Name: Les Misérables
Genre: Drama, History, Romance
Released: 2026-10-14T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 178 min
Cast: Vincent Lindon, Tahar Rahim, Noémie Merlant, Camille Cottin, Benjamin Lavernhe

Every generation of French cinemagoers gets its own Les Misérables, and each version tells you which half of Victor Hugo’s novel its era wanted. Fred Cavayé’s new adaptation, which topped the French box office and now heads to Spanish cinemas, picks the chase: a former convict who rebuilt himself under a false name, and the police inspector who cannot accept that a man can change. Vincent Lindon plays Jean Valjean. Tahar Rahim plays Javert. French coverage describes it as more squarely centred on the two enemies than earlier tellings.

That choice puts the film in long company. Harry Baur, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo all carried Valjean for French audiences; Liam Neeson took him into English-language drama, and Hugh Jackman made him sing. Cavayé’s version arrives at the tail of a newer cycle, the run of expensive French heritage adaptations that recently handed Alexandre Dumas back to the domestic public with The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Its first week in French cinemas suggests the public is less certain it needed another Valjean.

The casting is the film’s clearest statement of intent. Lindon won the best actor prize at Cannes for The Measure of a Man, playing an unemployed man pushed into a humiliating job, and his screen persona has long been the decent man worn down by institutions. Rahim, a César winner who broke through as a young prisoner in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, crosses to the other side of the bars. At San Sebastián, where the film had its world premiere in the Official Selection, Rahim described his Javert as “a wounded, abandoned child” taken in by a system that turns enforcing the law into an obsession, according to Vistazo’s report from the festival. Around them, Noémie Merlant plays Fantine, and Camille Cottin and Benjamin Lavernhe play the Thénardiers, whom Lavernhe called “predators” who know the mechanics of poverty because they have suffered them.

Cavayé is an unexpected custodian for a national monument. He made his name with tight thrillers: Anything for Her, with Lindon as a teacher plotting his wife’s escape from prison, later remade in Hollywood as The Next Three Days; Point Blank; and Mea Culpa, again with Lindon. He then moved to the dinner-party comedy Nothing to Hide and the Occupation drama Farewell, Mr. Haffmann. According to the French Wikipedia account of the production, he told Deadline that he had long dreamed of a great literary fresco and that the film would stay in the vein of his thrillers. At San Sebastián he admitted he knew the story through its adaptations and only read the novel while preparing the project. “It is an adaptation, not a remake,” he said.

The claim deserves some scrutiny, because the duel structure is itself an inheritance. Hugo’s novel is closer to an encyclopedia than a plot, with its Waterloo digression, its convent and its sewers, and every film has had to choose. Bille August’s English-language version, with Neeson opposite Geoffrey Rush, already reduced the book to hunter and hunted. Cavayé’s stated ambition is different: to restore characters and nuances that earlier versions dropped, and his running time of nearly three hours gives him the room. The title also has a more recent owner. Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables moved Hugo’s Montfermeil into a present-day police drama and earned an Oscar nomination, a reminder that the sharpest recent use of Hugo in French cinema was not a period piece at all.

The doubts are commercial as much as critical. AlloCiné counted 480,822 admissions in the first week, previews included, enough for first place but well short of the million-plus that The Three Musketeers drew in its first week and the roughly 1.2 million of The Count of Monte Cristo, as Entrevue noted. French press reports put the budget between €33 million and €41 million; Le Parisien, cited by PureBreak, estimated the film would need four to five million admissions to recoup, against projections of 1.5 to 2 million. Première summed it up: the film “takes the top of the box office, but it is not yet a hit.” Critics are split. AlloCiné’s press average sits at 3.1 out of 5 against 4 out of 5 from audiences; Les Inrockuptibles called it “a heritage blockbuster hollowed out of any political reach,” and Libération was harsher still. From San Sebastián, Sensacine wrote that the film turns its fidelity to Hugo into both its greatest virtue and its main limit. French audiences had also met Valjean recently, in Eric Besnard’s Jean Valjean, which covered the novel’s opening chapters. What none of this settles is whether a faithful, nearly three-hour heritage reading can say something about poverty that Ladj Ly did not say more directly.

Clapperboard on the first day of shooting Fred Cavayé’s Les Misérables, with extras in period costume — On the set of *Les Misérables*, first day of shooting (2025)

The ensemble also includes Megan Northam as Cosette, Vassili Schneider as Marius, Marie Colomb as Éponine, Louis Peres as the young Valjean and Frédéric Pierrot as Bishop Myriel. Cavayé wrote the screenplay; Richard Grandpierre (Eskwad) and Olivier Delbosc (Curiosa Films) produced, with StudioCanal, TF1 Films Production, Canal+ and Netflix on board. Denis Rouden shot it and Christophe Julien composed the score. StudioCanal handles world sales and its own releases in France, the UK, Germany, Austria, Poland, Benelux, Italy, Australia and New Zealand.

Les Misérables premiered in competition at the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival (September 18–26, 2026) and opened in France on October 14, 2026. It reaches Russia on November 4, Spain on November 6 through Beta Fiction Spain, several Gulf markets on November 12 and Germany on March 25, 2027, and screens at the Hong Kong French Film Festival on November 21. The running time is 178 minutes. No US or UK release date has been announced yet.