Julianne Moore, Josh Brolin and Daisy Ridley Lead the Buzziest Titles at AFM

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THR’s 2026 AFM Hot List spans star-led packages, international genre plays, animation and prestige dramas, all hunting for an audience in a changing independent landscape

November 9, 2026 10:00am

Published on November 9, 2026

The American Film Market’s 47th edition, taking place Nov. 10-15 at the Fairmont Century Plaza, AMC Century City and The Pavilion in Los Angeles, arrives at a moment of near-total disruption for the independent film business. The models that have long underpinned financing, production and distribution are in flux, squeezed by consolidation, changing audience habits and a market in which the traditional routes to getting a film made and seen are no longer a given.

But the upheaval is also opening doors. A new generation of online creators-turned-filmmakers — Curry “Obsession” Barker, Kane “Backrooms” Parson and Mark “Iron Lung” Fischbach among them — is proving that audiences can be built outside the traditional system and carried onto screens.

“Oddly, every independent success is still seen as a fluke, or gets put in a bucket,” says Jackie Brenneman, the new head of IFTA, which runs AFM. “What’s not being seen is that almost none of these films should have happened, because the structure of the business doesn’t support independent film. That they’ve broken through the way they have is just the tip of the iceberg of demand. Once we build the infrastructure to connect audiences with the stories they want across all different screens, the numbers are going to be much bigger.”

That sense of untapped demand is echoed by international sellers, some of whom are returning to the market after time away. Among them is South Korea’s Finecut, back at AFM after several years with the animated feature Long Long Night, from Korean director Kyu Bock Youm, which follows a rhino and a penguin as they journey across the wilderness together. “As one of the last markets of the year, AFM is an important opportunity to introduce titles launched after Cannes to buyers, particularly for North and Latin America,” says Finecut sales manager JD Kim. “Considering the trajectory from Parasite to K-Pop Demon Hunters, I believe global interest in Korean culture and content remains strong.”

THR’s 2026 Hot List of the titles generating buzz at AFM spans star-led packages, international genre plays, animation, prestige dramas and films at various stages of production. The common thread is a search for projects — and business models — that can find their audience in a rapidly changing independent landscape.

• ‘Almost You’

  

  Almost You

  DIRECTOR Matt Lipsey

  STARS Juno Temple, Joey King, James McAvoy

  BUZZ AI and grief collide in this high-concept tale about a robotics engineer mourning her younger sister, who feeds years of messages, videos and social media posts into an AI replica of her. The invention brings comfort — at first — before forcing her to confront a thorny question: if you could bring someone back, should you? A trio of Temple, King and McAvoy gives the timely premise some marquee value for buyers.

  SALES Bankside Films, UTA

• ‘A Speck in the Sea‘

  

  A Speck in the Sea

  DIRECTOR Orlando Von Einsiedel

  STARS Josh Brolin, Jeremy Renner

  BUZZ Oscar-winning documentarian Von Einsiedel (The White Helmets) makes his fiction debut with this based-on-a-true survival tale of Johnny Aldridge (Brolin), a Montauk lobster fisherman who falls off his fishing boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the dead of night, with his best friend Anthony Sosinski (Renner), asleep below deck.

• ‘Breakwater’

  

  Breakwater

  DIRECTOR Luc Walpoth

  STARS Olga Kurylenko, Alex Pettyfer

  BUZZ Action thrillers are a go-to at any AFM, which bodes well for this neo-noir project, about a woman trapped in a toxic marriage (Kurylenko) whose plan to blackmail her rich sadistic husband (Pettyfer) goes horribly wrong, landing her and her accomplice in a fight for survival on the high seas.

  SALES WestEnd Films

• ‘Control’

  

  Control

  DIRECTOR Robert Schwentke

  STARS James McAvoy, Julianne Moore

  BUZZ One of the higher-profile star-driven actioners on offer at AFM, this feature, from the director of Red, features McAvoy as a man who wakes up one morning with an untraceable device planted in his head and must follow a mysterious voice’s instructions or devastating consequences.

  SALES Studiocanal

• ‘Darlington’

  

  Darlington

  DIRECTOR Sascha Gervasi

  STARS Renée Zellweger, Dominic Sessa, Peter Dinklage

  BUZZ Zellweger plays a faded television actress invited to reprise her most famous role — only this time in the real world. Her host (Sessa) is a reclusive tech billionaire who has restored an English country estate and lives there as if it were 1923. As she settles into his carefully controlled fantasy, the line between illusion and reality starts to blur. Alexander Payne is on board as executive producer, which should add some cachet to the package.

