Upcoming Drama & Rom-Com Movies: Full Descriptions
Here’s a deeper look at each film mentioned, with more context on premise, cast, and what makes it worth watching. Whether you’re after something breezy and low-stakes or a heavier, awards-caliber character study, this list breaks down what each project is actually about, who’s involved, and where it fits into the broader trends shaping both genres right now. Some of these titles are backed by decades-old source material and long, careful development processes; others are still taking shape in production and could evolve considerably before release. Either way, there’s enough here to fill out a watchlist well into 2027.
Rom-Coms
13 Going on 30 (Reboot)
Netflix is officially reviving the beloved 2004 romantic comedy that made “Thriller” dance breaks a cultural touchstone. The original followed an awkward 13-year-old who makes a birthday wish to be “30, flirty, and thriving,” only to wake up instantly transported into her adult life, forced to reckon with who she actually became. Plot specifics for the new version are being kept tightly under wraps, but the casting has generated real buzz: original stars Jennifer Garner and Judy Greer are both part of the new ensemble, with Garner also attached as an executive producer. That suggests the reboot may function less as a straight remake and more as a passing-of-the-torch story, possibly following a new young lead while weaving in the original characters years later. Joining them is a stacked supporting cast that includes Emily Bader, Logan Lerman, Jessica Alba, Taylor Zakhar Perez, and Nasim Pedrad, hinting at a much larger ensemble than the original film’s more intimate scale.
Untitled Julia Hart/Jordan Horowitz Teen Rom-Com
This Netflix original centers on Liz Buxbaum, a high school senior whose entire worldview has been shaped by a lifelong obsession with classic romantic comedies. When she sets her sights on landing her untouchable crush, she reluctantly turns to her charmingly irritating next-door neighbor for help, kicking off a story that plays with genre tropes while still delivering the swoony beats fans of the genre actually want. It’s being helmed by husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Julia Hart and Jordan Horowitz, who co-wrote the script together, with Hart directing. Filming is set to begin in Chicago in late August 2026 and run through October, which means the film is unlikely to arrive until sometime in the second half of 2027. Given the self-aware premise — a girl who’s essentially been trained by rom-coms trying to live out one in real life — expect plenty of winking references to the genre’s classic tropes.
Untitled Campus Rom-Com
A lovesick indie musician botches the simple task of getting his crush’s phone number, accidentally setting off a chain of comedic misunderstandings when he enlists a sharp, no-nonsense psychology student to help track her down. What starts as a straightforward mission spirals into a campus-wide frenzy that tests both of their romantic ambitions — and, predictably, sparks feelings between the two leads themselves. The film comes from a team with ties to Love Actually, so expect an ensemble-heavy structure, witty dialogue, and a soundtrack built for repeat listens. The cast includes Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, and Minnie Driver, blending younger talent with more seasoned comedic presence.
Voicemails For Isabelle
This one blends grief with classic rom-com misunderstanding. After her sister dies, a young woman named Jill copes by leaving rambling, unfiltered voicemails chronicling her chaotic life in San Francisco, treating the messages almost like a diary. When the phone number is unexpectedly reassigned, an elusive Austin-based real estate agent on the other end begins receiving her hilariously confessional messages instead. The setup allows the film to balance real emotional weight with the kind of comic, slow-burn connection that rom-com fans live for, as two strangers develop a bond entirely through one-sided voicemail messages before ever meeting. The cast includes Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson.
Office Romance
A starry workplace comedy built around the classic will-they-won’t-they office dynamic. Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein lead the film, which Goldstein also co-wrote alongside Joe Kelly, with Ol Parker directing. The supporting cast — including Betty Gilpin, Amy Sedaris, Tony Hale, and Bradley Whitford — suggests a workplace ensemble comedy in the vein of classic corporate rom-coms, mixing romantic tension with office politics and comedic supporting characters. It premiered on Netflix in mid-2026.
