Focus Features' 'Sense and Sensibility' Gets a Second Trailer Ahead of Its October 16 Release

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2026 — Jane Austen fans have one more look before the ball. Focus Features has released the second and final trailer — plus a new poster — for Sense and Sensibility (2026), the studio's new adaptation of Austen's 1811 novel, directed by Blue Jean filmmaker Georgia Oakley and adapted by screenwriter Diana Reid.

The new footage spotlights the late 18th-century romantic drama's emotional core: the Dashwood sisters' displacement from their family estate in Sussex after their father's death, and their navigation of love and heartbreak in Devon under crushing financial insecurity. The trailer's centerpiece is the budding, gentle romance between Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars — including ballroom dancing — played by Daisy Edgar-Jones and George MacKay. The campaign describes the film's aesthetic as bold and emotionally rebellious, heavily inspired by Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Two sisters, two temperaments

At the center are the two performances the whole campaign is built around. Daisy Edgar-Jones — the Normal People breakout who carried 2024's Twisters to more than $370 million worldwide — plays Elinor Dashwood, the pragmatic, guarded elder sister who carries her heartbreak quietly. Esmé Creed-Miles, known for Amazon's Hanna, plays Marianne, the fiercely passionate romantic who refuses to hide anything she feels. As the trailer's own framing puts it, the sisters represent the two forces at the center of Austen's story: the sense that protects us and the sensibility that makes us vulnerable.

The suitors complete the picture. George MacKay (1917) steps into a leading-man role as Edward Ferrars, a notable departure from the supporting war-drama work that first brought him wide recognition. Frank Dillane (The Essex Serpent) plays the dashing John Willoughby, Herbert Nordrum (The Worst Person in the World) plays Colonel Brandon, and Outlander's Caitríona Balfe — in her first major role since that series concluded earlier this year — plays the girls' mother. Fiona Shaw appears as Mrs. Jennings, with Bodhi Rae Breathnach as the youngest Dashwood sister, Margaret.

A rebellious take on the canon's most-adapted author

Oakley's hiring is the film's most intriguing choice. Her 2022 debut Blue Jean was an intimate, naturalistic drama about a closeted PE teacher in Thatcher-era England — about as far from Regency romance as a director can get. That is precisely the point: early coverage has described the film as a rebellious take on Austen's classic satire, with the filmmaking team aiming for something more naturalistic and emotionally grounded than previous adaptations, and a stronger focus on the evolving relationship between Elinor and Marianne as the emotional backbone. The Portrait of a Lady on Fire reference is doing real work here — less bonnets-and-ballgowns heritage cinema, more a love story told as an act of emotional defiance.

The production pedigree is the safest bet in prestige film. The movie comes from Working Title Films — the studio behind several of the most acclaimed Austen adaptations of the past two decades — produced once again by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner alongside November Pictures' India Flint and Jo Wallett. Focus and Working Title previously teamed on Joe Wright's 2005 Pride & Prejudice and Autumn de Wilde's 2020 Emma, so returning to Austen is hardly a left turn; it is a homecoming with a new director at the wheel.

Following Ang Lee's shadow

Every new Sense and Sensibility is measured against the last great one. Austen's first novel — first published pseudonymously in 1811 — has been adapted for the screen many times, most famously by Ang Lee in 1995, with Emma Thompson (who also penned the Oscar-winning script), Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman in the lead roles. That film's warmth and wit set a bar that has stood for three decades; Oakley and Reid's answer is to go younger, livelier and more openly romantic, with the Dashwood displacement — a once well-to-do family suddenly living in diminished circumstances — played as the engine of the story rather than its backdrop.

The rollout is already underway. The film premiered in London on September 16, bringing the cast and filmmakers together ahead of the theatrical run; it opened in the UK on September 25. The second and final trailer now sets the table for the U.S. release: Sense and Sensibility opens in American theaters on October 16, 2026, landing it squarely in the heart of the fall prestige calendar — where handsome estates, thwarted desire and men making emotionally disastrous decisions in waistcoats have always belonged.

Our movies section is tracking the full fall theatrical calendar, and the newsroom has more on this season's prestige releases — including Tom Cruise's next big swing.

What the final trailer signals

That this is the second and final trailer — not a teaser cycle still ramping up — says plenty about Focus's confidence. The campaign is selling the finished shape of the film: the Dashwood displacement played as both personal and material loss, courtship inseparable from questions of home and stability, and the central tension of two sisters navigating love under the same pressures of diminished security. The Playlist reports that Focus Features is framing the film as 'a fresh take on Austen's story of love and sisterhood,' and notes that Oakley's involvement adds a point of curiosity beyond the usual Austen polish — the reason this adaptation is being watched as a directorial statement, not just another heritage retelling.

Early reviews have already begun weighing in ahead of the wide rollout, per ComicBasics, with Edgar-Jones arriving at a particularly strong moment in her career — the rare lead who brings both critical credibility and genuine box-office draw to a period romance. For Focus and Working Title, the bet is that a rebellious, emotionally grounded Sense and Sensibility can do for this fall what their earlier Austen collaborations did for theirs: turn a 215-year-old novel into a modern theatrical event.