Lukas Dhont's First World War drama Coward reached Belgian cinemas on October 21, 2026, five months after its world premiere in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, and MUBI lists a German cinema release for December 31. The MUBI film page carries the line A MUBI release - in cinemas December 31 for its German-language market, and the German film site Kino-Zeit gives the same start date, 31.12.2026, with MUBI Deutschland GmbH named as distributor. France follows on November 18, 2026, through Diaphana Distribution under the title Les Braves, according to Wikipedia.

The film arrives in each market carrying a Cannes acting prize, a Belgian Oscar submission and a spread of ratings that differ by platform. None of the five public listings that describe it is dated as a single announcement. Wikipedia's article was last edited on October 21, 2026, at 04:53 UTC, the morning of the Belgian release.

In Short

A Belgian director made a film about two young soldiers in the First World War who fall in love while putting on shows behind the trenches. It won an acting prize at Cannes in May, opened in Belgium this week and comes to German cinemas on New Year's Eve through MUBI, which is both a film distributor and a streaming service. Websites that list the film do not agree on basic facts such as how long it runs, so the numbers depend on which page you read.

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What the film is

Coward is the third feature by Lukas Dhont to enter the official selection at Cannes, following Girl in 2018 and Close in 2022, according to Wikipedia. Dhont wrote the screenplay with Angelo Tijssens. The story is set in 1916. Pierre, played by Emmanuel Macchia in what Wikipedia describes as his acting debut, serves at the Belgian front. Behind the trenches he meets Francis, played by Valentin Campagne, and the two organise a theatrical revue with their comrades.

MUBI's synopsis frames the premise this way: "Surrounded by brutality but bound by tenderness, two World War I soldiers find a fragile sanctuary of love and art amid the shadows of the Belgian trenches. COWARD asks a profound question for a generation sent to war: when the world demands violence, is walking away the truest act of bravery?"

IMDb's shorter summary reads: "Pierre, a young Belgian soldier wants to prove himself on the battlefield during the First World War. Behind the frontlines, he meets Francis, who is asked to find a way to boost morale."

The supporting cast listed by Wikipedia and IMDb includes Jef Jacobs as Jozef Stevens, Willem De Schryver as Jacobs, Liam Jacqmin as Blanckaert, Mistral Guidotti as Gustaaf Cooreman, Boris Bouchat as Thomas, Mathieu Carpentier as Sergeant Dubois M., Anaëlle Fournier as Mathilde and Max Colonne as Robert. Kino-Zeit names a different third lead in its credits box: Campagne, Macchia and Jonas Wertz, who plays Jozef according to Wikipedia. IMDb's billing places Willem De Schryver third instead.

Behind the camera, the credits are consistent across Wikipedia and Kino-Zeit: Frank van den Eeden on cinematography, Alain Dessauvage editing and Valentin Hadjadj on music. The film is in French and Dutch, according to both Wikipedia and IMDb.

How it was made

According to Wikipedia, the screenplay took three years to develop. Dhont and Tijssens researched archives that included London's Imperial War Museums, alongside sources in Belgium and France. The writers learned that male soldiers performed theatre on the front lines, often cross-dressing to play wives and mothers, and found rare accounts of lasting romantic relationships between closeted queer men.

The production company behind it is The Reunion, founded in 2021 by Lukas Dhont and his brother Michiel Dhont. Versus Production, Topkapi Films and producer Juliette Schrameck for Lumen co-produced. The public money is specific. Eurimages, the Council of Europe film fund, contributed €500,000 and Screen Flanders €200,000, according to Wikipedia, which cites Screen. Broadcasters and telecoms groups France 2 Cinéma, Ciné+ OCS, VTM, RTBF, Proximus, BeTV and Orange are listed as further co-producers.

Principal photography was scheduled to begin in September 2025, with filming in Belgium and New York, according to Wikipedia. IMDb lists Belgium as the only filming location.

