The Walt Disney Company published its autumn theatrical calendar on September 3, 2026, listing seven titles between September 4 and November 6 and disclosing that Walt Disney Studios has crossed $4 billion at the global box office for the year. Only two of the seven are new narrative features.

In short

Disney has published the list of films it will put into cinemas this autumn, and told the market that its studios have already taken more than $4 billion worldwide in 2026. Most of the autumn list is not new movies: it consists of one twentieth-anniversary re-release, one re-release of a 2019 blockbuster, and three documentaries, with only two original narrative features among the seven. For anyone buying cinema advertising, that shifts the shape of the season, because re-releases and documentaries draw smaller and more concentrated audiences than a wide franchise opening does.

What Disney listed

The announcement, carried on the company newsroom under an entertainment tag and dated September 3, 2026, sets out seven titles with fixed dates. Disney and Pixar's Cars returned on September 4 in a twentieth-anniversary re-release. Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger follows on September 11. Marvel Studios' Avengers Endgame: Encore arrives September 25. Portrait of an Artist: Stephen Curry opens October 9. 20th Century Studios' Whalefall is dated October 16, Everest: The Other Side October 30, and Searchlight Pictures' Wild Horse Nine November 6.

Three further titles sit outside the autumn window but inside the same calendar year. Walt Disney Animation Studios releases the original feature Hexed on November 25. Searchlight brings Tony Gilroy's Behemoth!, with Pedro Pascal and Olivia Wilde, to cinemas on December 4. Marvel Studios closes the year with Avengers: Doomsday on December 18.

That structure was largely visible in June, when Disney set out its summer plans and PPC Land documented the studio crossing $2 billion for the year alongside the Endgame re-release date, the Whalefall and Wild Horse Nine slots, and the December 18 Doomsday anchor. The September announcement confirms those dates and adds four titles that were not previously grouped into a published autumn list.

The summer figures behind the calendar

Disney attributes the $4 billion global figure to the combined performance of its winter, spring and summer releases. The four summer titles it names are Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, Disney's Moana, Searchlight Pictures' Super Troopers 3, and 20th Century Studios' The Dog Stars.

Toy Story 5 carries most of the weight in that account. According to Disney, the fifth instalment passed $1.1 billion at the global box office and recorded the largest opening weekend in the franchise's history domestically, internationally and globally. The company also places it as the second-largest animated debut of all time in the domestic market, behind Disney and Pixar's own Incredibles 2 from 2018.

The doubling from $2 billion in early June to more than $4 billion by early September is the single most useful number in the release for anyone modelling exhibition volume. It compresses roughly three months of Disney distribution into a figure that can be set against the wider market. In April, PPC Land reported that more than 651 million cinema tickets were sold across all 2025 releases, a 9% rise on 2024, against box office revenue up only 1%, with North American forecasts pointing to $9.8bn to $9.9bn in 2026 domestic gross. Admissions, not gross, were identified in that reporting as the metric most closely tracking audience volume, which is the variable that governs pre-show inventory delivery.

Five of seven are re-releases or documentaries

The composition of the list is more consequential than its length. Cars is a re-release. Avengers Endgame: Encore is a re-release. Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger, Portrait of an Artist: Stephen Curry and Everest: The Other Side are documentaries. That leaves Whalefall and Wild Horse Nine as the only new narrative features in the autumn window.

Documentary and re-release titles behave differently from wide franchise openings. Screen counts are typically lower, runs are shorter, and audiences skew toward the specific fandom the title serves rather than a general moviegoing population. The Video Advertising Bureau made the fandom argument explicit in March, mapping the full 2026 theatrical calendar against eight fandom categories, research PPC Land covered alongside Nielsen figures on ad-supported viewing. An autumn slate weighted toward music, sport, mountaineering and superhero nostalgia is a slate with unusually legible audience composition, and unusually limited scale.

Cars returns on its twentieth anniversary

The Cars re-release opened September 4 and was timed, according to Disney, to coincide with Lightning McQueen Day on September 5. The company describes the 2006 original as one of Pixar's most enduring franchises, citing sequels, shorts, park attractions and consumer products. Voice credits named in the release are Owen Wilson as Lightning McQueen, Larry the Cable Guy as Mater and Bonnie Hunt as Sally.

The commercial logic sits outside the cinema. In August, PPC Land reported that Disney had added Pixar's Cars to its Formula 1 arrangement, now running through 2028, extending a programme that had previously been framed around a single championship year. A theatrical re-release dated to a franchise-specific calendar day, sitting alongside an active motorsport licensing deal, functions as a synchronisation point across licensing, parks and media rather than as a box office event in its own right.

The Oasis documentary crosses from Hulu to cinemas

Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger is described by Disney as a Hulu Original film given a special theatrical engagement presented by Disney+. It charts Liam and Noel Gallagher's Oasis Live '25 reunion tour. Disney credits Magna Studios and Sony Music Vision as the production companies, Steven Knight as writer, producer and creator, and Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace as directors. The release is set for cinemas across the United States and select IMAX screens.

