I say go for it. The only real risk is trying to measure up to something that set the bar so high for single-location hostage thrillers. But I doubt the man who actually took it upon himself to film a nearly-shot-for-shot remake of one of the most important movies ever made was too intimidated by this challenge.

Plus, the true story this is depicting is an interesting one: Anthony George Kiritsis, convinced that his mortgage broker and the broker’s father were colluding to cheat him out of some real estate that he had fallen behind on his monthly payments for, stormed into his broker’s office on a Tuesday morning in February 1977, and wired the muzzle of his shotgun to the back of the man’s head. Any attempt at escape, or if Kiritsis is killed by a police officer, will trip the wire and kill his hostage, hence the name “dead man’s wire.” He wanted more than just financial compensation; he also demanded public vindication. Not hard to see what could attract a filmmaker to this story in this present day.

The only thing that gives me some measure of pause is the release date. Why would an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, who has directed popular box office hits before, see his latest project relegated to the second weekend of the first month of the year? The reviews have been very positive so far. Did Row K Entertainment think this was too hard a sell during the competitive “Oscar contender” fall and winter seasons? Are they assuming a better play would be to audiences looking for an alternative to Avatar: Fire and Ash after what will be four weeks dominating theaters? I guess we’ll never really know, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a worthwhile time.

Also, nice touch to cast Al Pacino as the father Kiritsis demands an apology from.

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE – In Theaters January 16

Directed by Nia DaCosta

Starring Ralph Fiennes, with Jack O’Connell and Alfie Williams

What is it about? Picking right up where 28 Years Later left off, Spike joins that weird gang of Jimmy Savile cosplayers and Dr. Kelson is going off to do some other thing and seriously who cares?

How am I feelin’ about this one? What the fresh hell is this, the 28 Years Later DLC? Jesus, just shoot me in the face.

Can we please get a horror-thriller with some measure of originality?

SEND HELP – In Theaters January 30

Directed by Sam Raimi

Starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien

What is it about? Two antagonistic office co-workers find themselves stranded on a deserted island after they are the only survivors of a plane crash.

How am I feelin’ about this one? Ah, here we go! Here’s a horror-thriller that feels new and interesting! And actually fun! This is Sam Raimi’s first wholly original project in seventeen years. Not since Drag Me To Hell (which is awesome, if you haven’t seen it) has he directed something not based on a preexisting IP, and this looks like it’s right in his wheelhouse as a darkly comic grindhouse maestro at heart.

Rachel McAdams, in her first feature film role since her richly-deserved Academy Award win for Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., stars here as a perpetually abused office drone in some faceless, soulless corporation who becomes one of only two survivors of a plane crash that strands her on an uninhabited island. The other survivor? Her abusive douchebag boss. He’s played by Dylan O’Brien, who is fresh off hands-down the best performance of his entire career so far in Twinless. And since this mousy, shy accountant is an unexpectedly resourceful survivalist, suddenly the tables of power have turned… and she is not interested in making nice with her corporate tormentor now that he’s in a more submissive state in the middle of nowhere. The trailer promises a visceral and gory and even a little absurd send up of the premise of Swept Away (no, not that one).

Aside from Dead Man’s Wire, this is my most anticipated new release in January. The trailer looks delightfully nasty and layered with a thick coat of dark humor. I am so looking forward to seeing McAdams showcase a truly menacing side to her for the first time since her big breakout in Mean Girls over two decades ago, and I’ve come around on O’Brien as a genuine talent who I predict will excel in a two-hander like this. I just wish Hollywood produced more thrillers with this kind of gleeful edge to them.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS – In Theaters February 13

Directed by Emerald Fennell

Starring Margot Robbie, with Jacob Elordi and Hong Chau

What is it about? Very very very loosely inspired by Emily Brontë’s classic novel about the destructive, obsessive love between the daughter of a privileged West Yorkshire family and a mysterious orphan taken in by them. The book is about a lot more than that, but let’s just stick with this basic premise for now…

How am I feelin’ about this one? Hoo boy, I guess we don’t have to wonder what #BookTok will be obsessing over this year, huh? So, just to get the obvious out of the way, and just in case you’re a bit rusty on your AP English Lit syllabus, Wuthering Heights is not a romance novel. It is not at all about “forbidden love” and was not a bodice-ripper written to get its female readers all hot and bothered. That is, in fact, a big reason why its reception was rather mixed when it was first published in 1848. Time, of course, has canonized it as one of the most iconic revenge narratives of its era, with its frank depiction of class stratification, domestic abuse, religious hypocrisy, the corrupting influence of wealth, and intergenerational trauma feeling bold even by today’s standards.

