When Zendaya was asked at the New York premiere of The Odyssey in July what she would do once her five press tours were over, she told Entertainment Tonight: “Oh, girl, nothing.” Sometimes, she added, “you need to just, you know, disappear for a little bit.” In 2024, Alex Garland told The Guardian, “I’m not planning to direct again in the foreseeable future.” The foreseeable future has turned out to be quite short for both of them.
On Thursday 15 October, Variety reported that Zendaya will star in an untitled science-fiction film written and directed by Garland for A24. Deadline, TheWrap and The Hollywood Reporter confirmed it the same day. There is no title, plot or co-star yet. TheWrap describes it only as a “secret project” that shoots next year. So we know who is making it, who is in it and roughly when it will be filmed, and nothing about what happens in it.
That a plot-free announcement still made every trade’s front page shows how 2026 has gone for Zendaya. TheWrap’s figures put Spider-Man: Brand New Day at about $2.5 billion worldwide and The Odyssey, in which she plays Athena, at about $1.78 billion, Universal’s biggest film ever. Those are the year’s top two films. She has also had The Drama, a sleeper hit for A24, and the final season of Euphoria, and Dune: Part Three opens on 18 December. She has a Ronnie Spector biopic in development at A24 and Shrek 5 due next year. If you’ve seen less of her lately, check your eyesight.
Garland’s retirement has gone much the same way. He first talked about quitting directing during the Men press tour in 2022, telling The New York Times he was “tired of feeling like a fraud.” He said it again for Civil War in 2024, then told IndieWire he wasn’t retiring, just taking “a break from directing for the foreseeable future.” Since then he has co-directed Warfare with Ray Mendoza, which made $127 million and became one of A24’s biggest hits, and he has finished shooting Elden Ring. That is FromSoftware’s famously punishing fantasy game turned into an IMAX film, with George R.R. Martin among the producers. It stars Kit Connor, Ben Whishaw, Cailee Spaeny, Jonathan Pryce and Peter Serafinowicz, and A24 releases it on 3 March 2028. TheWrap says Garland will run the Zendaya film alongside it. He also wrote both 28 Years Later films, and Danny Boyle says the third is on hold partly because Garland is too busy. Some sabbatical.
None of this is a complaint. Garland is probably the most consistently interesting British SF filmmaker working today. As a writer he went from The Beach to 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd. As a director he made Ex Machina, Annihilation, Devs and Civil War. Each one takes a single idea seriously: a machine that may be conscious, a biology that rewrites whatever it touches, a universe with no free will, a republic that falls apart sooner than anyone expected. Everything that follows is speculation, because nobody outside A24 knows the premise. Zendaya would suit most of those modes. She has played the still centre of chaos in Dune and the human wreckage of Euphoria, and Garland’s films usually need someone who can carry the moment the camera simply watches a face while the world turns strange around it. Shooting starts sometime in 2027, so a release before 2028 looks unlikely.
The best caveat comes from Zendaya herself. In her ELLE cover story this summer, between promises of rest, she admitted: “As soon as I take a break, I start to go crazy. And I’m like, ‘I need to work.'” That sounds like Garland’s retirement plans too.
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