Sorkin Goes Back to Facebook, DC Goes Full Horror, and a Diver Gets Swallowed by a Whale. Here Is October 2026 in Theaters, Week by Week.

Two moves reshaped this October before a ticket was sold. On the same day in February, Warner Bros. pushed DC's Clayface from September 11 to October 23 and moved M. Night Shyamalan's Remain off that date to February 5, 2027, after it posted the highest test scores of his career.

What is left is one of the most varied months of the year: Tom Cruise under prosthetics, Aaron Sorkin back at Facebook, a Palme d'Or winner, LAIKA's first movie in seven years, and a man with one hour of oxygen inside a sperm whale. Here it is, week by week.

October 2: Tom Cruise opens the month in prosthetics

Digger is the big swing. Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) casts a nearly unrecognizable Cruise as an oil tycoon whose drilling in Greenland knocks an ice shelf loose, sending him racing to prove he is humanity's savior before the disaster he caused wrecks the planet. First reactions ran from "Tom Cruise's best performance since Magnolia" to "a self-indulgent miscalculation from end to end." Here is everything to expect from Digger.

Opposite it, Verity turns a Colleen Hoover bestseller into an outright psychological thriller, with Dakota Johnson as a writer hired to finish the novels of an injured star author (Anne Hathaway). Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) directs.

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October 9: Sorkin goes back to Facebook

Sixteen years after The Social Network won him an Oscar, Aaron Sorkin returns to the company, this time directing his own script. The Social Reckoning follows Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), the Facebook engineer who took the company's internal research to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). Jeremy Strong takes over Mark Zuckerberg. The first trailer went over badly, and Sony skipped the major fall festivals, holding its first public screening in Silicon Valley instead. Expect loud opinions either way.

The month's first big horror release lands the same day. In Other Mommy, from Blumhouse and James Wan's Atomic Monster, Jessica Chastain plays both a mother and the thing in the house that looks exactly like her, which her young daughter starts getting close to. Rob Savage (Host, The Boogeyman) directs from a novel by Bird Box author Josh Malerman.

And the one critics already love keeps spreading. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother opened in New York and Los Angeles on September 25, adds more cities on the 9th, and is set to open everywhere on the 16th. Mahershala Ali plays a devout Muslim hitman in Houston left to raise three young kids after his wife dies. Bassam Tariq was once set to direct Ali in Marvel's Blade. This is their first movie together instead, and reviews have raved about Ali.

Also opening October 9, in limited release

• Fjord: Cristian Mungiu's English-language debut won the Palme d'Or in May, his second. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play Romanian parents in a Norwegian village, and critics at Cannes split hard on it.
• Misty Green: Chris Rock's first film as a director since Top Five, with Rosalind Eleazar as an actress fighting for a second act. Variety called it the best movie about Hollywood in years.

October 16: Street Fighter, a whale, and Jane Austen

The busiest weekend of the month opens with Hollywood's third live-action Street Fighter, after the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme film and 2009's The Legend of Chun-Li. Kitao Sakurai (Bad Trip) directs for Legendary, Capcom, and Paramount, with Andrew Koji as Ryu, Noah Centineo as Ken, Callina Liang as Chun-Li, and Jason Momoa as a Blanka far bigger than the one in the games. Whether it can crack our best-reviewed video game movies ranking is another question.

Whalefall is the one we cannot stop thinking about. Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) adapts Daniel Kraus's novel about Jay (Austin Abrams), a diver searching for his late father's remains off California who gets swallowed by a sperm whale with one hour of oxygen left. It plays out nearly in real time, and a six-minute sequence stole CinemaCon in April. Abrams also led Resident Evil a month earlier, which makes him the fall's most reliable person to put in mortal danger.

For something gentler, Sense and Sensibility has already opened in the UK and sits at 72 on Metacritic from its first 15 reviews. Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) casts Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles as the Dashwood sisters, and critics describe an earthier, less precious take than Ang Lee's 1995 version.

In limited release, A24 opens You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's 174-minute documentary that begins 34 days before Elizabeth Holmes reports to prison and turns into something much stranger. RogerEbert.com's review says it is like nothing you have ever seen.

October 23: DC tries horror, and LAIKA comes back

Clayface is the month's biggest gamble on a brand. The third film in the new DC Universe, after Superman and Supergirl, is R-rated body horror: Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a Gotham kid turned movie star who is disfigured by a crime boss and takes an experimental treatment that turns his body to clay. James Watkins (Eden Lake, Speak No Evil) directs from a Mike Flanagan script. Our DC movies ranked list shows how high the bar sits.

The same day, LAIKA releases Wildwood, its first feature since Missing Link in 2019. Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) directs the stop-motion adaptation of Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis's novel, in which Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) follows a murder of crows into an enchanted forest to rescue her baby brother. Carey Mulligan, Angela Bassett, and Mahershala Ali, in his second October release, lead the voice cast.

Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun adapts Kazuo Ishiguro's novel with Jenna Ortega as a solar-powered robot companion and Amy Adams as the mother of the girl she is bought for. If you need the opposite, Sacha Baron Cohen directs his first feature, Ali G: Who Iz I?, the character's first movie since 2002.

Halloween weekend: the scary part is how quiet it is

Here is the odd thing about this October: as of this week, no new wide horror release is dated for October 30. So Halloween belongs to holdovers, Other Mommy in its fourth weekend and Clayface in its second, plus a theatrical revival of the found-footage cult favorite Hell House LLC. Or stay in with our Halloween movies ranked.

How to plan the month

If you make only three trips, make them Whalefall, Clayface, and whichever of Digger or The Social Reckoning you feel more strongly about, because both will be argued over all fall. The safest tickets are the ones with reviews already in: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Sense and Sensibility, and Misty Green.

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