The direction of travel is worth noting. This is a streaming-originated title being pushed into cinemas, not a theatrical title moving to streaming. Disney has been building the distribution and advertising plumbing on the streaming side for two years, including work PPC Land documented when the company consolidated EMEA campaign delivery into its global Ad Server and when it rolled out four DXC interactive ad formats across Disney+ and ESPN. A theatrical window attached to a Hulu Original adds a physical release event to a title whose eventual home is ad-supported streaming inventory.

Endgame: Encore carries a Doomsday trailer as its payload

Marvel Studios returns Avengers: Endgame to cinemas on September 25. Disney frames the re-release around what accompanies it: an exclusive look at Avengers: Doomsday, dated December 18. Audiences watching in IMAX and what Disney calls Infinity Vision-certified theatres receive an additional sneak peek at the December film.

This is a paid ticket wrapped around promotional material, and Disney says so plainly in the release. The mechanism resembles a premium format trailer placement more than a conventional re-issue: the differentiating asset is available only in a subset of auditoriums, which gives exhibitors a reason to route the title toward large-format screens. For advertisers buying pre-roll in cinemas, that concentration matters. PPC Land's reporting on cinema advertising around a major summer release set out how a long-form IMAX screening holds a seated audience for ten to fifteen minutes of pre-show inventory, a dwell period no other channel replicates.

ESPN Films holds Curry exclusively in IMAX

Portrait of an Artist: Stephen Curry opens October 9 as an IMAX exclusive. According to Disney, the ESPN Films documentary records the night Curry became the first player to reach 4,000 career three-pointers, in a game against the Sacramento Kings that he entered two three-pointers short of the record. Gotham Chopra directed. The production used 21 IMAX proprietary cameras positioned around Chase Center. The film also carries reflections from Viola Davis, Rick Rubin, Patti Smith and Jon Batiste.

Twenty-one IMAX cameras on a single live sporting event is the most specific production detail in the announcement, and it constrains distribution: footage shot in that format loses much of its argument outside large-format auditoriums. An exclusive-window IMAX release is therefore a narrower buy than a wide documentary release, delivering a smaller absolute audience through screens with above-average pre-show conditions.

Sport sits at the centre of Disney's advertising business as well as its documentary output. Disney's fiscal second quarter results, which PPC Land reported when the company beat Wall Street forecasts by $320 million, showed advertising revenue within the Sports segment falling 2% to $1.132 billion on fewer impressions, even as streaming advertising revenue rose 12% to $821 million.

Whalefall and Wild Horse Nine carry the new-release load

Whalefall, dated October 16, is described by 20th Century Studios as a survival thriller. Austin Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, who is swallowed by a sperm whale while attempting to recover his late father's remains, with one hour of oxygen remaining. Josh Brolin plays the father. Brian Duffield directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Kraus, on whose novel the film is based. Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy and Emily Rudd are also credited.

Wild Horse Nine, dated November 6, is a Searchlight Pictures dramedy set shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup. CIA agents played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell are dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island by a bureau chief played by Steve Buscemi. Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas play students whose bond with Malkovich's character destabilises the assignment. Disney describes the film as the director's third collaboration with Searchlight, following The Banshees of Inisherin, nominated for nine Oscars in 2023, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which won Best Actress for Frances McDormand and Best Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell alongside five further nominations.

Everest documentary extends the large-format run

Everest: The Other Side is dated October 30 and made for the IMAX screen. According to Disney, thousands have ascended Everest from the southeast ridge in Nepal, while only five have summited from the direct North Face route on the Chinese side. The film follows ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson attempting that ascent and descent. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the Oscar-winning directors of Free Solo, are credited.

Placed three weeks after the Curry documentary, it gives Disney two IMAX-oriented documentary titles inside a single month, followed by the Endgame encore's large-format component in September. The autumn calendar therefore concentrates Disney's premium-screen demand into a nine-week stretch.

Source detail that does not reconcile

Two points in the source material do not resolve cleanly.

The release text dates Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger to September 11. An embedded trailer caption in the same document, credited to Disney UK, reads "In Cinemas September 9". The announcement gives no explanation for the two-day gap and does not state which market the September 9 date applies to. Staggered international dates are common, and PPC Land has previously documented a case where a European opening preceded a United States release by two days, but Disney's document does not make that claim here.

Second, the description of Wild Horse Nine refers to "McDonagh's third collaboration with the studio" without introducing the surname anywhere earlier in the text. PPC Land's June coverage of Disney's summer and autumn calendar identified Martin McDonagh as the film's director. This article does not attribute that identification to the September 3 release, which does not contain it.

What it means for media buyers

The autumn slate arrives as cinema and streaming pull in different directions inside the same company. Disney's ad-supported streaming base stood at 122 million as of early 2026, when PPC Land reported streaming revenue crossing $5.3 billion in the December quarter. Streaming now accounts for the majority of ad-supported television time among younger adults, a shift quantified when PPC Land covered Nielsen's 2026 upfront guide placing that share at 66.7% for adults 18 to 49. Cinema, by contrast, is a small channel with an unusual attention profile and an admissions-based measurement basis.

