2026 is the year of Anne Hathaway, we’re just lucky to be here
If you’ve been to a mainstream cinema lately, you might have noticed that most of the trailers star Anne Hathaway.
Whether she’s beaming at Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada 2, pining after Matt Damon in The Odyssey, or throwing out a wild theory about her suburban neighbourhood in The End of Oak Street, the Oscar winner is seemingly everywhere, and that doesn’t even count Mother Mary in April or that upcoming Colleen Hoover adaptation.
For years, Hathaway has been the Hermione Granger of Hollywood – earnest, hardworking, and successful, but regularly dismissed as over-eager. She’s just trying too hard, apparently. A friend told me recently that Hathaway reminds her of a mean theatre kid she went to school with. She gives off that vibe to some people, defined by a megawatt smile that is just barely diverting attention away from gritted teeth.
There is plenty of implicit sexism in such criticisms. How many men (famous or otherwise) can you think of who have been accused of “trying too hard”? And if she wasn’t trying, wouldn’t we just accuse her of being one of those celebrities whose success simply comes down to luck? We are going through an entertainment cycle that winces at earnestness and prizes performative ennui, and in that environment, Hathaway is downright rebellious. Luckily, her vindication is imminent and long overdue.
Remember the worst of all Oscar ceremonies when she hosted with James Franco? Speaking of performative ennui, his flamboyant portrayal of boredom was so powerful that it sucked the energy right out of the room, leaving Hathaway smiling for her life. At the time, people criticised both of them, but in light of Franco’s disgrace and the clarity of hindsight, it’s clear that Hathaway was put in an impossible position. No one, not even Martin Short or Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, could have compensated for the charisma vacuum that was Franco.
The confluence of Hathaway movies this year might leave audiences wondering just how much Hathaway is too much, but consider the range. On its own, David Lowery’s Mother Mary floats through genres and defies categorisation, and Hathaway’s performance could be the greatest moment of her career since Rachel Getting Married nearly two decades ago. As a pop star in the midst of a supernatural and creative crisis, she is more vulnerable and less effervescent (in a good way) than she has ever been.
Then, there’s The Devil Wears Prada 2, a weak remake that spends an hour floundering in nostalgia and another hour speeding through plot machinations about the downfall of journalism. Despite its cringeworthy script and the fact that comedies and female protagonists rarely attract huge audiences, it is, so far, the fourth-highest-grossing movie of the year. This is not Hathaway’s best film of 2026, but it does give her box office credentials to go alongside the artistic credentials of Mother Mary.
Up next is The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic in which Hathaway plays Penelope, the faithful wife who fends off suitors while waiting years for Odysseus’s return. The cast is so packed with A-listers that it’s almost easier to count the famous people who ‘aren’t’ in the cast list than those who are, but Penelope is more than a single-scene supporting character in the story, suggesting that Hathaway’s role might be larger than some of her famous co-stars. Combined with The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey could make her the highest-grossing star (male or female) of 2026.
The End of Oak Street is slated to be released a month later, in August. Helmed by It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, it is intriguingly described as a dinosaur survivalist adventure with a 12A certificate in which Hathaway plays a resident of suburbia alongside Ewan McGregor. It could either be an antidote to the ever-deteriorating Jurassic Park franchise or a side effect of it. Either way, it appears to have very little resemblance in tone or subject matter to any of the star’s other films this year.
Last and probably least is Verity, an adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel set for release in October. In it, Hathaway plays a bestselling novelist whose husband (Josh Hartnett) enlists the help of a struggling young author played by Dakota Fanning when an accident prevents his wife from completing her book series. Call me cynical, but this sounds like a mashup of The Da Vinci Code and last year’s The Housemaid, but as Serenity and Mother’s Instinct have proven, Anne hath a way of turning torrid melodrama into campy spectacle.
You might assume that the release of all five movies in just seven months could be chalked up to a fluke of scheduling, but that is only partially true. They were filmed across three years, but most of them overlapped. Mother Mary was shot between May 2023 and July of 2024, and The End of Oak Street was slotted in between March and June of 2024.
That seems somewhat doable, but how on Earth did she manage to film the other three movies between February 2025, when Verity began shooting, and October that same year, when The Devil Wears Prada 2 wrapped? That’s nine months to film three movies, all of which required wildly different performances. From there, she went straight into filming a war movie with Ron Howard. Did I mention that she also just announced her third pregnancy?
“I’ve always just felt defined by my work ethic,” Hathaway said in a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “[M]y skill set is what it is, and I have to work with what I have, but how hard I can work is something that I can control.”
Say what you will about her public persona, Hathaway is putting in the work. At 43, she’s having what could be her most artistically interesting and box office-dominating year to date. How can we not celebrate that?
