Though there are plenty of serious subjects among the selections at this year’s South by Southwest, which begins tonight, even the festival’s own programmers were surprised to find how strongly they gravitated toward films that made them laugh amid the chaos of the world at large.
“I don’t know if it’s the generation of filmmakers or just a reaction to how grim the rest of the world is,” says Peter Hall, SXSW senior film & TV programmer. “The filmmakers are processing it through a slightly more comedic lens. Even some of the dramas that we’re playing or the horror films — a lot of what we responded to has some comedic element to it.”
In a change introduced this year, the film and TV portion of SXSW — which also spotlights live music and technology — launches Thursday (pushed up from the traditional Friday opening) with the world premiere of Boots Riley’s political satire “I Love Boosters,” the follow-up to his celebrated 2018 debut feature “Sorry to Bother You.” The anticipated Apple TV series “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman, premieres later Thursday night.
Rather than creating a “chaos reigns,” everything-in-overdrive sprint of an event, organizers hope the new format for the overall SXSW festival will be a positive change, encouraging interactions and discovery.
“The film festival has always spanned the entire event,” Hall says of how the film festival previously ran for all nine days when SXSW was a longer event. “So even though the dates changed, on a philosophical level, it didn’t really change for us because we were always across everything the whole time.”
Another change for the event this year is that the central hub of the Austin Convention Center has been demolished and is in the process of being rebuilt. It will remain closed for the next few years, forcing organizers to rethink the overall SXSW footprint across the city. To that end, events for the film and TV festival will be much more centralized around the signature venue of the Paramount Theatre, home to many high-energy premieres, and a clubhouse lounge for attendees across the street.
“Everything has moved into more of a neighborhood feel,” Hall says.
“Austin has really changed in the last 15 years,” says Greg Rosenbaum, SVP of programming for SXSW. “We’ve also seen in the post-pandemic world that as people are engaging in events — not just at South by Southwest but more broadly — there may be limited windows of time you have to be in a given place. So we want to basically give the community the best day at South by Southwest every single day.”
Headline premieres this year include “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” a sequel to the 2019 thriller starring bride and final girl Samara Weaving; “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice,” a time travel action-comedy starring Vince Vaughn; and “They Will Kill You,” an action-horror-comedy hybrid starring Zazie Beetz and Myha’la.
Zazie Beetz in the movie “They Will Kill You,” premiering as part of the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
(SXSW)
Claudette Godfrey, SXSW’s VP of film and television, notes how with its outrageous style, the deeply idiosyncratic “I Love Boosters,” a politically radical satire about a group of shoplifters that takes on issues of race and class, stands out from the increasingly selfsame-looking wave of many recent films.
“I feel like that movie is tapping into how I feel,” Godfrey says. “Tapping into the way that everybody feels in this moment of… literally name a list of the 10 things that are on everyone’s mind. Boots’ films are always political, but people also want to have a good time, even if that’s on the way to talking about, ‘What are we going to do about the future?’”
A lot of the most charged filmmaking this year is doing the work of processing a world in flux. “And doing it through strange lenses,” Hall adds. “And Boots’ film does it through quite a big creative lens. In the room when that plays, people are going to have the same sense of discovery that we had when we watched it.”
Among the late additions to the program is a keynote speaking slot for Steven Spielberg, who will be sitting for an interview for “The Big Picture” podcast with Sean Fennessey. Spielberg previously premiered his film “Ready Player One” at SXSW in 2018, causing immediate speculation that the festival might also have a surprise screening of the filmmaker’s upcoming alien invasion movie “Disclosure Day,” which opens in June.
However, Godfrey and Hall both stress that there are no plans to show “Disclosure Day.”
“It doesn’t matter what we say, people will still think that,” Godfrey says. “I have not seen that movie and I have not talked to anyone who has seen that movie. So it’s not a thing. I even sent this Slack to the whole company, ‘I just want you to know, even if you’re not going to believe me, we really are not going to play this movie.’”
“It’s not out of disinterest on our part,” Hall adds — a slight caveat.
With a new timeline and an altered footprint, this year feels like it could mark a new beginning for SXSW, even as the film program leans further into what the festival already does best: combining a sense of adventure and fun.
“I think it’s going to be really cool,” Godfrey says. “But it’s definitely going to be different.”