The Hollywood Movies Actually Worth Getting Excited About
Big-budget filmmaking has been in a weird place for a while — a lot of flat CGI, formula plots, movies that feel more like content than cinema. But the upcoming slate looks like a real correction: directors with actual voices, practical effects making a comeback, and studios betting big on films built specifically for a giant screen rather than a phone.
Here’s a rundown of the ones actually worth planning around, plus what’s driving the shift behind them.
The Lineup at a Glance
| Movie | Studio | Director | Leads | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Mandalorian & Grogu | Lucasfilm/Disney | Jon Favreau | Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver | Star Wars back on the big screen |
| Avengers: Doomsday | Marvel/Disney | Russo Brothers | Robert Downey Jr., Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby | MCU’s multiverse endgame |
| Spider-Man 4 | Sony/Marvel | Destin Daniel Cretton | Tom Holland, Zendaya | Grittier, street-level Spidey |
| The Batman Part II | Warner Bros./DC | Matt Reeves | Robert Pattinson, Colin Farrell, Zoë Kravitz | Noir crime saga continues |
| Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow | Warner Bros./DC | Craig Gillespie | Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts | Darker, cosmic take on Supergirl |
| Project Hail Mary | Amazon MGM/Sony | Lord & Miller | Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller | Hard sci-fi from the author of The Martian |
| Toy Story 5 | Pixar/Disney | Andrew Stanton | Tom Hanks, Tim Allen | Toys vs. screens |
| Dune: Messiah | Legendary/Warner Bros. | Denis Villeneuve | Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh | Trilogy’s tragic finale |
| Fast XI | Universal | Louis Leterrier | Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Jason Momoa | The franchise’s last lap |
| Jumanji 3 | Sony | Jake Kasdan | Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black | Game mechanics leak into the real world |
The Mandalorian & Grogu
After sitting out theaters since The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars is finally coming back to the big screen — and fittingly, it’s Jon Favreau (the guy who kicked off the MCU with Iron Man) steering the ship. Set during the messy New Republic era, the film follows Din Djarin and Grogu as they get pulled from bounty-hunting jobs into something much bigger: black-ops missions against Imperial remnants regrouping under the shadow of Grand Admiral Thrawn.
Favreau’s building on the LED-volume tech that made the show possible, but this time it’s paired with real location shoots in the UK and the California desert, plus dogfight sequences filmed with actual jet-fighter camera rigs to get real g-force motion. And yes — Grogu is still a practical puppet, just with a bit of CGI help for the more acrobatic moments.
Avengers: Doomsday
The Russo Brothers are back, and so is Robert Downey Jr. — not as Tony Stark this time, but as Doctor Doom. It’s one of the stranger, more interesting casting swings Marvel has made in years. Doom isn’t a variant of Iron Man here; he’s an autocratic ruler from a dying universe trying to prevent a collision of realities, using a mix of sorcery and advanced tech.
The story pulls together the Fantastic Four, the Thunderbolts, the New Avengers, and Doctor Strange’s crew, all wrestling with whether to fight Doom or go along with his plan to merge collapsing timelines into one empire under his control. The Reed Richards/Doctor Doom rivalry looks like it’ll carry a lot of the film’s weight — two brilliant men on opposite ends of the same instinct to control everything.
Spider-Man 4
After No Way Home’s massive success, this one goes in the opposite direction — no Stark tech, no cosmic backup, just Peter Parker as a broke, anonymous vigilante in a city that’s forgotten who he is. Director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi) is putting him up against Wilson Fisk, now the actual mayor of New York, who’s declared war on masked vigilantes and started deputizing task forces to hunt them down.
That pushes Peter into an uneasy team-up with Daredevil, all while he’s trying to figure out how to have a life with MJ without getting her killed. Cretton’s bringing his close-quarters, Hong Kong-style fight choreography to it, so expect Spidey to lean on the environment and physical skill rather than gadgets.
The Batman Part II
Matt Reeves’ first Batman movie set a new bar for how grim and grounded this world could feel, and the sequel picks up right after Gotham’s disastrous flood. With the Falcone and Maroni empires wiped out, Oz Cobb has taken over the underworld, and Bruce Wayne is rethinking whether fear-based vigilantism actually works. Underneath it all, quieter threats — the Court of Owls, a criminal doctor named Hush — are starting to move.
Cinematographer Greig Fraser is back with custom vintage lenses and heavy practical rain and snow, so visually this should be every bit as moody and specific as the first one.