MUBI's director page for Dhont carries a statement from him that reads close to a description of the film's two leads: "I am constantly in this process of going beyond myself by trying to go beyond my own limits as a director. So I am always attracted, fascinated even, by characters able to break the norms that they are internal or external, and for whom it is even urgent to do so as it is necessary for them to achieve something else."

That page credits Dhont as director and screenwriter on five titles: Headlong (2012), Infinity (2014), Girl (2018), Close (2022) and Coward (2026). It also lists two producer credits, Julian by Cato Kusters (Netherlands, 2025) and Gun by Charlotte Lybaert (Belgium, 2022). Wikipedia describes Julian as the first feature from The Reunion.

The release map

Distribution is split between local distributors and MUBI. Lumière handles Belgium and the Netherlands, and Diaphana Distribution handles France, according to Wikipedia. The Match Factory handles world sales. Wikipedia's sentence on this reads "The Match Factory and Cologne will handle the world sales", which appears to fold the company's Cologne base into a second company name.

MUBI's role was settled in two steps. In May 2026, according to Wikipedia, which cites Variety from May 6, MUBI acquired rights for the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and Turkey. Shortly after the Cannes premiere it added North America, per a Variety report dated May 22. MUBI had already distributed Close in several countries.

The dated releases visible in the sources are:

  • 21 May 2026: world premiere, Cannes competition
  • 21 October 2026: Belgium, Lumière
  • 18 November 2026: France, Diaphana Distribution, as Les Braves
  • 31 December 2026: Germany, MUBI, per MUBI and Kino-Zeit

No source gives a date for the UK, North America or the other MUBI territories. The British Board of Film Classification rated the film 15 on September 4, 2026, according to Wikipedia. Kino-Zeit lists the German FSK age rating as "keine Angabe" - not stated.

A distributor that also streams

MUBI is a curated subscription streaming service as well as a theatrical distributor, so a December cinema release in Germany is also the front end of a later streaming window on its own platform. The sources do not say when Coward will reach MUBI's streaming service in any market. Kino-Zeit's streaming box for the title states that no streaming offers are currently available, a field the site notes is powered by JustWatch.

That arrangement matters for how independent film is marketed. A studio title depends on a paid media plan tied to an opening weekend. A MUBI release leans on festival laurels, critics' pull quotes and the platform's own subscriber base, and the MUBI film page is built that way: the awards panel, three critics' excerpts and a trailer sit above the cast list.

The commercial terrain for such films is not empty. Films outside each year's top 20 took $3.7 billion, or about 43%, of the $8.7 billion 2025 US domestic box office, according to VAB's analysis of Box Office Mojo data. Cinemas sold more than 651 million tickets in 2025, up 9% from 598 million the year before, while revenue rose about 1%.

Prizes, and how many

Coward won the Best Actor award at Cannes, shared by Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, at the ceremony on May 23, 2026, according to Wikipedia. Dhont also won the Prix du Cinéma Positif. The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or, which went to Fjord, per Wikipedia citing Deadline.

How those honours are counted depends on the listing. IMDb shows "1 win & 3 nominations total". Wikipedia's accolades table lists two wins and one nomination. MUBI states "Show all (25)" for awards and festivals, which bundles festival selections with prizes, and its visible panel shows Cannes 2026 with "Winner: Best Actor", Toronto 2026, San Sebastián 2026 in the Perlak section and the BFI London Film Festival 2026 in its Love strand.

The festival run extends beyond those. Wikipedia lists the Kinoscope section of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2026 and the Perlak sidebar of the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival. Kino-Zeit's tags add Filmfest Hamburg 2026, the Filmkunstmesse Leipzig 2026 and IFFMH 2026, the Mannheim-Heidelberg festival.

The Oscar entry is a submission

Belgium selected Coward as its entry for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards, according to Wikipedia, citing VRT NWS and The Hollywood Reporter on August 25, 2026. It is Dhont's second Belgian submission. Close, the first, was nominated in the category.

Kino-Zeit tags its page "Nominierung Oscar für den besten internationalen Film 2027". That tag describes a nomination. None of the sources reports one; the film is a national submission, and Academy nominations for the 99th ceremony are not reported in any of them.