Solo Mio
A comedic getaway movie following a tight circle of friends who head to Palm Springs expecting a relaxing, low-key spa retreat. Naturally, things don’t go as planned once one especially unpredictable friend crashes the trip and turns their peaceful vacation into chaos. Starring Anna Faris, Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, and Michelle Buteau, it leans more toward pure comedic chaos than romance, proving that not every entry on this list needs an emotional gut-punch — some are just here for the laughs. Its ensemble cast of established comedic actresses suggests a film built around chemistry and improvisational energy rather than a tightly plotted romantic arc, in the tradition of hangout comedies that prioritize character dynamics over story mechanics.
Wishful Thinking
A romantic fantasy-comedy that blends wish-fulfillment and second-chance romance with a lighter, whimsical tone. Written and directed by Graham Parkes in his feature directorial debut, the film stars Maya Hawke, Lewis Pullman, and Randall Park. It premiered at SXSW in early 2026 before a wider theatrical release planned for early 2027, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. Its hybrid approach — mixing traditional rom-com beats with a fantastical premise — reflects a broader trend of romantic comedies borrowing elements from other genres rather than staying strictly grounded.
Verity
The fourth Colleen Hoover novel to be adapted into a film within just a few years, following in the footsteps of hits like It Ends With Us. Unlike many of Hoover’s more straightforward romantic dramas, Verity stands out as a thriller, following a writer who becomes increasingly consumed by the disturbing manuscript left behind by an incapacitated author whose life — and marriage — she’s been hired to help finish documenting. Its blend of psychological suspense and slow-burn romantic tension makes it one of the more unusual entries in the current wave of book-to-screen adaptations.
The Love Hypothesis
Adapted from the wildly popular BookTok romance novel by Ali Hazelwood, this film follows a PhD student who fakes a relationship with a standoffish professor to help convince her real romantic interest that she’s moved on — only for the fake relationship to start feeling a lot less fake. Its journey to the screen has been closely tracked by the massive online fanbase the book built, and casting announcements for the project have generated some of the most passionate fan reactions of any adaptation on this list.
People We Meet on Vacation
Based on Emily Henry’s bestselling novel, this film follows two best friends, Poppy and Alex, who are opposites in nearly every way — she wants to see the world, he’d rather stay home with a good book — but who have spent one week of every summer traveling together for a decade. When their annual trip is thrown off course, both are forced to confront feelings they’ve spent years avoiding. With a cast including Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, it’s one of the most anticipated literary rom-com adaptations of the year, riding the wave of Henry’s massive readership.
Dramas
Dune: Part Three (Dune Messiah)
Denis Villeneuve continues his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s saga, moving into the events of Dune Messiah. Set years after the war that installed Paul Atreides as emperor, the film follows the consequences of the religious movement built around him, as political intrigue and personal cost catch up with the man once mythologized as a messianic figure. Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and Anya Taylor-Joy all return, with the film positioned as the emotional and thematic conclusion to Villeneuve’s trilogy.
The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan takes on Homer’s foundational epic, following Odysseus’s dangerous, years-long journey home after the fall of Troy. Along the way, he faces mythological threats including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Sirens, and the sorceress Circe, testing both his cunning and his resolve to reunite with his family. Starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, alongside Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway, the film represents a significant swing for Nolan into large-scale mythological storytelling, a notable departure from his more grounded, high-concept work.
Wuthering Heights (2026)
Emerald Fennell, known for the provocative, stylish filmmaking of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, tackles Emily Brontë’s gothic classic about the destructive, obsessive love between Cathy and Heathcliff. Margot Robbie stars as Cathy, with Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, in a pairing that’s already generated enormous conversation online. Given Fennell’s track record, expect a version of the story that leans into its darker, more unsettling undertones rather than playing it as a straightforward period romance.
Mother Mary
David Lowery’s long-anticipated drama finally arrives after years in development. It stars Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel as an iconic pop star and her estranged former costume designer, who reunite ahead of a major event in the singer’s life. The reunion forces both women to reckon with the fallout of their past relationship, blending themes of fame, isolation, and reconciliation. With a supporting cast that includes Hunter Schafer, Kaia Gerber, and FKA twigs, the film is positioned as one of the year’s more stylish, character-driven awards contenders.
