The Coen brothers are reuniting, and Reddit thinks Ethan needed it more than Joel
'We're getting old. It better be the near future,' says Joel, though the reunion still has no title, studio or date. Fans have spent eight years comparing the brothers' solo films and think they already know who did what.
Joel and Ethan Coen told AFP in Lyon on 16 October 2026 that they will make a film together again, their first since The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in 2018. Which film, they don't know yet. Joel, 71, did at least set a deadline of sorts:
"We're getting old. It better be the near future."
— Joel Coen, to AFP
The same evening the brothers collected the Lumière Award, only the second duo to get it after the Dardennes in 2020. Ethan thanked the Lumières for inventing the movie camera, "or we'd have been f***ed", and Javier Bardem said they had given him "one masterpiece and the gift of a lifetime".
Joel also waved away talk of a split: there was no break-up, the brothers say, they simply ended up on different schedules. Ethan was telling Deadline the same thing in August 2025: "We've written one to do together. I'm sure we'll do. We got to kind of get on the same schedule page again."
Eight years of a public experiment
On r/oscarrace, nobody is weeping with nostalgia. They are exhaling. The top comment in the thread mourns a "huge loss for mid lesbian comedy thrillers", a cheeky summary of Ethan's two solo features co-written with his wife and longtime Coen editor Tricia Cooke. The next one is less polite: "Thank god because Ethan's solo movies are awful."
The scorecard fans are working from looks like this:
- Joel alone: The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), a stark Shakespeare with Denzel Washington, which one commenter calls a favourite of its year. Jack of Spades is next.
- Ethan alone: the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, then Drive-Away Dolls (2024) and Honey Don't! (2025), both starring Margaret Qualley.
- Together: Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men, which won four Oscars, best picture included.
The sharpest comment treats the whole thing as a lab result: when directing brothers go solo, "it was immediately apparent who was responsible for what in the partnership". Another puts it more kindly: Ethan has "the interesting comedic voice", Joel "makes smarter and measured choices".
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That's the part Joel's denial can't fix. Nobody needs a feud to read the results: apart, the Coens made one film people defend and two that fans file under rubbish. For an audience, the reunion is an admission that the brand works with both names on it, or not at all.
Joel can call it a scheduling problem. Eight years of separate films look a lot like an answer.
To be fair to Ethan, he isn't retiring from comedy: he and Cooke told Deadline last year they were writing a third film together, about the ten-year reunion of a women's rowing crew.
No capes, no spaceships, no monsters
Ethan told AFP that mainstream cinema now means fantasy, science fiction, horror and comic books, and called that a sad thing for two filmmakers who have never been drawn to any of it. Joel said they have a stock of scripts written over the decades to choose from.
So the next Coen film will be the old kind: idiots, crime, a dry punchline, somewhere between No Country and Lebowski. That is precisely the grown-up, mid-budget film that barely gets a cinema release any more. Their last joint project went to Netflix, Joel's Macbeth to Apple TV+, and at the Lyon masterclass Joel admitted that hearing "Oh, I saw your movie on my iPhone" is "very disheartening".
What's next is mostly a queue. Joel's Jack of Spades comes first. No title, no studio, no date for the reunion. The only joint Coen work actually scheduled is Lyon tradition: their own version of the Lumières' 1895 Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot on Saturday. Under a minute long, and still technically their first film together in eight years.
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