It’s not uncommon for actors to have two or three bites at the Oscar apple in a single year. But in some distant corner of the multiverse — maybe Earth-2099? — Anne Hathaway will be up for six acting awards at the 2027 Oscars that could sit on a shelf next to her Best Supporting Actress statuette for Les Misérables.
The actress is on track to have five movies arriving in theaters between April and October, with the possibility of one more title crashing onto the calendar at the tail end of 2026. The full roll call includes Mother Mary (April 17), The Devil Wears Prada 2 (May 1), The Odyssey (July 17), The End of Oak Street (Aug. 14), Verity (Oct. 2), with the yet-to-be-scheduled Alone at Dawn rounding out the sextet.
That’s a formidable lineup of films that pairs Hathaway with multiple major stars and/or fellow Oscar-winners — Meryl Streep! Matt Damon! Charlize Theron! — as well as awards-friendly directors like Christopher Nolan, Michael Showalter, and Ron Howard. Still, none of them are guaranteed to pair her with either a Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress nomination. That’s why we’re ranking Hathaway’s six 2026 contenders by how likely they are to earn her a shot at that elusive second statuette.
And hey, if none of these work out, there’s always the long-promised Princess Diaries 3. You can bet that the Academy’s millennial voters in particular are royally engaged with that franchise.
6. Mother Mary
Forget video — mixed reviews and underwhelming box office killed this particular radio star. Granted, David Lowery’s love story/psychological thriller/rock opera/fashion exorcism passion play was always going to be a tough sell to Oscar voters, let alone audiences. A24 tried to sell Mother Mary as a descendent of Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 Oscar champ Black Swan when it’s actually closer in spirit to another less celebrated (and highly underrated) music-laden Natalie Portman vehicle, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, which came up empty with major awards bodies back in 2018.
As the titular pop star possessed by an otherworldly spirit, Hathaway gets the chance to strut her singing stuff on a big stage for the first time since Les Miz. But truth be told, she’s not the real star of the movie. That title goes to Emmy-winner Michaela Coel, whose character — Mother Mary’s jilted fashion designer and likely ex-lover — drives the increasingly eerie action. It’s a role that’s well-tailored to the British actress, who can currently be seen expertly fulfilling a similar function in Steven Soderbergh’s droll art world satire The Christophers alongside Ian McKellen.
While Mother Mary won’t beget Hathaway a Best Actress nomination, the film could potentially finds way into the Oscar race courtesy of the original songs from Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs. And if that happens, Mother Anne herself could perform the nominated tune live in the room.
5. The End of Oak Street
One year after Weapons put a Best Supporting Actress statuette in Amy Madigan’s sights, Warner Bros. is reloading that fortuitous release date with the latest — and most ambitious — film from writer-director David Robert Mitchell. The It Follows auteur conjures up a scenario where a mysterious event uproots an ordinary suburban home with an ordinary suburban family inside and drops them in an entirely extra ordinary place populated by foreboding terrain and fear-inducing giant lizards.
Backed by J.J. Abrams and clearly influenced by Steven Spielberg, Oak Street gives off Poltergeist-meets-Jurassic Park vibes in the first teaser trailer and additional footage that screened at CinemaCon earlier this month. In place of Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, Ewan McGregor and Hathaway play the patriarch and matriarch of this particular clan and do a very, very good job looking like they’ve just seen multiple ghosts in addition to multiple dinosaurs.
Of course, neither Poltergeist nor Jurassic Park netted any Oscar nods for its stars. And while Weapons showed that Oscar voters are open to rewarding gonzo horror/thriller characters played by veteran character actors, that’s not the kind of role Hathaway appears to be tasked with playing here. The most likely thing waiting at the end of Oak Street for her is a late-summer box-office hit — not an Oscar.
4. Verity
Now here‘s the kind of gonzo horror/thriller part that could catch voters’ attentions. On the page, Colleen Hoover’s 2018 bestseller reads like Misery meets Mommy Is a Murderer or another such memorably-named made-for-Lifetime killer mom classic. The premise is at once both simple and needlessly complicated: young scribe Lowen Ashleigh is hired to finish a series of books by recently-incapacitated celebrity author Verity Crawford and falls for said author’s dashing husband, Jeremy, after moving into their house. But Lowen soon comes to suspect that Verity is not only faking her medical drama — she may also be guilty of multiple counts of infanticide.