Train Dreams
Based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed novella, this quiet character study follows Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker living through the rapidly changing landscape of early 20th-century America. Rather than building toward a single dramatic climax, the film traces the accumulated weight of an ordinary life lived against a backdrop of enormous historical change, with Joel Edgerton in the lead role. It’s the kind of understated, deeply human drama that tends to build momentum slowly through festival buzz before dominating awards conversations later in the season.
Untitled Nuremberg Psychiatrist Drama
This WWII-set psychological drama follows a psychiatrist assigned to evaluate captured Nazi leaders in the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials. As he conducts his interviews, he becomes increasingly consumed by his own attempt to understand how ordinary human minds could commit such atrocities, developing an unsettling rapport with one of history’s most notorious figures. Directed by James Vanderbilt and starring Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, and Michael Shannon, the film leans into morally complex, historically grounded territory that tends to draw serious awards attention.
Pride and Prejudice (2026)
A new screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s enduring novel about Elizabeth Bennet and the proud, initially off-putting Mr. Darcy, whose mutual misjudgments give way to one of literature’s most famous romances. Austen adaptations tend to arrive with heavy expectations given how many beloved versions already exist, and this new take will inevitably be measured against past adaptations, but its fresh casting and current-day sensibility are generating interest among fans eager for a new interpretation of the classic story. Part of what keeps drawing filmmakers back to this particular novel is how endlessly adaptable its central romantic tension is — the slow thaw between two people who initially can’t stand each other remains one of the most durable templates in all of romantic fiction, and each new adaptation tends to find a slightly different angle on the class commentary and social satire baked into Austen’s original text.
The Forsytes (2026)
Drawing on John Galsworthy’s sprawling Forsyte Saga, this adaptation follows a wealthy British family across generations as they navigate love, inheritance, social ambition, and the quiet cruelties of upper-class propriety. Multigenerational family sagas like this one tend to work best as prestige television, but this film adaptation compresses the sprawling source material into a tighter, more focused story, likely centering on the saga’s most famous romantic entanglement between Soames Forsyte and his wife Irene. The original novels span decades and multiple generations of the Forsyte family, tracing how wealth and rigid social expectations shape — and often damage — the romantic lives of those born into it, and any film adaptation faces the challenge of distilling that scope into a single feature without losing the slow-building emotional weight that made the source material so enduring.
Why These Two Genres Keep Overlapping
Looking at this list as a whole, it’s striking how much romance runs through even the prestige dramas here. Mother Mary, Wuthering Heights, and Pride and Prejudice are all fundamentally love stories, just told with a heavier, more literary hand than something like Solo Mio or Office Romance. That overlap isn’t an accident — romance has always been one of the most reliable emotional engines in storytelling, whether it’s dressed up in awards-season prestige or delivered as pure comfort viewing. The difference between a rom-com and a romantic drama often comes down less to the presence of love and more to tone, stakes, and whether the story is built to make you laugh or make you sit with something heavier. Given how strong both ends of that spectrum look over the next year and a half, there’s rarely been a better moment to be a fan of either.
A Note on What to Expect
A few of these films — particularly the untitled Netflix projects and the ones still deep in production, like the Julia Hart teen rom-com — don’t have confirmed plot details beyond their initial premise, since they’re still months (or over a year) away from release. Details like supporting cast, tone, and even title are subject to change as production continues. On the other end of the spectrum, the awards-driven dramas, especially Mother Mary, Train Dreams, and the Nuremberg psychiatrist drama, have had considerably longer development windows, meaning their premises are more firmly locked in, even if festival premieres and wide release dates could still shift.
Worth noting, too, is how differently these two genres tend to roll out. The rom-coms on this list are overwhelmingly bound for streaming, especially Netflix, meaning most will drop all at once rather than building toward release through a traditional marketing campaign. The dramas, by contrast, are far more likely to premiere at festivals like Venice, Telluride, or Toronto months before their public release, building critical buzz and awards momentum long before general audiences get a chance to see them. If you want to get ahead of awards season conversations, festival coverage of titles like Mother Mary and Train Dreams is worth following well before their eventual wide releases.
