20 Upcoming 2026 Movies You Don't Know About (But Should)
These upcoming movies all need to be on your radar.
2026 has been quite the stacked year for movies already, with audiences being wowed by the likes of Project Hail Mary, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Send Help, and The Drama, to name just a few.
But the rest of the year still has so much to offer us, from massively hyped blockbusters like The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, and Avengers: Doomsday, to those lesser-known films that'll sneak up on us all totally out of nowhere, as they always tend to do.
This list is concerned with those movies you likely don't even know about, and yet which are sure to end up living in your head rent-free well beyond the bounds of 2026.
These 20 films represent the most artistically out-there and downright unexpected movies due to release by year's end, some of them from established, beloved auteurs while others are bold visions from new filmmakers.
Spanning all manner of genres, you should absolutely have these movies on your radar if you cherish original filmmaking that couldn't be much further from the blockbuster franchise sausage factory - and thank god...
20. Drag
Drag is one of those ingenious movie ideas a whole host of filmmakers will surely wish they came up with first.
Lizzy Caplan and Lucy DeVito star as sisters who decide to rob a man's (John Stamos) house, only for one of them to suffer a debilitating back injury mid-burglary.
And so, with the clock ticking before the owner returns home, the sisters must figure out a way to escape unscathed.
Early reviews from its recent SXSW premiere have likened Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer's film to a live-action episode of Itchy and Scratchy, as Caplan's injured thief gets put through an increasingly wince-worthy series of mishaps.
Reviews have also suggested there's a deeply unhinged sting in the story's tail, and one can probably assume it has something to do with Stamos' mysterious character.
Either way, Caplan is one of the most underrated actors of her generation and seems like a perfect fit for wacky gross-out material like this.