It takes a certain level of creative madness to create something like Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola's long-gestating film that finally saw its release in 2024 after his script sat on the shelves for over 40 years. The legendary director fully realized his passion project with this self-financed, freewheeling portrait of an artist at his most unyielding. As a result, Megalopolis baffled most viewers who bothered to see it, and it seemed like a misbegotten idea and execution for a filmmaker who directed The Godfatherand Apocalypse Now. Between the tumultuous production and the self-assurance of his own vision, the movie succinctly represents Coppola and his vision.

At the height of the popularity of The Hunger Games, in book form and its wildly successful film franchise starring Jennifer Lawrence, Hollywood was all in on adapting Young Adult novel series for the big screen, particularly ones set in a dystopian world. In 2014, 20th Century Studios' answer to The Hunger Games was The Maze Runner, an action-adventure science fiction three-part franchise based on the books by James Dashner starring Dylan O'Brien.

Although recognizable brands still drive audiences to theaters, the promise of an epic space odyssey on the big screen is often enough to persuade audiences to take a chance on an original film not based on any pre-existing character or video game, as seen with one of 2026's smash hits, Project Hail Mary. Between Interstellarand the Dune movies, sci-fi and space movies are as fashionable as ever, and they routinely amount to box office titans amid the glut of IP.

It's been quite some time since Gus Van Santhas been in the spotlight. To many's surprise, the visionary director had been away from the big screen for seven years until his inspiring feature-film comeback, Dead Man's Wire, which opened in a limited capacity in 2025, expanded into theaters early in 2026, and is now on Netflix. Best known for sensitive dramas and sympathetic portraits of societal outcasts, like My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, and Milk, Van Sant seems like an unlikely choice for this biographical crime drama/thriller about a hostage crisis in the 1970s, but the versatile filmmaker returned to his early roots as an indie director making anarchic crime thrillers and pitch-black comedies like Drugstore Cowboy and To Die For. This overlooked film is due for a reappraisal now that it's widely available for all audiences, and, luckily, it features a compelling performance by the star of IT: Welcome to Derry, Bill Skarsgård.