Perhaps you’re just a hunk of burning love for Elvis Presley. Maybe you’ve been relishing Charli xcx’s Brat summer moment. Watching Billie Eilish live might make you happier than ever. Or, good times could never seem as good as when you’re hearing Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline.
Whichever of the above fits, 2026’s cinema slate so far has obliged that affection – but there’s more to come for fans of music-related movies in what’s proving to be a packed jukebox of big-screen offerings.
In its fixation with ready-made audiences, Hollywood might adore sequels, prequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots and reimaginings, alongside adapting seemingly every book, comic, game and toy possible. Music, however, also comes with an inbuilt fanbase – and plenty of this year’s new cinema releases have been capitalising upon that fact.
Almost every week in theatres in 2026, a new concert film, music documentary, mockumentary or biopic has been vying for patrons’ eyes and ears, spoiling viewers for choice. So have movies that otherwise put music or musicians at their centre, or actively value the experience of listening to or creating tunes.
Movies for music lovers – quick links
Just like you’re there
Great concert films weave a special kind of magic, making viewers feel as if they’re swaying with a stadium crowd rather than sitting in a cinema. The best go beyond capturing that sensation and championing the artist in the spotlight.
They ensure that everyone watching, existing fan or not, experiences how and why the star at the feature’s centre can hold audiences in their thrall. See: the recent phenomenon that was Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.
Concert movies both delight existing obsessives and offer perhaps the strongest enticement there is for potential new enthusiasts, then. In 2026, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert and Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) have each achieved this feat, aided not only by their titular talents but also by superstar directors.
Baz Luhrmann’s second ode to Presley, after Oscar-nominated 2022 biopic Elvis, again matches the director and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll’s respective flair. Compiled from lovingly and meticulously restored archival footage, plus revealing behind-the-scenes moments, EPiC adores witnessing Presley perform – but also appreciates how Luhrmann’s feverish fondness can augment the experience.
In his first directing stint away from the world of Avatar since his Pandora-set franchise began in 2009, James Cameron co-directs Hit Me Hard and Soft with Grammy- and Oscar-winner Eilish. Given the former’s penchant for immersive filmmaking and the latter’s knack for live tours that earn the same description, they make a well-suited pair across multiple nights of Manchester shows. Cameron even appears on-screen, stressing that Eilish is driving the project.
With their 2026 concert films, Luhrmann and Cameron join a sizeable list of fellow famed directors who’ve excelled at bringing live performances to the screen, including Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz, Shine a Light), Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense, Neil Young: Heart Of Gold, Neil Young Trunk Show, Neil Young Journeys), Spike Lee (American Utopia) and David Lynch (Duran Duran: Unstaged).
EPiC and Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour are merely two of the concert movies that have reached cinemas in 2026, alongside Stray Kids: The Dominate Experience, Thom Yorke: Live at the Sydney Opera House, Bring Me the Horizon: Live in Sao Paolo and, featuring John Lennon’s only full-length gigs beyond The Beatles, Power to the People: John & Yoko Live.
The inside story
Weaved throughout their onstage footage, EPiC and Hit Me Hard and Soft provide glimpses of Presley and Eilish as people, not just performers. This year’s best music documentaries so far tackle the same task, just with more attention given to the behind-the-scenes tale over live numbers.
That said, with the insightful and impassioned It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, experienced music documentarian Amy Berg (Janis: Little Girl Blue) gives her film the same feeling as listening to Buckley’s iconic album Grace. Befitting its focus on intimacy – of his songs and performances alike – the movie also strives to convey, through showing as well as telling, why everyone who saw him live speaks of it as if it was a divine revelation.
Berg similarly knows when the archival material at her disposal can say everything that her movie needs to. A key skill for both music documentaries and concert films, it’s equally pivotal to Morgan Neville’s Paul McCartney: Man on the Run.
After also directing movies about Brian Wilson, Sam Phillips, Johnny Cash, Iggy & The Stooges, Keith Richards and, using Lego animation, Pharrell Williams, Neville’s skill at turning the lens on music figures firmly shines through in his engaging exploration of McCartney after The Beatles.
The delightful Live It Up: The Mental As Anything Story dives into the origins, ascension and career of the beloved Australian rockers. That this isn’t director Matthew Walker’s debut music doco – he first helmed 2021’s I’m Wanita – also shows. He, too, trusts his treasure trove of footage, as well as the story of the band’s journey from playing on pool tables to becoming Aussie music royalty, also working in reflections and anecdotes from the group’s members into this spirited tale.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple might’ve delivered Iron Maiden’s greatest movie moment of 2026, courtesy of a stunning Ralph Fiennes-starring scene, but music documentary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition still offers a loving and likeable celebration of the British metal heroes. While little that it covers about the group will surprise diehards, seeing Javier Bardem sing the band’s praises as a superfan just might.
