ok marking the calendar for real this time. Ridley Scott's first sci-fi movie in nine years, The Dog Stars, officially hits theaters August 28, and after weeks of it hovering on release calendars with no exact date, we finally have it locked in. Collider confirmed the date this week.

Nine years. Let that sit for a second. The guy gave us Alien, Blade Runner, The Martian, and then just... dipped out of the genre entirely after Alien: Covenant in 2017. And you may remember Covenant has been quietly charting on Prime Video lately, which felt like the universe warming us up for this.

The cast is stupid good. Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, and Margaret Qualley. Elordi doing a Ridley Scott sci-fi movie is the kind of career pivot I did not have on my 2026 bingo card but I'm so here for it. Brolin in a dystopia again just makes sense, that man was built for end-of-the-world material.

If you haven't read the Peter Heller novel it's based on, the setup is: a pandemic wiped out most of humanity, and a pilot named Hig lives at a small airport with his dog and his gun-toting neighbor, flying patrols and trying to keep what's left going. It's quieter than it sounds. Less laser guns, more grief and small hope. Very on brand for late-career Scott, the man does not miss when he's locked in on intimate-scale stuff inside huge premises.

I know I keep saying I'll sit through any runtime a director throws at me when the scale earns it, and this one's apparently leaner than you'd expect. Scott shot this fast. He's 88 and out here making movies quicker than some directors half his age, which is its own kind of unsettling.

The part I'm most curious about is the tone. The book is half survival story, half interior monologue, written in this fragmented style with no quotation marks. Adapting that could go so wrong in the wrong hands. But Scott doing small-canvas sci-fi with an actual budget behind it is exactly the flavor of thing I live for. Not everything needs to be a franchise starter. Sometimes you just need one guy, one plane, one dog, and the end of the world.

so yeah. August 28. Theater. I already promised myself I'd catch it opening weekend after the Hobbits reunion reminded me how good it feels to just show up for things. Review coming once I've seen it, and fair warning, I'm going in with high expectations because the man made Blade Runner. He owes us nothing but I'm still demanding everything.