SXSW 2024: 23 Films and TV Series to Watch This Year

This year’s SXSW Film and TV Festival (running March 8 through March 16) continues the Austin-based multimedia showcases expansion beyond typical-screen movies and into the realms of TV and XR experiences.

The festival’s opening night premiere, Doug Liman’s “Road House,” falls somewhere in the cracks between film and TV, as controversially the Jake Gyllenhaal-led ’80s throwback reimagining will not play theaters (besides, of course, in Austin) from Amazon MGM Studios and will instead plop on Amazon Prime Video on March 21. (“Road House” and Amazon MGM are meanwhile in the thick of a copyright lawsuit filed by the 1989 original’s screenwriter R. Lance Hill that also messily involves the studio’s alleged AI usage to rush completion on the movie.)

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Similarly, the deep-pocketed but theatrically stingy streamer’s “The Idea of You,” a Coachella-set romantic dramedy from director Michael Showalter and starring Anne Hathaway, will also be a Prime Video exclusive this May after playing SXSW.

Other headliners like Dev Patel’s directorial debut “Monkey Man” (Universal Pictures, April 5), Kyle Mooney’s first behind-the-camera feature “Y2K” (A24), surprise screening “Civil” War from Alex Garland (A24, April 12), and Pamela Adlon’s “Babes” (Neon) will make their theatrical debuts in Austin before opening in the U.S. later this year. But beneath the hood of these high-profile titles (and we spotlight plenty of them here) are yet-to-be-sung-for gems from around the world, all still looking for a distribution home.

There are also plenty of TV series to discover at SXSW, with Netflix’s massive “3 Body Problem” series, from “Game of Thrones” team David Benioff and D. B. Weiss with Alexander Woo, and HBO’s docu-fantasia “Ren Faire” from the Safdies’ Elara Pictures and director Lance Oppenheim popping in Austin.

Below, IndieWire rounds up 23 films and TV series to watch for at this year’s SXSW. With the festival falling (again) the same weekend as the Oscars, here’s a chance to jumpstart screen culture and get audiences talking about something that isn’t the by-now-stale 2024 Academy Awards nominee selection.

David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, Chris O’Falt, Erin Strecker, Ben Travers, Brian Welk, and Christian Zilko also contributed to this article.

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