38 great films on Disney Plus that are actually for adults

By now, we all know that Disney+ isn’t just your favourite childhood animated films and obscure early-aughts TV shows full of now-A-list stars like Miley Cyrus and Zendaya. Since absorbing, well, pretty much everything, the collection available at your fingertips from the House of Mouse is more like a cursed all-you-can-eat buffet than a children’s playpen.

Since acquiring 20th Century Fox and Star, you’re more likely than ever to stumble across gems that aren’t exactly family-friendly viewing. The bigguns are all there – your Aliens, your Die Hards – but it might be lost on some that the movie library now ranks highly among its rivals. Even Netflix, whose film offering from before 1990 has always left something to be desired.

Here’s our list of some of the best Disney+ has to offer.

Sunshine (2007)

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One of the more divisive efforts from the absolutely lethal pairing that is Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, this early-career Cillian Murphy space epic follows a group of astronauts who have to blow up the sun. We’re only slightly joking – the sun’s dying, the earth is freezing, and the answer is to plant a massive bomb that’ll sort of kick the sun up the arse and remind it to work again. For all of the sci-fi technicals that entails, this is really just a simple thriller in a whacky space outfit. It’s all about the can-they-do-it tension, which builds and builds until it… well, does it explode? Watch and find out!

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

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Has Wes Anderson gone off the boil a little in recent years? Maybe. Maybe not. Was this his last great film before he did? Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever side you land on, it’s far from a hot take to say that The Grand Budapest Hotel is a perfect vehicle for just about everything we love in an Anderson film. Lovably-awkward characters, just-about-believable and incredibly idiosycratic storylines, symmetry galore – it’s got it all, wrapped up in a little chocolate box of a film with an art heist and some quasi-fascism stuck in for good measure.