A few weeks ago I threw in a prediction for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! in Best Adapted Screenplay, but news out of Warner Bros. last week makes that my first wrong prediction of the season.
Alas, the fun match-up between Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and his bride is no more—The Bride! now appears to be a commercial play with a March 6, 2026 release date. I was really looking forward to the possibility of two awards-worthy Frankenstein films competing, but you can’t win ’em all.
The shuffle also affects the release date of a major contender, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. The film originally had an August 8 bow, but will now debut on September 28—a better date for Oscars play.
Speaking of the new PTA movie, we got our first look at footage last week including a drinking Leonardo DiCaprio, a pregnant Teyana Taylor shooting an assault rifle, a not-pregnant Teyana Taylor shooting an assault rifle, a brief look at Sean Penn, and the first hint of Johnny Greenwood’s score. There are a lot of people thinking Greenwood could be the frontrunner in that category this year. The stinger at the end of the teaser has been compared to the Guardian theme from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
The teaser doesn’t show much to make a judgment on, but it won’t be just a teaser for long. The teaser promised a full trailer this week. We will see what that holds and how it affects our feelings about its place in the race.
Speaking of trailers, Celine Song’s Materialists did get a full trailer, which, for me, effectively rules it out as an Oscars contender. The movie stars Dakota Johnson as a matchmaker who gets caught between the rich, dreamy Pedro Pascal character and the schlumpy guy with the heart of gold played by Chris Evans.
I wouldn’t say it necessarily looks like a run-of-the-mill rom-com, but Past Lives it is not. I am hoping for this movie to be really fun, but I can’t see it being an awards player. I’m also not sold on Johnson’s performance from the trailer and I’m not a Johnson hater.
Wes Anderson also promised a trailer this week for his new film The Phoenician Scheme, which some people have pegged as a potential Oscars player. But Anderson has not been an Oscars kind of guy in a while, so let’s wait for that trailer before we get sold on the hype.
That’s all I’ve got for this week’s roundup but I’m quite excited about some of the posts we have coming up in the “offseason” including two chats I got to have with out very own Bob Cram on Frankenstein and Valerie Morreale on Wicked: For Good. I’m keeping this in my back pocket for a slow week as I attempt to keep the series running in the doldrums of summer.
