Now that the Venice and TIFF schedules are out, the NYFF slate is complete, and most everyone can guess what Telluride’s lineup is, the fall festival lineup as a whole is just about set in stone. But before these festivals have even started, there is already a lot of skepticism over how strong some of them will be this year, and how many sure-fire Best Picture frontrunners and contenders will actually break out.
However, the first eight months of 2026 have already given a real safety net, in case some presumed fall festival hits fall short. In fact, there’s a real scenario where there could be a lot fewer fall festival Best Picture contenders than usual, whether due to disappointments at Venice, TIFF, NYFF and Telluride or because the field doesn’t need a lot of hits from them.
So far this season, there are at least seven early releases with a real shot at getting into Best Picture – including pre-fall festival blockbusters “The Odyssey,” “Project Hail Mary,” and “Obsession,” Cannes films “La Bola Negra,” “All of a Sudden” and “Fjord,” and Sundance premiere “The Invite.” At the absolute minimum, “The Odyssey,” “Project Hail Mary,” and at least two out of the three Cannes films are probably safe as Best Picture nominees already, with maybe at least two of the others likely to join them too.
If there are really up to six pre-fall festival Best Picture nominees, it would match the record in this era that was set in 2023, when summer releases “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie,” “Past Lives,” and Cannes premieres “Anatomy of a Fall,” “The Zone of Interest,” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” all got in early. That left a lower-than-usual four fall festival films to fill out the rest of the field, amongst “Poor Things,” “The Holdovers,” “American Fiction,” and “Maestro.”
There may not even be four open slots to fight over this year, since this doesn’t account for potential contenders releasing after fall fests. Last year made headlines when “One Battle After Another” was the latest premiering film to skip fall festivals and win Best Picture anyway since “The Departed” in 2006, and now the likes of “Digger” and “Dune: Part Three” hope to do the same after this year’s festivals. Even if only one of them does the bare minimum to at least get into Best Picture, that’s one less slot open for any fall festival film – and by then there could be as few as three realistic slots left open for them.
Taking out the pandemic year of 2020, the last time fewer than four fall festival premieres got a Best Picture nomination was 2014, when just “The Imitation Game,” “The Theory of Everything” and eventual winner “Birdman” made the cut. Even that has an asterisk, since it was a Best Picture field of eight that year instead of ten, and it was a time when fall festivals were only just beginning their dominance of Oscar season.
Back in the 2010s, it was more common for only two or three early premieres to make it into Best Picture, before fall festival premieres dominated the rest of the season. Yet whether as an aftereffect of the pandemic, a change in thinking about when to release prestigious movies, the rise of blockbusters turned Oscar contenders, or just Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York losing their influence over Oscar season, fall festivals haven’t had to fill out the Oscars as much in the 2020s. Now in 2026, there’s a real chance that they could have less to contribute than ever before.
Beyond seemingly sure thing festival premieres like “Wild Horse Nine,” “Behemoth!” and “The Debut,” surging potential sleepers like “Ink,” “Elsinore,” and “Misty Green,” and smaller films that could really surge out of nowhere like “A Long Winter,” “Tender Loving Care,” and “Possible Love,” there are a lot of question marks surrounding the fall fests. And if history is any indication, at least one or two, if not more, of the presumed heavy hitters will be colossal disappointments that flame out instantly, or fade from Oscar consideration over time. In that scenario, depending on what the disappointments are and what might rise up to cover for them, how many potential nominees will really come out of the fall festivals – and does this season really need them?
There were some lucky breaks last year, when the likes of Venice premieres “Bugonia” and “Frankenstein” recovered from mixed reviewed festival receptions to gain momentum afterwards, when presumed post-festival contenders “Wicked: For Good” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” fell out completely to leave greater room, and when “Marty Supreme” became a fall festival premiere turned Oscar nominee by a technicality after a “surprise” New York screening. Thanks to that, the Best Picture lineup was balanced with four fall fest premieres, two Cannes films, a blockbuster hit each from spring and summer, one Sundance premiere and one post-festival Best Picture winner.
A few breaks like that could tip the scales this year and make it look more like 2025 instead of 2023. For one thing, if “Elsinore” breaks out and makes Andrew Scott a Best Actor favorite, Focus Features could ride it to a Best Picture nomination if it can’t do so for the far bigger but far less traditional “Obsession.” In that same vein, if A24 leaves Telluride and TIFF with “The Debut” as its top Oscar season movie, it could put all its chips behind that instead of early season contender “The Invite.” And should potentially highly divisive post-fall-fest films like “Digger” and “Dune: Part Three” fall on the wrong side of the divide, like “Wicked: For Good” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” did, that leaves an open path for any other festival films on the bubble.
Of course, if the expected behemoths like “Wild Horse Nine,” “The Debut,” and maybe even “Behemoth!” meet or exceed their highest predictions, that could make everything moot right there. If there is only really room for a couple of fall festival nominees this season, all or most of the preseason favorites hitting big for once can fill out that room pretty quickly. At that point, any other fall festival breakouts would have to hope recency bias powers them in over earlier season films, or that some of the less locked-in early season films are much weaker in the long run than they look right now.
But if this is a year where a pre fall fest group of “The Odyssey,” “The Invite,” “Obsession,” “Project Hail Mary,” “La Bola Negra,” “All of a Sudden,” and “Fjord” already has at least half if not 60 percent of the Best Picture lineup covered, then perhaps even the best possible fall festival lineup can only do so much. Back in the day, the best of Venice, Toronto, Telluride and New York would have overpowered the vast majority of January to August films in a walk, yet nowadays maybe a draw is the best to hope for.
If Venice, Telluride, TIFF and NYFF do wind up disappointing this year, then it may be a blessing to have so many early movies in contention already, if not worrying in a few other ways. If the festivals do exceed expectations, then at the least, it makes the bubble a lot more crowded, if not more worrisome, for fans of early-season bubble films like “The Invite,” “Obsession,” and a few Cannes films. But in terms of whether the fall festival season can have as much of an impact as it did in its glory days, that ship may have already sailed for this year.
Right now, the best-case scenario might be for the festivals to avoid the worst-case scenario, of having fewer Best Picture slots to fight over than there have been in a normal year in a long time. Yet the bar might have been set so high by the first eight months of this year, and the bar might be so low behind the only few festival premieres being given a real chance, that the Oscars really don’t need Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York to do that much for them – as they haven’t for a good deal of the 2020s. But if that indeed sinks to a brand new low in the next several weeks, it won’t just be 2026 that the fall fests need to worry about.
What do you currently have predicted for Best Picture this year? How many of those titles are from films that have already premiered before the fall film festivals begin? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account, and check out Next Best Picture’s latest Oscar predictions here.
