Most Anticipated Releases of October
October is already splitting in two. The first weekend handed Warner Bros. a historic miss and Amazon a surprise hit; HBO closed a Green Lantern season that actually landed, and the rest of the month is still stacked with horror, Jane Austen, a fighting-game reboot, and the last episode of Ted Lasso.
Digger opened October 2 as Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s climate satire, with Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon trying to sell himself as the man who can undo a disaster he caused. It grossed about $8 million domestically and roughly $20 million worldwide against a budget the studio put at $125 million, with outside estimates higher. Critics sat near 51 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, audiences gave it a C CinemaScore, and it became one of Cruise’s worst openings in nearly two decades. It was also Warner Bros.’ last release before the studio folded into Skydance.
Verity took the weekend instead. Michael Showalter’s Colleen Hoover adaptation, with Dakota Johnson as a ghostwriter and Anne Hathaway as the incapacitated author whose manuscript turns the job into a nightmare, opened to $32.6 million domestically and about $62.6 million worldwide. Josh Hartnett co-stars. The Hoover streak at the box office is still intact.
On television, Lanterns aired its season finale October 4 on HBO and HBO Max. The Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler series averaged more than 12 million viewers per episode in the U.S. and nearly 19 million globally, the biggest DC Studios premiere the streamer has had, with a 92 percent critics’ score. Co-creator Damon Lindelof has said writers are already ideating a second season, though HBO has not ordered one.
Ted Lasso closes season 4 on October 7 with the Apple TV finale “Being Alive,” the tenth episode of a weekly run that started in August. Richmond’s season, and whatever the show has left to say about the club, lands in one night.
Love of Your Life opens the same week, October 7, from Amazon MGM, with a Prime Video date of October 14. Rachel Morrison’s romantic drama stars Margaret Qualley as a woman whose future is upended, with Aaron Pierre, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Basso, and Catherine Keener. Ryan Gosling produces. It premiered at TIFF in September.
The October 9 corridor is the month’s densest. The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s companion to The Social Network, opens from Sony as a whistleblower story about the social-media reckoning that followed the first film. Other Mommy, Rob Savage’s Blumhouse horror from Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, puts Jessica Chastain against an entity that wears her face and wants her daughter. Fjord opens from Neon the same week. Animals hits select theaters and Netflix, following an L.A. mayoral candidate and his wife after their son is kidnapped and the ransom starts to split them.
Midmonth shifts toward prestige and spectacle. You Can See Everything is dated October 16. So is La Bola Negra, Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s Cannes Best Director winner, a music drama spanning 1932, 1937, and 2017, opening limited in New York and Los Angeles before a wider Netflix rollout.
Sense and Sensibility, Georgia Oakley’s new Austen adaptation, reaches U.S. theaters October 16 after a September release in the U.K., with Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles as Marianne. Whalefall, with Josh Brolin, is the survival outlier of the stretch, a man trapped inside a whale with no existing model for how that plays on screen. Street Fighter opens October 16 in a 1993 setting, with Andrew Koji as Ryu, Noah Centineo as Ken, Callina Liang as Chun-Li, and a tournament that turns old allies into enemies.
The Diplomat returns October 15 on Netflix, all eight episodes of season 4, with Keri Russell’s Kate Wyler walking into a plot that pushes the U.S. toward war over a Russian nuclear weapon.
Clayface is the Halloween tentpole, October 23. James Watkins’s R-rated DC horror follows actor Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys Harries, from a rising career to a disfigurement and a treatment that gives him his face back and takes his grip on reality. It is the first outright horror film from the new DC Studios slate.
The month closes on two smaller bets with real followings. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Noah Segan’s drama with John Turturro as an aging thief in a city that no longer runs on cash, opens October 30 from Sony Pictures Classics. Wildwood, Laika’s stop-motion adaptation of Colin Meloy’s novel, is set for October 30, the rare October release aimed at families who still want a dark fairy tale in a theater.