Published Oct 4, 2026, 7:30 PM EDT
In over three years at Collider, senior author Jake has now penned over 3000 articles covering a wide range of TV and film for the resources, lists, utilities, news, and interview teams. Alongside interviewing stars such as Selin Hizli, Rose Ayling-Ellis, Harlan Coben, and Chelsea Peretti, Jake was lucky enough to visit the set of Aardman and Netflix’s Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl in 2024, getting the chance to chat with four-time Academy Award winner Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham. Jake has also worked for other publications, including Agents of Fandom. You can also hear Jake every week as the resident film and TV journalist on Track Radio.
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Now that the 51st annual Toronto International Film Festival has concluded, thoughts inevitably turn to the first whispers of the Academy Awards race. Who will follow in the footsteps of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ***One Battle After Another ***and become the latest winner of the coveted Best Picture prize? Currently, early favorites for the biggest prize include the legal thriller Fjord, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, and the box office phenomenon Obsession, starring Best Actress hopeful Inde Navarette.
But there’s no doubt that Christopher Nolan’s historical blockbuster ***The Odyssey ***is the early favorite to walk out of the 99th Academy Awards with the most Gold Statues. Called an “unrivaled cinematic spectacle” in Joe Schmidt’s review for Collider, the adaptation of Homer‘s epic is already the favorite to take home Best Picture, and will likely earn nominations in most other categories, perhaps even breaking the nominations record set by Ryan Coogler’s vampire sensation ***Sinners ***earlier this year.
If you’re one of the many who adored Nolan’s highest-grossing film yet, then you should check out Starz this October, as a perfect replacement has just arrived. You can now stream Clash of the Titans, directed by Louis Leterrier, on Starz. A remake of Ray Harryhausen’s 1981 original, the film stars Sam Worthington, who recently led the record-breaking **Harlan Coben **adaptation I Will Find You. *Clash of the Titans *was unfortunately panned by critics, who bemoaned the oversaturation of visual effects and a lackluster script.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
It might have made nowhere near the $1.7 billion of The Odyssey, which is now the 11th highest-grossing film of all time, but *Clash of the Titans *managed to avoid the effects of its poor critical reception and prove a hit in theaters. Against a reported production budget of $125 million, the film earned a global haul of $493 million, split between $163 million in domestic revenue and a further $330 million from overseas markets. The film opened in first place in the North American box office charts and maintained this top position into its second weekend, before drastically dropping to fifth in weekend #3.
*Clash of the Titans *is streaming now on Starz. Stay tuned to Collider for all the latest streaming stories.
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Louis Leterrier