A late addition at Cannes

IMDb's trivia section, which is written by users, states that the film was initially reported not to be ready for Cannes, that a rough cut reached the selection committee after the submission deadline, and that Thierry Frémaux and the committee viewed it less than 24 hours before the selection was announced. No other source repeats the account.

The runtime problem

Two figures circulate for the film's length, seven minutes apart.

MUBI lists 127 minutes. Wikipedia gives 127 minutes and cites the BBFC classification of September 4, 2026, which is the only runtime in the five sources tied to a regulator. IMDb lists "2h (120 min)" in its technical specifications and Kino-Zeit gives "Filmlänge: 120 Min".

Which is correct for a given screening cannot be settled from these pages alone. A festival cut and a release cut can differ, and a classification body times the version submitted to it. The difference is not trivial for cinemas planning sessions, or for anyone buying pre-show advertising, where audiences arrive early: in an MRI-Simmons study cited by VAB, 96% of moviegoers arrive before show time and 80% at least ten minutes early.

The country of origin varies too. MUBI lists "Belgium, France". Wikipedia, IMDb and Kino-Zeit all list Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

Ratings by platform

Reception scores are split across four counting systems, and each counts something different.

Platform Score Basis
Rotten Tomatoes 94% approval, 7.7/10 average 36 reviews, retrieved October 14, per Wikipedia
Metacritic 66 out of 100 12 critics, retrieved September 21, per Wikipedia; IMDb shows the same Metascore of 66
MUBI 7.6/10 54 user ratings
IMDb 7.3/10 684 user ratings

Metacritic describes its 66 as indicating "generally favorable" reviews and uses a weighted average, according to Wikipedia. The gap between a 94% approval rate and a 66 is not a contradiction. Rotten Tomatoes counts the share of positive reviews; Metacritic averages weighted scores. A film most critics like, without most of them loving it, lands in exactly that position.

IMDb lists 33 critic reviews and 5 user reviews, a popularity rank of 1,610, and states that 21,700 users have added the title to their watchlist. For a film that has opened in one country, that last figure is a measure of intent rather than of viewing. PPC Land applied the same caution to the ratings around the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, where Metacritic and IMDb's Metascore did not even agree.

What the critics wrote

MUBI's critics panel shows three excerpts, all dated from the Cannes premiere week. Erik Anderson of AwardsWatch wrote on May 21 that Coward is "Dhont at his most tender and his most mature, crafting a stunning piece of work and one of the best films of the year, of any year."

Aurore Engelen of Cineuropa, on May 22, wrote that Dhont "uses beauty to offer a form of resistance against the ugliness of the world... Beauty lies at the heart of the story just as it lies at the heart of the shots."

Pete Hammond of Deadline, on May 21: "Coward may be a story taking place in war, but it is set firmly in the human heart."

These are the excerpts a distributor chose to display, and they are uniformly positive. Wikipedia's summaries are more measured. It describes Nadia Dalimonte of Next Best Picture calling the film a sensitively crafted examination of shifting definitions of bravery and cowardice, and Clotilde Chinnici of Loud and Clear concluding it is a well-made film with a bold premise.

Kino-Zeit's critic Arabella Wintermayr, who saw the film at Cannes, opens on the title's ambiguity. "Wer ist hier eigentlich der Feigling?" she asks - who is actually the coward here? Those trying to survive, the men hiding behind military hardness, or those who can allow themselves feelings only under the cover of war? Her verdict, translated by PPC Land: "With Coward, Lukas Dhont has made his most impressive film to date." She also singles out a tenderness in the love scenes "of a kind still seen far too rarely in gay cinema", in PPC Land's translation of "wie man sie im schwulen Kino noch immer viel zu selten sieht".

