D3D CINEMA & GIANT SCREEN FILMS ANNOUNCE UPCOMING FILM SLATE
Principal photography is complete on three new releases for the coming year!
EVANSTON, IL, December 2025 — Fresh on the heels of the blockbuster T. REX—winner of the 2025 GSCA Best Film Award—D3D and GSF announces the roll out of three powerful, immersive giant screen/dome documentaries for 2026: Penguin Island, Ocean Giants and Arctic Odyssey.
“Crowd-pleasing King penguins, an epic discovery story about the largest prehistoric marine reptiles, and a journey to the ice-dependent Indigenous communities of the frozen Bering Sea—this slate offers a lineup for all audiences,” said Don Kempf, President and Founder of GSF and D3D. “Arguably our strongest lineup for a single year in quite some time, these three shows collectively check the boxes that make the giant screen sizzle—the heart of the GSF brand; cute animals, outsized prehistoric beasts, ocean life, mind-blowing science expeditions and moving profiles of the human experience.”
ALL FORMATS PRE-LEASING NOW
40 & 20 min run times
Contact D3D/GSF, [email protected], for lease packages, combination deals, subscriptions and coalition partnerships.
RELEASING APRIL 2026
Much like their close cousins the Emperors, crowd-pleasing King penguins star in one of nature’s most extraordinary circle of life stories. Shot on the dramatic and uninhabited sub-Antarctic Crozet Archipelago, home to over half a million breeding pairs of penguins, the film chronicles the arrival of a lone, determined male suitor, driven by instinct to return to this treeless mote in the vast Southern seas. Here, against all odds, he must find a special someone among a cacophony of colony rivals, protect a precious egg, and start a family. Navigating a world of hungry orcas, predatory petrels, and feuding, farting elephant seals, a touching story of perseverance and parental care emerges, offering a family-friendly, timeless tale at the windswept and beautiful edge of the world.
For over nine months the production team braved overwhelming extremes to bring this remarkable penguin odyssey to the giant screen—diving into otherworldly kelp forests, pointing cameras into wind-blasting volcanic ash, and camping among brutish and aggressive island denizens. The result is an immersive voyage to the hidden world of a most beloved animal, a faraway PENGUIN ISLAND rarely seen by humans.
RELEASING FALL 2026
Throughout the history of science, blue whales were thought to be the largest animal to ever live on Earth. But in 2020 a 12-year-old British girl named Ruby Reynolds, hiking with her father, discovered the bones of a leviathan—near the same cliffs made famous by a young fossil-hunting Mary Anning over two centuries ago. The scale of Ruby’s new ichthyosaur species, christened Ichthyotitan, rivaled the size of the largest known whales. As it turns out, her discovery was only the beginning.
In 2025, scientists in the remote northern Canadian Rockies unearthed an even more titanic ichthyosaur—a gargantuan fossil locked in bedrock underneath a raging river. With GSF’s camera’s rolling—and Ruby and her father participating in the excavation—OCEAN GIANTS captures an inspirational and mind-blowing discovery bound to rewrite the record books…and poised to set the paleontology world abuzz in 2026.
Directed by Myles Connolly (writer/producer of Blue Whales), the film offers a kindred sequel to GSF’s blockbuster T. REX—a rousing narrative blend of young explorers making profound fossil discoveries, science mentorship, and super-sized Mesozoic beasts brought life in dazzling CGI.
RELEASING WINTER 2026-27
ARCTIC ODYSSEY (WT) is a cinematic journey to the remote Siberian Yupik villages of Savoonga and Gambell, located in the heart of the Bering Sea. This very special film is produced in partnership with these ice-dependent Indigenous communities exactly 50 years after University of Alaska filmmakers first captured life on their island in the mid 1970s. The young hunters and children then—elders now—describe changing sea ice and a shift in the traditional, ageless rhythms that shape Yupik life and drive the migration patterns of the wildlife critical to their survival and identity—especially walruses.
The film is a tour de force of partners and creative talent: directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, the Academy-award nominated team behind large format classics Pulse: a STOMP Odyssey, Great White Shark and Wild Ocean, with support from the National Science Foundation and featuring epic walrus footage by Maxim Arbugaev, director of the Oscar-nominated doc Haulout. ARCTIC ODYSSEY blends powerful human stories, majestic walrus gatherings as far as the eye can see, restored archival footage, Indigenous music, artistic animation, and stunning photography into an immersive celebration of the faraway north.
