Frankenstein, Knives Out and Ballad of a Small Player Among Netflix Premieres at TIFF 2025

Pictures: Netflix

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF for short) has confirmed its lineup for 2025, and several high-profile Netflix movies will be making their premieres at the festival this year. Here’s a rundown of what’s set to premiere from Netflix’s upcoming film roster. 

It’s going to be a big festival for TIFF, which is celebrating its 50th edition. Some of the highlights away from Netflix’s roster include Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune, Maude Apatow’s Poetic License, Isabel Coixet’s Three Goodbyes, Romain Gavras’ Sacrifice, David Michôd’s Christy, Yeon Sang-ho’s The Ugly, James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, and Alice Winocour’s Couture.

Let’s run through the new premieres plus the fresh new runtimes for movies:

• Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, directed by Rian Johnson, is the third film in the film franchise and the second to head to Netflix exclusively. Following in the footsteps of the first and second film, which both had premieres at TIFF, Wake Up Dead Man will follow suit with its world premiere at TIFF 2025. 
  • “Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) faces his most puzzling mystery yet in the latest entry in Rian Johnson’s beloved Knives Out series. The reliably star-studded cast also includes Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Josh O’Connor, and Kerry Washington.”
• Ballad of a Small Player, directed by Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), will have its Canadian Premiere at TIFF, with the film’s runtime revealed to be 1 hour and 41 minutes. The psychological thriller, starring Colin Farrell, premieres globally on Netflix on October 29, 2025.
• Nouvelle Vague is set to launch globally on Netflix on October 10th, having already premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Richard Linklater’s new black and white drama will have its Canadian premiere at TIFF.
• Train Dreams, the drama that Netflix acquired starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones, already premiered at Sundance earlier this year but will make its “International Premiere” at TIFF as a special presentation. The film premieres on Netflix globally on November 21st, 2025. 
  • “Set in the Pacific Northwest during the first decades of the 20th century, Jockey director Clint Bentley’s beguiling adaptation of Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson’s novella stars Joel Edgerton as a humble labourer immersed in a rapidly changing world of natural splendour and voracious industry.”

• Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein will be making its North American premiere at TIFF, with the festival also revealing the movie’s runtime at a hefty 2 hours and 29 minutes. 
  • Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro’s visually sumptuous adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece finds Oscar Isaac as the brilliant scientist whose unearthly creation, eerily and ingeniously conjured by Jacob Elordi, blurs the boundaries between life, death, and madness.
• STEVE – A late announcement, but the new Cillian Murphy British drama from director Tim Mielants will make its world premiere at TIFF.

https://twitter.com/TIFF_NET/status/1947662004124057921

Looking elsewhere in Netflix’s Fall 2025 lineup, there are still several films expected to head to film festivals in the months to come. We already know the Spanish film She Walks In Darkness will be premiering at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, and Wake Up Dead Man will be making its European premiere at the BFI, as mentioned earlier. Jay Kelly, Steve, and A House of Dynamite will also be prime candidates for premieres this year, we suspect with some speculating that these will be heading up Netflix’s Venice Film Festival slate. 

What movies are you looking forward to checking out from this list?