And the users

User reviews pull in both directions. IMDb's featured reviews pair a 2 from a user titled "Boring a WWI drag show", who argues the film "misses the mark by prioritizing uncomfortable romantic dynamics over a compelling historical narrative", with a 10 from a user who saw it at a preview screening in Brussels and was "absolutely blown away". MUBI's visible user scores run from a 5/10 to a 1.5. One MUBI reviewer writes: "It's unlike most anti-war films in that it is also a queer film, where male bonding and desire become intertwined with performative femininity."

Why it matters for marketers

Coward is not an advertising story, but it shows how a film's commercial identity is assembled now. The cinema date sets the window. The streaming platform owns the later relationship with the viewer. And the numbers a buyer, a programmer or a reader sees - runtime, prize count, rating - are drawn from different databases that do not reconcile.

For a distributor like MUBI that both releases in cinemas and runs a subscription service, those signals are part of the funnel. A watchlist add on IMDb or MUBI is an expression of intent that the platform can act on later. Data on what people want to watch has become a commercial asset in its own right: JustWatch, which feeds Kino-Zeit's streaming box, opened JustWatch TV to 50 million guide users with 30 content partners on October 20.

The release calendar also places Coward in a crowded season. Disney, by contrast, passed $4 billion at the 2026 global box office ahead of a seven-film autumn slate, and earlier in the year PPC Land examined how Spielberg's Disclosure Day was marketed with a $115 million production budget and a trailer that drew 15.8 million YouTube views in eight days. A Belgian-French-Dutch war drama in French and Dutch sits at the other end of that market, competing for screens with prizes, reviews and a December 31 date chosen to land in the awards season.

Timeline

  • 2012: Dhont directs Headlong, the first title on MUBI's list of his films
  • 2018: Girl, Dhont's first film in the Cannes official selection
  • 2021: Lukas and Michiel Dhont found The Reunion
  • 2022: Close premieres at Cannes, later nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film
  • September 2025: Principal photography scheduled to begin, in Belgium and New York per Wikipedia
  • April 2, 2026: PPC Land reports more than 651 million tickets sold in 2025
  • May 2026: MUBI acquires rights for the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and Turkey
  • May 21, 2026: World premiere in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival
  • May 22, 2026: MUBI acquires North American rights, per Variety
  • May 23, 2026: Macchia and Campagne share the Cannes Best Actor award; Dhont wins the Prix du Cinéma Positif
  • June 5, 2026: PPC Land examines the cinema ad buy around Spielberg's Disclosure Day
  • August 2026: Screens in the Kinoscope section of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival
  • August 25, 2026: Belgium selects Coward as its submission for the 99th Academy Awards
  • September 4, 2026: BBFC rates the film 15, at 127 minutes per Wikipedia
  • September 6, 2026: Disney passes $4 billion at the 2026 box office
  • September 27, 2026: VAB finds films outside the top 20 took 43% of 2025 US box office
  • October 20, 2026: JustWatch TV opens to 50 million guide users
  • October 21, 2026: Belgian theatrical release through Lumière
  • November 18, 2026: Scheduled French release through Diaphana Distribution, as Les Braves
  • December 31, 2026: Scheduled German cinema release through MUBI

Summary

Who: Belgian director Lukas Dhont and co-writer Angelo Tijssens; actors Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne; production company The Reunion; distributors Lumière, Diaphana Distribution and MUBI.

What: Coward, a French- and Dutch-language First World War drama about two soldiers who fall in love while staging a revue behind the trenches, won the Cannes Best Actor award and is Belgium's Oscar submission. Its listings disagree on runtime (127 or 120 minutes), country of origin and the number of prizes, while ratings range from 94% on Rotten Tomatoes to 66 on Metacritic.

When: World premiere May 21, 2026; Belgian release October 21, 2026; France November 18, 2026; Germany December 31, 2026.

Where: Produced in Belgium, France and the Netherlands; premiered in Cannes; released through local distributors in Belgium and France and through MUBI in Germany and its other acquired territories.

Why: The film shows how an independent release is built from festival prizes, critics' excerpts and platform data, and how a distributor that also runs a subscription service links a cinema date to a later streaming relationship with the audience.