Ridley Scott is back. The Dog Stars opens tomorrow and it looks like the event film of the summer.
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Ridley Scott's first sci-fi film in nine years hits cinemas tomorrow. Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, an $110 million budget, and a story about what's worth surviving for. Here's everything you need to know.
Ridley Scott hasn't made a sci-fi film since Alien: Covenant in 2018. Nine years. And when Scott returns to a genre, he doesn't do it quietly.
The Dog Stars opens in cinemas tomorrow, August 28 2026, distributed by 20th Century Studios. It's based on Peter Heller's bestselling 2012 novel and follows Hig, a young pilot played by Jacob Elordi, who has survived a pandemic that wiped out most of humanity. He's been living at an abandoned Colorado airfield with his dog Jasper and a hardened ex-military survivalist named Bangley, played by Josh Brolin. Their fragile existence is disrupted when a mysterious radio transmission comes through while Hig is flying his old Cessna. He goes looking for it. The film follows what he finds.
The cast around Elordi and Brolin includes Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney, Guy Pearce, and Benedict Wong. Cinematography is by Erik Messerschmidt, who won an Oscar for Mank. Music is by Harry Gregson-Williams. This is not a film that was assembled cheaply or carelessly. The budget sits at $110 million and it will be screening in IMAX.
Elordi is the right choice at the right moment. Fresh off his first Oscar nomination for Frankenstein and the final season of Euphoria, he's the most compelling young leading man working in cinema right now. Pairing him with Brolin, who brings weight and menace to anything he's in, gives the film a dynamic that should carry its quieter, more introspective passages.
The Dog Stars at a glance
Director
Ridley Scott
Release
28 August 2026
Stars
Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin
Budget
$110 million
Studio
20th Century Studios
Format
Theatrical + IMAX
Ridley Scott at 88 years old is still making $110 million sci-fi films in IMAX. If that doesn't tell you something about what it means to be obsessed with cinema, nothing will.
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What makes The Dog Stars interesting beyond the spectacle is what it's actually about. This isn't a film about the apocalypse. It's a film about what makes survival worth anything. Hig has kept himself alive. But the radio signal asks a harder question: is there anything left worth living for beyond the airfield? That's the journey the film takes.
Scott has spoken about the film as a meditation on grief and human connection. The Dog who gives the film its title, Jasper, isn't a gimmick. He's Hig's emotional anchor in a world where everything else has been stripped away. The adaptation, written by Mark L. Smith and Christopher Wilkinson, keeps that emotional core from Heller's novel intact while scaling the story up to the visual ambition Scott's name demands.
For filmmakers watching from the outside, The Dog Stars is worth paying attention to for reasons beyond the cast and the director. Scott is one of the last major studio directors working at this scale who still treats production design, cinematography, and visual world-building as the foundation of the film rather than something you fix in post. Every frame of a Scott film is a pre-production decision. Messerschmidt's camera work on this is reportedly extraordinary. Italian landscapes were transformed into a post-apocalyptic American interior, which tells you something about the level of planning that went into it.
That's the thing about films at this scale. What you see on screen is the result of months of meticulous preparation before a single camera rolled. The planning is the work. And the planning always starts long before the shoot.
The Dog Stars is in cinemas from tomorrow, August 28, 2026, in IMAX and standard formats. If you're a filmmaker and you haven't booked a ticket yet, do it today. Then go and read what Shotly can do for your next production at shotly.io.