  SALES Rocket Science, CAA

• ‘The Face of Horror’

  The Face of Horror

  DIRECTOR Anna Biller

  STARS Jonah Hauer-King, Kristine Froseth, Leo Suter

  BUZZ Biller’s gothic horror takes its cue from Yotsuya Kaidan, Japan’s most famous ghost story and a cornerstone of Japanese horror, adapted more than 30 times, including by Takashi Miike as Over Your Dead Body in 2014. Set amid war and plague, the story follows a knight who kills a landowner, marries his daughter and vows to avenge the very crime he committed. When he betrays her, his wife returns from the grave to exact revenge, drawing his squire and her sister into the supernatural reckoning.

  SALES Embankment Films

• ‘Falcon’

  Falcon

  DIRECTOR Marco Bellocchio

  STARS Pierfrancesco Favino, Louis Garrel, Benedetta Cimatti, Barbara Ronchi, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

  BUZZ Bellocchio turns his lens on the boardroom with this drama about Sergio Marchionne (Favino) and his bid to rescue Fiat from the brink of collapse. Framed as a financial thriller with a psychological edge, the film tracks Marchionne’s battles with General Motors and Chrysler and his mentorship of heir John Elkann (Garrel), while counting the personal cost of saving an industrial empire.

  SALES Rai Cinema International Distribution

• ‘Feed’

  Feed

  DIRECTOR Leslye Headland
  STAR Rosamund Pike

  BUZZ This new project, which Pike will also produce, could provide an injection of socially-conscious body horror in the vein of The Substance for indie buyers. Inspired by 2022 Finnish feature Hatching, it stars Pike as a Muminfluencer desperate to make her gymnast daughter an online sensation. But when she turns to a suspicious supplement to help her along, monstrous things begin to happen.

  SALES The Veterans, CAA Media Finance

• ‘Found Alive’

  Found Alive

  DIRECTOR Carlota Pereda

  STARS Chloë Grace Moretz, Rupert Friend

  BUZZ Genre buyers get a festival-tested option here: the thriller opened the 2026 Sitges Film Festival ahead of its AFM outing. Ten years after escaping a sadistic captor, a young woman agrees to mentor a newly rescued survivor. When the girl’s story points to other missing victims, she is drawn into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. The English-language debut of Piggy director Pereda is adapted from Carla Norton’s Edge of Normal book series.

  SALES XYZ Films; CAA Media Finance, XYZ Films

• ‘Get Rid of It’

  Get Rid of It

  DIRECTOR Ry Russo-Young

  STARS Daisy Ridley, Sosie Bacon, Simon Rex

  BUZZ A one-night stand leaves Harper with something unexpected growing inside her in this horror thriller, which sends her and her estranged sister on a desperate search for medical help. With the man from the encounter, religious fanatics and, eventually, the FBI all in pursuit, the sisters must confront both the creature and the wounds that drove them apart. The film is scheduled to shoot in February 2027.

  SALES Upgrade, CAA Media Finance, Range Select

• ‘Gods Don’t Give Gifts’

  Gods Don’t Give Gifts

  DIRECTOR Zack London

  STARS Richard Cotton, Sam Dale, Ben Kersley

  BUZZ Add another name to the roster of online creators making the leap to features: YouTuber Zack London (Gossip Goblin) makes his debut with this animated sci-fi horror anthology, set in a future where transhumanism has pushed humanity far beyond recognition. Across four stories, ordinary people turn to strange new technologies to satisfy primal urges, exposing a widening rift between body and mind.

  SALES AGC Studios

• ‘It’s Alright’

  It’s Alright

  DIRECTOR Scott Stewart

  STARS Paul Bettany, Asha Banks, Colin Firth, Gugu Mbatha-Raw

  BUZZ A Brit feel-good comedy with a strong music hook, this feature from Legion and Dark Skies director Stewart sees Bettany playing an aging rock star, with real-life pop singer Banks as his estranged daughter, an aspriring singer-songwriter. With a score produced by Marius de Vries, music producer on La La Land, CODA and Moulin Rouge!, this package should have AFM buyers humming along.

  SALES Protagonist Pictures, CAA Media Finance

• ‘I’m With Stupid’

  I’m With Stupid

  DIRECTOR Hannah Pearl Utt

  STARS Jacob Tremblay, Kate McKinnon, Ego Nwodim, Chabely Ponce

  BUZZ A teen comedy about two slackers at the opposite ends of their high school’s social spectrum forced to work together to try and graduate. With few mainstream comedies on offer in the market, this could be the one to get buyers to open up.

