Kenneth Lonergan's finally making his first film since Manchester By The Sea

The director and playwright hasn't made a movie since winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Manchester back in 2017.

By William Hughes  |  May 16, 2026 | 8:06pm
Casey Affleck in Manchester By The Sea, Screenshot: YouTube
Film News Kenneth Lonergan
Kenneth Lonergan's finally making his first film since Manchester By The Sea

It’s been a full decade since playwright-screenwriter-film director Kenneth Lonergan last tapped that last bit of his multi-hyphenate, courtesy of his excellent 2016 Oscar winner Manchester By The Sea. Lonergan’s spent the intervening years focused largely on his theatrical work, while making occasional contributions to TV (most notably his 2017 miniseries adaptation of Howards End); he’s actually popped up more often in front of the camera than behind it, doing small acting roles in Noah Baumbach’s White Noise adaptation and the Andrew Scott Ripley series. Now, though, he’s finally gearing up for his first film since Manchester, a still fairly mysterious project titled Tomorrow Is A Drag.

This is per Variety, which reports that Lonergan’s latest is currently being shopped around at Cannes. The film doesn’t have a logline attached to it—if we had to guess, it’d be some blend of funny, sweet, and completely devastating, but that’s just us engaging in blatant Kenneth Lonergan stereotyping—but it does have a pretty stacked cast list to its name. That includes Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza (probably not billed as “The Megalopolis reunion you’ve all been dreaming of!”), plus Matthew Broderick and Vanessa Kirby. Broderick is the main repeat offender here: A long-time friend of Lonergan’s, he’s appeared in all three of his previous directorial efforts, popping up in a single scene of Manchester as the host of one of the more awkward family luncheons in recent cinematic history. (Driver also has recent history with the writer-director, having starred in an off-Broadway production of his play Hold On To Me Darling in 2024.)

Tomorrow Is A Drag is expected to start filming in New York in the fall of 2026.

 
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