Robert Pattinson's year: four releases, a Homeric villain and the Batman shooting in between

Fifteen years ago Robert Pattinson was the vampire from “Twilight”, the saga that between 2008 and 2012 made him the most photographed face on the planet and the most underrated actor of his generation, both at once. He spent the following decade doing everything possible to stop being that, and he did it by always choosing the director before the part: “Cosmopolis” with Cronenberg (2012), “Good Time” with the Safdie brothers (2017), “High Life” with Claire Denis (2018), “The Lighthouse” with Robert Eggers (2019), “Tenet” with Nolan (2020). From the outside that read as flight. 2026 no longer allows that reading: he is a character actor with a leading man's face who has got the studios to pay him for doing exactly what he did in independent cinema, only with two hundred million dollars behind it.

Where he comes from

The year did not start from zero. 2025 was the run-up: in March, “Mickey 17”, by Bong Joon-ho, where he played a disposable worker reprinted every time he dies —two Pattinsons on screen, one shy and one not— and in May, at Cannes, “Die My Love”, by Lynne Ramsay, with Jennifer Lawrence, where he was the husband who does not know what to do with a wife who is coming apart. Neither was a box-office hit. Both made clear that Pattinson was at the point in his career where an actor gets to choose, and that he was choosing the strange ones.

April: “The Drama”

The year opened on 3 April with “The Drama”, by Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian behind “Sick of Myself” and “Dream Scenario”, for A24: a couple about to marry —Pattinson and Zendaya— whose wedding week is blown apart by a revelation. It cost 28 million dollars and took 132 million worldwide, crossing a hundred in nineteen days, an unusual result for an auteur comedy with no effects and a twist that cannot be told. The campaign sold it as a romantic comedy and the film turns into something else halfway through; some viewers felt cheated and some critics celebrated precisely that. It is the first time in a long while that Pattinson plays a normal man —in love and scared— and the interesting thing is that he is good at it. It has been on HBO Max since 31 July.

July: Antinous

Then came the big one. Christopher Nolan's “The Odyssey”, his first film after the Oscars for “Oppenheimer”, premiered on 6 July at the Odeon in Leicester Square and opened on the 17th, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras —the first film to do so, with more than two million feet of film— and with a cast that reads like a shopping list: Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Calypso. It cost 250 million and opened to 264 worldwide in its first weekend, Nolan's best start since “The Dark Knight Rises”. As of today it stands at 1.687 billion dollars, the second-highest grosser of the year and the highest-grossing R-rated film ever.

Pattinson is Antinous, the ringleader of the suitors besieging Penelope in the palace of Ithaca while Odysseus fails to return. He has said he built him out of James Woods's Lester Diamond in “Casino”: a slimy man who knows he is not wanted and will not leave. He was, reportedly, the only cast member who asked to read the script before signing, which with Nolan almost nobody does. That a Homeric suitor is among the most talked-about characters of a three-hour film with a cyclops in it says a lot about what Pattinson does with a supporting part: he steals it from the leads without ever seeming to try.

September: a real host

On 25 September comes “Primetime”, by Lance Oppenheim, also with A24. Oppenheim came from documentary —“Some Kind of Heaven”, “Spermworld”, the series “Ren Faire”— and this is his first fiction, though his subject is the same as ever: people performing for a camera. Pattinson, who also produces, plays Chris Hansen, the host of “To Catch a Predator”, the NBC show that between 2004 and 2007 set traps for child predators on camera and aired them in prime time. It is an uncomfortable part by design: a real, living man turned into a character in a film about what television does with other people's shame, and about what it does to the man who administers it.

It competed at Venice earlier this month, with a seven-minute ovation and, as of today, 93% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average of 8.3 out of 10 across the first fourteen reviews. The notices speak of a magnetic performance, of a descent into madness wearing a news anchor's face, and of a film more interested in the psychology of the spectacle than in the scandal. And there is already Oscar talk, which is what gets said in September about any Venice film, but which in his case, for the first time, does not sound like an exaggeration.

December: Scytale

And on 18 December “Dune: Part Three”, by Denis Villeneuve, closes the year, adapting “Dune Messiah”, Frank Herbert's second novel, with a script by Villeneuve himself and the comics writer Brian K. Vaughan. Pattinson is Scytale, the Face Dancer of the Bene Tleilax, able to take any shape, and the centrepiece of the conspiracy against the emperor Paul Atreides. His appearance in the trailer was its most discussed moment, above a shaven-headed Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya's first line —Chani asking what they will name a girl, and proposing Leto if it is a boy. It is the role that best sums up the year: an actor who likes to disappear inside the mask and who is nonetheless recognisable the moment he opens his mouth.

And Batman, in between

All of this he has juggled with “The Batman: Part II”, which started shooting on 12 June at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, with exteriors in London, Liverpool and Glasgow, and with Sebastian Stan and Scarlett Johansson as Harvey and Gilda Dent, Charles Dance as his father and the return of Jeffrey Wright, Andy Serkis and Colin Farrell. Warner has dated it for 18 February 2028, four years after the first. In other words: while releasing four films, he was shooting the fifth, and the fifth is the one paying for the other four.

What it means

There is a pattern, and it is not accidental. In the big ones —Nolan, Villeneuve, Reeves— Pattinson is the villain or the masked man, the one hiding behind something. In the small ones —Borgli, Oppenheim— he is the lead with his face uncovered. The classic character actors, the Willem Dafoes, the Gary Oldmans, took twenty years to get Hollywood to give them both at once. Pattinson has done it in one.

He has said it would have devastated him to give up any of the four. Understandably. It is hard to recall a year in which one actor was in an A24 comedy, in Nolan's biggest hit, in a portrait of a trash-TV host and in the third part of “Dune”. The strange thing is not that he was offered all four parts; the strange thing is that all four fit him. Box office, dates and reviews checked on 15 September 2026.