  SALES Upgrade, UTA Independent Film Group, After Hours

• ‘In Her Shadow’

  In Her Shadow

  DIRECTOR Rowan Athale

  STARS Letitia Wright

  BUZZ This supernatural horror thriller sees Black Panther: Wakanda Forever star Wright playing Annie Cutter, a celebrated author who adopts the daughter of her estranged, recently-deceased sister, a girl her sister kept locked in a basement for five years. But after taking the girl in, Cutter begins to suspect her sister may have had a reason to be afraid of the child.

  SALES Bankside Films

• ‘The Journeyman’

  The Journeyman

  DIRECTOR Ángel Manuel Soto

  STARS Patrick Schwarzenegger, Leslie Grace

  BUZZ Blue Beetle director Soto pivots to sports-crime with this story of a down-on-his-luck tennis pro who is drawn into the dark world of match-fixing as he tries to make ends meet for his family. Schwarzenegger and Grace lead the cast.

  SALES AGC Studios, WME, UTA

• ‘The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd’

  The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd

  DIRECTOR Tim Blake Nelson

  STARS Amanda Seyfried, Scoot McNairy

  BUZZ Based on true events, this drama, which premiered to strong reviews in Toronto, follows an English teacher trapped in an abusive marriage who takes a job at a maximum-security prison in Oklahoma and falls for a charismatic inmate who is also a student in her class.

  SALES WestEnd Films

• ‘Mare Nostrum‘

  Mare Nostrum

  DIRECTORS Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat

  STAR Antonio Banderas

  BUZZ This feature, from the Argentine directors of Official Competition (2021) should have potential beyond the Spanish-language market. Banderas stars as a container ship captain who takes on a boat of African migrants, only to land in a political storm when he tries to dock in Europe.

  SALES HanWay

• ‘The Portrait’

  The Portrait

  DIRECTOR Sarah Colangelo

  STARS Gillian Anderson, Rebecca Hall

  BUZZ A pitch for a more adult demographic, this new project from Colangelo, director of The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) is billed as a Hitchcockian thriller about an acclaimed writer (Anderson) who for years has been having an affair with a married man. When he is struck ill and she can’t see him anymore, the writer commissions his artist wife (Hall), to paint her portrait, setting up a showdown between the two women.

  SALES Rocket Science, WME

• ‘Safe Space’

  Safe Space

  DIRECTOR Gillian Wallace Horvat

  STARS Joey King, LaKeith Stanfield

  BUZZ Dating is hard enough without an alien. In this high-concept sci-fi comedy from I Blame Society director Horvat, an intelligent but insecure scientist escapes a toxic relationship with a co-worker, only to rebound into what may be the most toxic relationship in the galaxy: an affair with a gorgeous alien.

  SALES Lucky Number, WME, CAA

• ‘Speed The Plow’

  Speed the Plow

  DIRECTOR David Mamet

  STARS Anthony Mackie, Sharon Stone, Ben Mendelsohn, Emily Alyn Lind

  BUZZ Hollywood inside baseball from Mamet, who revisits the town’s power games in this black comedy about a newly appointed studio chief offered a guaranteed blockbuster — or an important art-house film championed by his office temp. The choice becomes a test of professional ambition and personal integrity.

  SALES The Solution Entertainment Group

• ‘Untitled Armando Iannucci Package’

  Untitled Armando Iannucci Package

  DIRECTOR Armando Iannucci

  STARS Taron Egerton, Alicia Vikander, James McAvoy

  BUZZ The award-winning writer/director of Veep and The Death of Stalin is trying his hand at the conspiracy thriller in this hot project. Plot details are being kept under wraps but the A-list cast, and Iannucci’s pedigree, should bring buyers in.

  SALES FilmNation Entertainment, UTA Independent Film Group

• ‘Violet’

  Violet

  DIRECTOR Patrick Brice

  STARS Lili Reinhart, Danny Ramirez, Suki Waterhouse, Mark Duplass, Lukas Gage

  BUZZ A horror thriller with a tech edge, this feature from Creep director Brice follows a widower Sean (Ramirez) trying to move on after the death of his fiancée, Violet (Waterhouse). He finds new love with his childhood friend (Reinhart). But then Sean begins to receive unsettling text messages from someone, or something, claiming to be dead ex. someone, or something, claiming to be his dead ex.

  SALES FilmNation Entertainment

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