10 Movies We Can’t Wait to See This Fall

Key takeaways

• The fall calendar is top-heavy and smaller than usual. "The Odyssey" opened early, is tracking toward roughly $1.8 billion worldwide and 11 to 14 nominations, and sits as the heavy Best Picture favorite, which seems to have pushed other studios out of the prestige lane. They expect Grand Theft Auto 6 on November 20 to swallow attention and ticket sales around Thanksgiving, with "Fokker-in-Law" positioned as pure family counterprogramming.
• Box office check-in: "Coyote vs. Acme" opened to $15.5 million, and both hosts think it skews to eight-to-twelve-year-olds because many gags are text on signs and the plot is essentially a legal comedy (John Cena versus Will Forte). "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" held number one into its fifth weekend, closing on $2.5 billion. "The Dog Stars" collapsed at $8 million domestic on a $100 million Ridley Scott production, which they read as fading support for old-school star vehicles; the Barney-and-Pee-wee horror riff "Buddy" made nearly $6 million on about 1,000 screens.
• Their most-anticipated titles lean toward films they know little about: "Whalefall" (Brian Duffield, Austin Abrams, a man swallowed by a whale), "Making Marie Antoinette" (shot by the late Eleanor Coppola, finished by Sofia), "Elsinore" (Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman, an actor playing Hamlet while dying of AIDS), "Ink" (Danny Boyle on Rupert Murdoch buying the Sun), Zach Cregger's "Resident Evil," and the Colleen Hoover adaptation "Verity."
• "The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth" is the season's biggest question mark. It reunites David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, and Brad Pitt, yet Netflix has released only an unposted Super Bowl teaser, ran summer reshoots, and is putting it in IMAX theaters only before a likely Christmas streaming date. The hosts plan to cover it with spoilers regardless of how many people can see it.
• Films they have already seen and recommend: James Gray's "Paper Tiger" (Adam Driver, plus what they call Miles Teller's best work in years), Noah Segan's tight 85-minute "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" with John Turturro, the Cristian Mungiu Palme d'Or winner about parenting and the state (compared repeatedly to "Anatomy of a Fall"), John Wilson's feature debut "The History of Concrete," Jordan Firstman's "Club Kid," and Hamaguchi's three-and-a-half-hour elder-care drama landing on Thanksgiving.
• Their "September Oscars" game predicts locks from released films: "The Odyssey" for Best Picture, Edward Norton in Supporting Actor for "The Invite," Ludwig Göransson's score, "Spider-Man" visual effects, and Greg Fraser's cinematography for "Project Hail Mary." Wild cards include Taylor Swift for Best Original Song with "Toy Story 5," "Michael" sneaking into Best Picture on a popular-hit argument, and Emily Blunt for "Disclosure Day."

Notable moments

• Around 02:00, the "Coyote vs. Acme" backstory: Warner Bros. shelved it as a tax write-off, Ketchup Entertainment reportedly paid $50 million to rescue it, and it opened to $15.5 million.
• Around 08:30, Sean admits "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" blew past the $1.7 to $1.8 billion ceiling he would have guessed, becoming one of the biggest movies ever.
• Around 10:50, his verdict on "The Dog Stars" bombing: "More of a Ridley and chiller."
• Around 16:00, the recurring bit about extending the show's run to 2028 as Anne Hathaway joins "Days of Thunder 2."
• Around 22:00, the "Whalefall" pitch, including the claim that a whale has 36 chambers, "much like Wu-Tang and Shaolin."
• Around 26:30, Amanda recounts a teenage date to Versailles with a tall German man she met in a Paris bar.
• Around 59:30, Sean says he turned to Amanda during "Paper Tiger" because the Astoria setting was his grandmother's neighborhood and his father was a cop there.

Time saved: 1 hour, 24 minutes.