Director and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Emerald Fennell decided to, erm, not make her version of Wuthering Heights centered on any of those things:

Uh… okaaaay. Literary nerds are, unsurprisingly, apoplectic. I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, for the entirety of my adult life, I have strongly pushed back against the contention that cinematic adaptations of anything, be they books or comics or television shows or video games, need to be 100% faithful to their source material. The best feature-length adaptation of any of Stephen King’s horror novels remains, in my view, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a version with key plot points that deviated so much from the book that King continues to disown it. When he attempted to produce a version that was more in line with his novel, it was unwatchable. L.A. Confidential remains the gold standard of James Ellroy adaptations despite radically reworking the book’s story and characters. The slavishly loyal adaptation of The Black Dahlia, on the other hand, remains the nadir of efforts to bring his work to the big screen.

Having said that… if you’re going to so dramatically deviate from not only the story, but the entire thematic backbone and tone of the original work… it does beg raise the question of why you would even bother calling it Wuthering Heights in the first place? The Shining was still ultimately about a dysfunctional family being torn apart in isolation. For all its differences from the novel, L.A. Confidential was still a twisty noir about crooked cops and criminal conspiracies. Remember that comedic fake trailer that recut The Silence of the Lambs into a lighthearted romantic comedy?

Imagine if the late Jonathan Demme had actually made that. Or, if you want to move away from hypotheticals, there’s a reason why Roland Joffé’s The Scarlet Letter is seen as a joke (and a useful tool for teachers to know instantly when their students didn’t do the assigned reading). If you want to make a movie that is wildly different from the tone, themes, and character arcs of the source material, why not just write and produce an original story? Why tap into any of the preexisting work if the only thing you want to mine from it are the character names and starting premise? My suspicion is that Fennell wanted to make a sexy period romance but couldn’t secure the funding for an original story, or maybe even a lesser-known book delivering all the hot and sensual “My Lord, we mustn’t! Oh, but my heart burns for you!” romantic tension she was actually going for. So she just threw up her hands and told Warner Bros. Pictures that she could get the Kids These Days buzzed up about a novel everyone is broadly familiar with and if the purists hate-watch it who cares because money is money at the end of the day. And hey, ya gotta do what ya gotta do in this moviemaking environment to get your projects funded. At least the visuals are dynamite.

Also, I have to admit… I kinda dig one of new Charli XCX singles attached to the movie.

GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE – In Theaters February 13

Directed by Gore Verbinski

Starring Sam Rockwell, with Michael Peña and Haley Lu Richardson

What is it about? A man from the future travels to the past and recruits the patrons of a Los Angeles diner he arrives in to help combat a rogue artificial intelligence.

How am I feelin’ about this one? I was wondering what Gore Verbinski had been up to, lately. It seems like he had gone dark for a few years. And I guess he did, after his overlong and tediously unpleasant A Cure for Wellness bombed in theaters nearly a full decade ago. But despite that misstep, I overall really like this filmmaker, mostly because he is one of the few still active in the industry who understands how to mount true spectacle. He gets how to utilize visual effects as a tool instead of a crutch. Don’t believe me? Watch this clip, keeping in mind that it was from a movie released almost twenty years ago:

I mean… it is honestly embarrassing how much better that looks than the vast majority of effects-driven blockbusters released these days. Compare that astonishingly well-aged creation of Davey Jones with this tacky-looking crap from a film that cost over $100 million more to produce and was released sixteen years later:

Verbinski is not the most disciplined storyteller, sure. I too wish he had someone who had the power to tell him to trim the fat off his movies. But the man knows how to truly dazzle us with the most state-of-the-art special effects technology and production values like few others in the industry today. So it’s a bit strange to see him working on something that looks more… ragged and smaller scaled than what we’re used to from him. Not to say those are bad things! I actually think it’s refreshing when Big™ filmmakers work on a smaller canvas. But it does mean the thing that normally instantly attracts me to a Verbinski movie may not be there this time around.

It also concerns me somewhat that the looming threat Sam Rockwell’s time-traveling crusader is trying to stop is… an artificial intelligence. Not that I don’t agree that AI is a very dangerous and odious invention actively making life worse for all of us. But I really do not want to see yet another movie that presents this janky, unreliable, sycophantic plagiarism machine as akin to a godlike entity that is dangerous to all of us because it’s some kind of superintelligence. That’s not a prescient science fiction thriller. That’s free advertising for some of the worst people in America. Fingers crossed that this motley crew of unlikely heroes is going to save us from the true threat of AI.