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow
This isn’t the usual Supergirl origin story. Based on Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s comic, it imagines Kara spending her first fourteen years drifting through space on a piece of destroyed Krypton, watching everyone she loved slowly die. By the time she reaches Earth, she’s not wide-eyed like her cousin — she’s hardened.
The plot kicks off when a young alien girl asks Kara to help avenge her father’s murder, sending them on a violent, cross-galaxy revenge mission. Visually, director Craig Gillespie is leaning into ’70s space-fantasy and heavy-metal album cover aesthetics — a much rougher, stranger tone than anything we’ve seen from a Super-family movie before.
Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir’s follow-up to The Martian gets the Phil Lord/Christopher Miller treatment, with Ryan Gosling as a man who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he’s there. As it comes back to him, he realizes he’s the last surviving crew member on a mission to stop a microorganism that’s draining the sun’s energy and threatens to freeze Earth solid.
Much of the film rests on Gosling carrying scenes solo, working through real physics problems under crushing pressure — and there’s an alien-contact storyline that’s been one of the most talked-about parts of the book, here brought to life with practical puppetry rather than pure CG.
Toy Story 5
Pixar’s tackling something surprisingly timely: kids trading in physical toys for tablets and screens. When Bonnie brings home an AI-powered smart device that eats up all her attention, Woody and the gang get shoved into the closet — and Woody ends up leading a mission to win back a kid’s imagination. There’s also a subplot involving a horde of malfunctioning toy soldiers running on broken software, which is a fun, weirdly current wrinkle for the franchise.
Dune: Messiah
Denis Villeneuve closes out his trilogy with an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s much darker sequel novel. Twelve years after Paul Atreides took the throne and unleashed a holy war that killed billions, he’s an emperor trapped by his own visions of a future he can’t stop. A conspiracy — the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the Tleilaxu — moves against him, using a resurrected clone of his old mentor Duncan Idaho as a weapon aimed straight at his mind.
Villeneuve’s shooting the whole thing on 70mm IMAX film, and Hans Zimmer’s back to score it, so expect the same scale as the first two, just with a much more tragic, somber current running underneath.
Fast XI
After 25 years, the Fast & Furious saga is finally wrapping up. This one picks up immediately from Fast X’s cliffhanger — Dom and his son trapped at a collapsing dam, the rest of the crew’s plane shot down — and brings Dwayne Johnson back as Hobbs to help take down the film’s villain, Dante Reyes. Director Louis Leterrier is pulling the franchise back toward its street-racing roots for the finale, including a climactic drag race meant as a tribute to Paul Walker.
Jumanji 3
The rebooted Jumanji games made well over a billion and a half combined, so a third one was inevitable. This time, the broken game console isn’t just sucking people in — its mechanics are leaking into the real world: health bars, NPCs, level bosses, wild animals, all showing up in an ordinary American town. The video-game avatars played by Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black become sentient and start walking around alongside the actual teenagers. It’s the same body-swap comedy that made the reboot work, just with the boundary between game and reality breaking down entirely.
Why These Movies Feel Different
A few real shifts are shaping this stretch of releases:
Practical effects are back. Villeneuve, Reeves, and Lord & Miller are all leaning on real locations, animatronics, and in-camera work instead of leaning entirely on CGI in post.
IMAX and premium formats are driving decisions. Studios are shooting natively for large-format screens — some in true 70mm — because premium formats are pulling a growing share of opening-weekend revenue, and that’s one of the few things that still gets people off the couch.
Directors are getting more creative control. Rather than forcing a house style, studios are letting people like Villeneuve, Favreau, and the Russos put their own stamp on massive properties.
Budgets are tightening up. After years of runaway costs, studios are spending more time locking scripts before shooting instead of fixing everything in post — partly a cost-control move, partly just better filmmaking practice.
A Few Quick Questions
Which movie’s expected to top the box office?
Early tracking has Avengers: Doomsday and The Mandalorian & Grogu out front, both helped by built-in global fanbases and wide IMAX availability.
Do I need to watch the Mandalorian show first?
No — Favreau has said the film is written to stand on its own for newcomers, even though it continues the TV story.
Is The Batman Part II part of the main DCU?
No, it’s kept separate under the DC Elseworlds label, distinct from James Gunn’s DCU (which includes Supergirl).
Why is everyone shooting on 70mm IMAX again?
It just captures more — resolution, color depth, dynamic range — than digital sensors can match, and it fills far more of your field of vision on a big screen.