Satirising fame and recreating stars (or inventing them)
For everyone who’s seen This Is Spinal Tap and its 2025 sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, any doco about a heavy metal band doubles as a game of ‘spot the influences’. It’s impossible not to glean how Christopher Guest and company took inspiration from Iron Maiden for their now just-as-famous mockumentary band, for instance.
2026’s first new addition to satirical music flicks arrived courtesy of Charli XCX. After already receiving the documentary treatment via 2022’s Charli XCX: Alone Together, she’s now parodying herself, her recent success and the trappings of pop stardom post-Brat, with the singer conceiving of, starring in and producing the ambitious The Moment. (Elsewhere, she’s also happy acting as characters other than herself, featuring in six other movies, including the Sydney Film Festival-bound Erupcja, since 2025.)
Before there was Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, there was mockumentary webseries and then TV series Nirvanna the Band the Show, with every entry in the franchise charting the fictional Nirvanna the Band’s quest to play a gig at Toronto’s The Rivoli. As a film, time travel gives Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s project an entertaining angle, as well as a fresh lens to explore what it means to achieve your music dreams – or not.
Cinema’s holy grail when it comes to musicians has long been the biopic, however. Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Bob Marley, Robbie Williams, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and now Michael Jackson – all have been the subject of silver-screen music bios over the last decade alone.
With its time-constrained and controversy-free portrait of Jackson until the late 1980s, box-office hit Michael might not see Jaafar Jackson follow in the footsteps of Academy Award-winning music biopic stars James Cagney (Yankee Doodle Dandy), Sissy Spacek (Coal Miner’s Daughter), Jamie Foxx (Ray), Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line), Marion Cotillard (La Vie En Rose), Renee Zellweger (Judy) and Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), but he turns in an uncanny portrayal of his uncle.
Like Michael, Song Sung Blue also sits in Australia’s box-office top 10 at the time of writing, aided both by Hugh Jackman as one of its leads (alongside Oscar-nominee Kate Hudson) and the fact that it casts the Aussie talent as a real-life Neil Diamond impersonator.
Of course, not all music biopics, or movies with a music superstar as their protagonist, focus on genuine musicians. While Mother Mary is psychological thriller and a ghost story about its pop star namesake, not a biopic, the bewitching Anne Hathaway-led film joins past releases such as Velvet Goldmine, Her Smell, A Star Is Born, Vox Lux, This Is Spinal Tap, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie in digging into the music industry through a fictional persona.
Echoing elsewhere
As the likes of Mother Mary and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie demonstrate, filmmakers aren’t solely drawn to movies about music because in-built fanbases will follow their favourite artists to the screen. Inherent in every picture that heroes music – regardless of whether it’s a concert film, music doco, mockumentary or biopic of a real or invented artist – is an awareness that the artform inspires such deep devotion because it both expresses and soundtracks our emotions.
Although every movie with a score or soundtrack understands this truth – and musicals, such as Rebel Wilson’s finally-released The Deb, overtly rely upon it – 2026’s cinema slate so far has actively danced with music’s unique power in multiple films.
In the affecting The Choral, Ralph Fiennes again communes with this idea, albeit as a choirmaster during the first world war rather than The Bone Temple’s doctor navigating dystopian times. Charmer Blue Moon, which earned Ethan Hawke an Academy Award nomination, also weaves it into its portrait of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart.
Cannes Jury Prize and Best Soundtrack-winner Sirât might’ve missed out on a nod for its score among its two Oscar nominations, but rarely has a movie revelled in the primal potency of music to such explosive effect. And in Sundance Audience Award-winner DJ Ahmet, a stereo helps transform a North Macedonian teen’s daily life.
Music-loving moviegoers clearly haven’t been short of options so far this year, and that trend is set to continue. Still to come in Australian cinemas before 2026 reaches its halfway mark, Power Ballad sees filmmaker John Carney (Once, Begin Again, Sing Street and Flora and Son) again pay tribute to music – this time with Paul Rudd playing a wedding singer and Nick Jonas as a former boy band member.
Plus, thriller Tuner tasks a piano tuner with applying his skills to cracking safes, while comedy The Musicians finds laughs amid the chaos of staging a recital.