THE BRIDE! – In Theaters March 6

Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

Starring Jessie Buckley, with Christian Bale and Peter Sarsgaard

What is it about? Frankenstein’s creature successfully reanimates a female companion from a murdered woman, and then… I’m not sure what happens next, actually.

How am I feelin’ about this one? Not at all what I was expecting from the writer and director of the psychologically brutal character study The Lost Daughter. Not even close. And even with this premise and general tone, I was also not expecting such an odd take on the classic Bride of Frankenstein tale. Because, in case you forgot, in that camp classic, the Bride dies shortly after being reanimated. This is also her fate in Kenneth Branagh’s take on the source material. And she’s not even created in the original novel!

So I guess it makes sense that, at some point, a filmmaker would naturally ask, “What if the Bride was created and just… stuck around with the Creature for a whole feature-length movie?” Having proven herself a more than capable filmmaker with her directorial debut, it makes sense that she would jump at the chance to actually answer this question with a bigger budget and more creative freedom to pursue whatever oddball project her heart desired.

Having been wholly convinced of her exceptional talents as a writer and director, I don’t need much to convince me to pay money to see Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore directorial effort. Especially since she’s reteaming with Jessie Buckley, who is… probably still the frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Lead Actress in a little over two months from now and whose last collaboration with Gyllenhaal I effusively praised (and I still stand by that praise!) back when it was not entirely certain she would be recognized by the Academy for it. She joins Christian Bale as undead reanimated lovers going on… what looks like a crime spree? Or maybe they’re starting up come kind of social unrest movement? Also, it might be a semi-musical? Whatever bizarre experience this film has in store for us, it excited enough deep-pocketed investors at Warner Bros. Discovery to come to the project’s rescue after Netflix abandoned it due to cost concerns. But in an interesting irony (and yet another sad example of Netflix not being able to properly budget their productions to save their lives), jumping ship ended up costing $20 million less for the completed production than if it had stayed with Netflix. And now Netflix is about to acquire Warner Bros… oh joy. Three cheers for corporate consolidation.

PEAKY BLINDERS: THE IMMORTAL MAN – In Select Theaters March 6, Streaming On Netflix March 20

Directed by Tom Harper

Starring Cillian Murphy, with Rebecca Ferguson and Tim Roth

What is it about? Amidst the chaos of World War II, series antihero Tommy Shelby is driven back from a self-imposed exile to face his most destructive reckoning yet.

How am I feelin’ about this one? I… uh… I got nothing on this one. Sorry. I never found the time to get into this show, which from everything I’ve heard is really good. I guess the only thing I’ll say for this upcoming movie is, as the ostensible finale of a long-running narrative about a supposedly morally dark protagonist, it would be nice if this concludes with integrity and doesn’t fall into the fanservice trap where the main character is given some disingenuous sycophantic send-off.

If Tommy Shelby’s story was originally intended to end in tragedy, if the point of the show was for his sins to eventually come back to haunt him, then I hope screenwriter Steven Knight isn’t planning to reverse course and pretend he was actually some badass inspirational hero the whole time deserving of a narrative attaboy just before the credits roll. There’s a reason why the series finale of The Shield is held up as one of the greatest in television history, while the series finale of Dexter is considered an embarrassment today. Pandering to the fanboys never works out in the long run.

PROJECT HAIL MARY – In Theaters March 20

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

Starring Ryan Gosling, with Sandra Hüller and Milana Vayntrub

What is it about? An astronaut awakens on a spacecraft with no memory of himself or his mission.

How am I feelin’ about this one? I really hate the marketing for this movie. With, like, a white-hot passion. For those of you who have not read it, Project Hail Mary is, no kidding, one of the best science fiction novels published in my lifetime. It is a thrilling, intelligent narrative full of fascinating scientific insights without ever getting bogged down in them, and nested within its seemingly simple premise is a mid-story twist that is revealed in the trailers goddammit!

I am so angry at how much is revealed in the trailers that I do not want to even run the risk of ruining any part of this in case anyone has not experienced the sheer jubilation of reading such a phenomenal book. If you are looking for something to add to your reading list at the start of the new year and have not gotten to this, yet, I can hardly think of a better way to start 2026. Keep an open mind, as I will, heading into this film, but for the love of gawd, do not seek out the promotional material for it.

So what say you, dear readers? Are you upset at Emerald Fennell deviating from such a beloved novel? Are you as frustrated as I am by the trailers for Project Hail Mary? Do you think you would survive on a deserted island with the worst boss you ever worked for? Let us know in the comments.