Michael Showalter’s film version tasks Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett with playing the Verity’s dupes, while Hathaway scores the plum part as the wicked wife and mother. Verity‘s first teaser trailer plus the extended clip that screened at CinemaCon as part of Amazon MGM’s presentation indicates that the actress is having a ball creating her own version of Annie Wilkes — the role that netted Kathy Bates a rare Best Actress win for a horror movie.
And if Verity were written by Stephen King instead of Colleen Hoover, it might engender less skepticism. But even after a string of successful adaptations like It Ends With Us and Regretting You, the Hoover name remains more associated with airport fiction than the Academy Awards. Still, there’s room in the 2027 Best Supporting Actress race for a delicious villain in the tradition of Annie or Aunt Gladys — and Hathaway could move right in.
Legacy sequels can be a risky business — Tron: Legacy anyone? — but The Devil Wears Prada 2 mostly succeeds at getting the band back together in style. The original movie, of course, was a showcase for Meryl Streep, who parlayed her biting performance as an Anna Wintour-coded fashion magazine editor into a 14th Oscar nomination. (That number has since grown to 21.)
What’s interesting about this 20-years-later redo is that Streep’s Miranda Priestly still brings the attitude, but Hathaway’s Andy Sachs is the one who keeps the wobbly story grounded. Prada 2 is at its best when it acknowledges the existential challenges facing modern-day journalism and that material is filtered entirely through Andy’s experience. Watching Hathaway move backwards in order to move forwards isn’t just something that will resonate with fourth estaters — it can apply to any professional field in late stage capitalism.
Naturally, this Devil is primarily selling aspirational fantasy, so it can only allow so much authenticity to creep into Andy’s journey. Still, Hathaway carries the sequel as assuredly as Streep carried its predecessor. There have been a few actors who have been nominated for playing the same character twice; she could be one of the first to get a nod for the second round.
2. The Odyssey
Speaking of war movies, most of the advanced looks at Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Ancient Greece’s most famous epic have emphasized its brawny Imax-sized battle sequences. During his 2026 CinemaCon appearance, though, the Oppenheimer Oscar winner indicated that those sneak peeks are a Trojan horse for an emotional drama about war-weary Odysseus (Damon) desperately trying to find a way back to his beloved wife Penelope (Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland). “It’s always been a film, first and foremost, about this idea of family, this idea of homecoming,” Nolan emphasized.
Damon and Hathaway previously journeyed with Nolan to faraway worlds in 2014’s Interstellar, where the erstwhile Jason Bourne was a cowardly villain, not a returning hero. Interestingly, Nolan also attempted to frame that heady sci-fi yarn as an emotional story about an absent father, but Oscar voters didn’t feel the love. Interstellar ultimately received five nominations, but only in below the line categories with the cast going overlooked.
Here’s a notable stat: across Nolan’s entire filmography, only four actors have received Oscar nominees, and three of that rarefied group have won — Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight followed by Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer. The latter duo’s co-star Emily Blunt is the only actress to have scored a nod for a Nolan movie. That would seem to stack the deck against Hathaway, but if The Odyssey successfully strikes that familial nerve voters are searching for, she could set sail to the Dolby Theatre when the ballots are counted.
1. Alone at Dawn
Ron Howard, start your engines. The Rush director reportedly wrapped filming on this Amazon MGM production in February, an end date that gives him either seven months to have it ready for fall festival season or ten months for a Clint Eastwood-style year-end drop. Either way, Alone at Dawn is the one Hathaway title that’s most clearly in the Academy’s wheelhouse — a fact-based military drama in the vein of American Sniper or The Hurt Locker.
Set against the backdrop of the Afghanistan War, the film recounts the story of John Chapman, an Air Force officer who was injured and left behind during a combat operation, and rescued numerous lives while awaiting rescue. Adam Driver plays Chapman, while Hathaway portrays the intelligence officer who fought for him to receive a Medal of Honor in the face of opposition from segments of the military. Alone at Down marks Howard’s first war film as a director, and Diver himself notably served in the Marines before pursuing an acting career.
Of course, for every Hurt Locker — which was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won six, including Best Picture — there’s a Courage Under Fire that wins rave reviews, but no Oscar nods. Still, Alone at Dawn sounds like it has the right stuff to be in the conversation; Driver has notably never been nominated before, while Hathaway could easily channel some of Jessica Chastain’s Zero Dark Thirty intensity into a woman-against-the-system performance that’s catnip for voters. Let’s see if good ol’ Ronnie can get the movie across the finish line.
