What Does the Release Slate for 2026 Say About How Hollywood is Handling its Crisis?

As of February 2025 the release slate for 2026 is far from complete. Still, anyone who might have thought that the shrinking market for theatrically released films and the signs that audiences have been getting fed up with Hollywood retreads of the same old franchises would nudge the studios in a different direction (I put in my two cents about what I think they need to be doing simply from a bottom-line perspective) will be quickly disabused of such expectations looking at the expected offerings for that year as reported by the relevant Wikipedia page (one page I have found a reliable guide in the past).

It is, after all, a year chock-full of movies in the same genres, from the same franchises. Yes, we have superheroes--with at least three Marvel movies not counting the fourth Spider-Man film, and three movies coming our way from DC Studios--along with a Star Wars movie, a Mummy movie, more Jumanji and Hunger Games, and another crack at the Street Fighter franchise. There is also animation of the familiar types aplenty, with Minions 3, Ice Age 6, Shrek 5, Toy Story 5, and of course, Super Mario 2, as well as a feature-length animated Cat in the Hat, and an animated-to-live-action remake of Moana to boot (less than two years after Moana 2!) due out. And of course, what does not belong to the big action movies and animated extravaganzas is substantially accounted for as horror also from the same franchises, including 28 Days Later, Scream, Exorcist and Insidious, and more parody of the same from the Scary Movie series.

If there is any possibility of adaptation on the part of the studios' behavior it would seem to lie not in the kinds of movies they make, which reflect their addiction to their long-established (if ever less reliable) model for generating blockbusters, but the management of the individual projects. While the publicly released data seems spotty, I get the impression that the studios, if still "big spenders" rather than "wise spenders" (to turn about a phrase of Tony Blair's), may be getting a little more careful with their money, if not with their expenditure on productions then at least their expenditures on promotion and the rest. (Indeed, looking at Deadline's numbers last year, if it was undeniably the case that the year was packed with flops, the numbers for films like Indiana Jones 5 and The Flash and Captain Marvel 2 not quite so bad as I thought they might be given the dismal grosses.) All the same, in finding their savings where they can as they stay an increasingly dubious course they may, especially as 2025, and now 2026, are shaping up to look like 2023, prove to be "penny wise but pound foolish."