Three practical consequences follow from the composition of this list.

First, screen supply. Two new narrative features across a nine-week window means fewer wide openings, and wide openings are what generate the large single-weekend audiences that make national cinema buys efficient. A record August weekend, when PPC Land reported AMC drawing 10.2 million moviegoers around a major superhero opening, is the pattern that autumn 2026 does not repeat until December 18.

Second, format concentration. Three of the seven titles carry an explicit IMAX component, and one is IMAX-exclusive. That routes a disproportionate share of the autumn audience through large-format auditoriums, where pre-show conditions differ materially from standard screens and where inventory is scarcer and priced accordingly.

Third, cross-channel timing. The Oasis title moves from Hulu to cinemas; the Endgame encore exists to promote a December release; the Cars re-release runs alongside an active Formula 1 licensing programme. Campaigns timed to theatrical dates increasingly land against titles whose primary commercial function sits elsewhere in Disney's portfolio. Buyers planning CTV activity around these dates are timing against promotional events rather than conventional film releases.

The broader exhibition environment is also in flux. In July, PPC Land reported that the European Commission had required Paramount to exit the UIP distribution partnership within 13 months as a condition of clearing its Warner transaction, with remedies aimed at rental and distribution terms for cinema operators. Distribution structure, screen availability and slate composition are the three inputs that determine how much cinema inventory exists in any given quarter, and all three are moving at once.

For planners working toward the next upfront cycle, the useful signal in this announcement is not the $4 billion figure. It is the ratio: five of seven autumn titles are re-releases or documentaries, and the year's largest Disney release does not open until eight days before Christmas.

Timeline

  • 2006 - Cars debuts, going on to generate sequels, shorts, park attractions and consumer products
  • 2018 - Incredibles 2 sets the largest domestic animated opening, a record Toy Story 5 does not surpass
  • 2023 - The Banshees of Inisherin receives nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay
  • March 15, 2026 - The 98th Academy Awards are held, an event PPC Land covered alongside research on cinema advertising and fandom
  • March 28, 2026 - The People Platform publishes its 2025 cinema report, recording more than 651 million tickets sold, up 9% year over year
  • May 6, 2026 - Disney reports fiscal second quarter results, with SVOD advertising revenue at $821 million and Sports advertising down 2%
  • June 5, 2026 - PPC Land documents Disney's summer lineup and the studio crossing $2 billion for the year
  • June 19, 2026 - Toy Story 5 opens, going on to pass $1.1 billion globally
  • August 2, 2026 - AMC records 10.2 million moviegoers across its circuit in a single weekend
  • August 2026 - Disney adds Pixar's Cars to its Formula 1 programme through 2028
  • September 3, 2026 - Disney publishes its autumn 2026 theatrical slate and discloses more than $4 billion in global box office for the year
  • September 4, 2026 - Cars returns to cinemas for its twentieth anniversary
  • September 5, 2026 - Lightning McQueen Day
  • September 11, 2026 - Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger opens in United States cinemas and select IMAX
  • September 25, 2026 - Avengers Endgame: Encore opens with an exclusive look at Avengers: Doomsday
  • October 9, 2026 - Portrait of an Artist: Stephen Curry opens exclusively in IMAX
  • October 16, 2026 - Whalefall opens
  • October 30, 2026 - Everest: The Other Side opens
  • November 6, 2026 - Wild Horse Nine opens
  • November 25, 2026 - Hexed opens
  • December 4, 2026 - Behemoth! opens
  • December 18, 2026 - Avengers: Doomsday opens

Summary

Who: The Walt Disney Company, through Walt Disney Studios and its labels Pixar, Marvel Studios, 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios and ESPN Films, alongside Disney+ and Hulu. The material is directed at moviegoers but carries direct relevance for cinema advertisers, media buyers and exhibitors.

What: A published autumn theatrical calendar of seven titles, accompanied by the disclosure that Walt Disney Studios has passed $4 billion at the global box office in 2026 and that Toy Story 5 has passed $1.1 billion on its own. Five of the seven autumn titles are re-releases or documentaries; two are new narrative features. Three further titles follow in late November and December, ending with Avengers: Doomsday on December 18.

When: The announcement was published on September 3, 2026. The listed titles run from September 4 through November 6, with the extended calendar reaching December 18.

Where: United States cinemas, with IMAX components on three titles and one IMAX-exclusive release. Disney describes worldwide theatrical distribution for the wider slate. One embedded trailer caption credited to Disney UK carries a September 9 date for the Oasis documentary against the September 11 date in the release text.

Why: Disney is using re-releases and documentaries to occupy the autumn window between its summer performance and its December releases, with the Endgame encore functioning explicitly as a promotional vehicle for Avengers: Doomsday. For the marketing community, the composition of the slate determines screen supply, format concentration and the timing of cross-channel campaigns through to the end of the year.