The Multiplex Strikes Back: Why This Fall’s Movies Are Worth Leaving the Couch For

WOODBURY — Somewhere in the last few years we all quietly agreed that the movies were a thing that happened to us on a phone, in bed, at 40% brightness, with the subtitles on because we’d stopped really listening. I get it. I’ve done it. But I’m here, double espresso in hand, to tell you that this October is the month to put the phone down, drive to the theater, and remember what a movie is supposed to feel like when it’s twenty feet tall and you’re not the one in control of the pause button.

The fall slate is genuinely, unreasonably good, and it’s the kind of good that only works in a dark room full of strangers.

Two openers on October 2

Start with Verity, out October 2, Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in an adaptation of the Colleen Hoover thriller that half of South Jersey read on a beach chair in Wildwood two summers ago. This is a book that got passed hand to hand down the shore like contraband, and now it’s a movie built to make an entire theater gasp at the same second. That shared gasp — that’s the thing you cannot get streaming alone. You cannot text the group chat a gasp.

Same day, same dare: Digger, Alejandro González Iñárritu directing Tom Cruise in what’s being sold as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.” Iñárritu is the guy who made Birdman and The Revenant — art films with a scowl — and now he’s handed the wheel to the last true movie star we’ve got, the man who still does his own stunts because he apparently believes we don’t deserve nice things unless someone risks their life for them. I have no idea if it works. That’s the point. I want to find out in a theater, not in a Wikipedia plot summary at midnight.

Sorkin, then Street Fighter

Then there’s The Social Reckoning on October 9 — Aaron Sorkin writing and directing the Frances Haugen Facebook-leak story, with Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White doing the rapid-fire Sorkin walk-and-talk. A movie about a whistleblower who tried to warn us all what the little glowing rectangle was doing to our kids feels almost too on the nose for the fall of 2026, given that Trenton passed a law this year to get phones out of classrooms. Art and life, shaking hands in the lobby.

And because cinema contains multitudes, October 16 brings Street Fighter — Jason Momoa, Roman Reigns, and a cast that is reportedly leaning fully into camp. Good. Not everything needs to be Iñárritu. Sometimes you need Aquaman throwing a fireball while a theater full of people who grew up feeding quarters into an arcade cabinet at the Deptford Mall lose their minds. That’s cinema too. Don’t let anybody snobby tell you different.

A vote for the local screen

Here’s my actual pitch, though, and it’s the same one I’ve been making in this column since I started it. We have real movie theaters in South Jersey — not just the big-box multiplexes but the smaller houses and the indie screens that survive on exactly the kind of night I’m describing. Every ticket you buy in October is a vote for whether those screens are still here in October 2030. Streaming isn’t the enemy; forgetting is. Forgetting that a movie was ever meant to be an event, a place you went, a thing you did with the person next to you instead of the phone in your hand.

Every ticket you buy in October is a vote for whether those screens are still here in October 2030.Vinny Vinci

So pick one. Just one. Drive to Deptford or wherever your nearest working marquee still glows. Buy the overpriced popcorn — it’s part of the sacrament. Turn the phone all the way off, not to silent, off. And let a story be bigger than you for two hours.

The movies aren’t dead. We just have to keep showing up like we mean it.

Based on reporting from Yahoo Entertainment, Complex, NPR and Movie Insider.