This first newsletter of the new year looks at some of the big questions we hope will be answered in the next 12 months, across film, TV, music and games
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elcome to 2026! I hope you are enjoying the final dribblings of the festive break, before reality bites on Monday. As is now tradition (well, we did it once before), this first newsletter of the new year looks at some of the big questions we hope will be answered in the next 12 months, across film, TV, music and games. Hopefully it will double up as a decent primer for the year ahead too, though for a more exhaustive rundown check the Guardian’s 2026 previews for film, music, TV, gaming, stage and art. Right, let’s get on with it:
A storyline likely to rumble on through the year is the proposed purchase of Warner Bros by Netflix, which will require government approval (certainly not a given), not to mention all manner of contractual fine-tuning, before that big red N gets stamped on Warners’ famous water tower. Just enough time then for Hollywood’s greatest wrangler of spectacle, and newly installed head of the Director’s Guild, Christopher Nolan to demonstrate the value to Netflix of putting mass-market movies on the biggest screens possible. His Oppenheimer followup is a giant adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey (17 July) featuring a preposterous cast: Matt Damon! Tom Holland! Lupita Nyong’o! Robert Pattinson! Anne Hathaway! Zendaya as the goddess Athena! Charlize Theron turning people into pigs as Circe! The only thing it is missing is a Barbenheimer style foil.
