In Other Worlds: Liam Young's Anti-Marvel Vision of the Future
TL;DR: Liam Young's immersive exhibition In Other Worlds runs at London's Barbican Centre through September 6, 2026. It features voices from Diego Luna, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Ayoade, and others—but it's not a film, not a stream, and definitely not a franchise. It's a walk-through speculative-fiction experience built from real Hollywood VFX talent, proving that blockbuster infrastructure can tell stories that don't require a superhero.
What happens when you take the people who build Marvel blockbusters and ask them to build something else entirely?
That's Liam Young's question. And for the first time, he's built a place where the answer lives.
In Other Worlds, currently at London's Barbican Centre, is one of the strangest and most genuinely ambitious science fiction projects of 2026. It isn't streaming anywhere. It isn't a film. You have to show up in person, physically walk through six possible futures, hear voices from Diego Luna and Jeffrey Wright narrate imaginary worlds, and sit with ideas instead of spectacle. Rare. Deliberate. It exists because Young decided to co-opt the Hollywood machine and point it somewhere completely different.
What In Other Worlds Actually Is
Six installations. Six narratives. One sprawling physical exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London, running through September 6, 2026.
Young, whose prior work includes Planet City, has assembled a Hollywood-grade production team: the same VFX artists who finish Marvel sequences when they're not here, the costume designer who dressed Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, a writer who created Westworld. All of that firepower has been redirected toward something quieter and stranger. The exhibition layers films with audio stories, soundscapes, physical installations, projections, original costumes, movie miniatures, and what Young calls "speculative artefacts."
Here's what you need to know at a glance:
- Running: Now through September 6, 2026 at the Barbican Centre, London
- Format: Physical immersive exhibition (walk-through, not a film screening)
- Voice cast: Diego Luna, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Ayoade, Denise Gough, Maxine Peake, Alma Pöysti, Natasha Wanganeen
- Costume design: Ane Crabtree (The Handmaid's Tale, Westworld)
- Writers: Lisa Joy (Westworld, Fallout)
- No streaming platform has announced rights yet. When one does, Movie OTT will track availability across UK, US, and India.
This isn't a marketing exercise. Young spent real money on this. The costumes exist. The miniatures were built. The VFX sequences were rendered. And then instead of burying them inside a 90-minute theatrical release, he's displaying them as artifacts. The craft made visible.
Why Young Thinks Science Fiction Got Lost
During the Barbican press walkthrough, Young was direct about his frustration. "One of the great tragedies of the Hollywood machine," he said, "is that we often lose that opportunity to find deep emotional connections to ideas through these mediums, rather than just create a backdrop for some superhero moment."
That line matters. It's not anti-Hollywood — Young's using Hollywood's own craftspeople. It's anti-purpose. He's arguing that blockbuster infrastructure got trained to serve franchise logic, and that somewhere along the way, science fiction stopped being a place to think about the future and became a delivery system for spectacle.
In Other Worlds is his counter-argument. "An attempt to create a collection of visions for a hopeful future," he called it. "Creating an entry point to talk about what the future could be and creating a shared conversation." That's the spine of the whole project: science fiction as shared language, not IP.
The Cast and Why It Matters
Diego Luna carries weight here. He comes fresh off Andor, the Disney+ series that wrapped its second and final season in 2025, pulling over 40 million accounts globally according to Disney's figures. But the Andor connection is deeper than star power. Think of the prison arc in Season 1, episodes 8 through 10, where Luna played a man slowly realizing that resistance isn't a single dramatic gesture but a grinding, daily choice. That's the register Young needs for this project, and it's exactly what Luna seems to be bringing.
Jeffrey Wright anchors the other side. American Fiction. Casino Royale. A decade of building a reputation as the actor you cast when you want intelligence on screen, not just presence. His voice carries weight in the dark.
Then there's Richard Ayoade — which is an inspired choice if you know his work. His films (Submarine, The Double) are fascinated by alienation and constructed realities. He gets why this project matters. Denise Gough, also from Andor, whose stage work at the National Theatre has earned her a reputation as one of the finest actors working in Britain right now. Alma Pöysti, the Finnish actress who won the Jury Prize at Cannes for Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves (2023). Natasha Wanganeen, the Australian actress from Phillip Noyce's Rabbit Proof Fence.
Not name drops for the marquee. They're specific people who have spent their careers making choices about what kind of stories matter.
Lisa Joy, co-creator of Westworld, contributed the narratives. If you want context for her speculative-fiction sensibility, both shows are available now — Westworld on Max, Fallout on Prime Video — though honestly, Joy's strength has always been in the philosophical setup, not the payoff, and In Other Worlds seems to lean hard into that.
The Model-Maker Philosophy
What's striking is how seriously Young takes the physical. In an era when "world-building" means rendering a CGI skyline in a server farm, he's pulling in the opposite direction — toward the tactile craftsmanship that defined pre-digital science fiction filmmaking.
Young cited Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) as touchstones. Specifically their model-makers. "The unsung heroes of world-building," he said, "have been model makers." That's not nostalgia. It's an argument about emotional weight. Physical objects create connection in ways that pure CGI rarely manages (even though the two aren't mutually exclusive, and Young knows that).
The workflow runs backward from Hollywood convention. The costumes from Crabtree, built to appear in films, are then displayed as physical objects inside the exhibition. Props and miniatures that were created for the shots are shown as artifacts. The exhibition becomes the destination, not the press junket that follows a theatrical release. Everything here was made to be seen up close, in person, where you can study the detail.
The Geography Problem: Getting There (and What Comes Next)
Here's the honest part for readers outside London: right now, In Other Worlds is London-only. No OTT release. No digital version. No confirmed broadcast deal. The exhibition runs through September 6, 2026 at the Barbican. If you're not in the UK, you can't see it yet — but that's likely to change.
The cast and creative team make a future streaming or digital release almost inevitable. Diego Luna guarantees interest from Disney+ Hotstar in India, which carries Andor. Jeffrey Wright's recent profile on Prime Video via American Fiction opens that door too. The Barbican has a history of filming and distributing its major productions; its National Theatre Live model, which as of 2024 had screened to over 12 million people across 75 countries according to NT Live's own figures, has proven the commercial logic of capturing live-venue work for global digital distribution.
When a deal is announced, the most likely platforms for Indian distribution would be:
- Disney+ Hotstar (the Luna and Gough Andor connection)
- Prime Video (Wright's recent profile there)
- MUBI (the most natural home for prestige art-world projects of this scale)
Check Movie OTT's streaming tracker for updates the moment rights are confirmed. Indian audiences have shown strong appetite for speculative fiction with literary weight — Arrival, Annihilation, the appetite for sci-fi anthology content on streaming — suggests In Other Worlds would find its audience here if given the chance.
What Nobody's Actually Saying About This
Most coverage frames In Other Worlds as a prestige art event with famous voices attached. That's accurate but it misses the more interesting read.
Young is running a proof-of-concept. He's demonstrating, with a real budget and real Hollywood talent, that blockbuster infrastructure can produce something that doesn't require a franchise, a sequel, or a merchandise deal to justify its existence. The VFX artists finishing Marvel sequences are here. The costume designer who dressed Gilead is here. The writer of Westworld is here. And they're all making something that won't be a franchise.
What the trade write-ups miss: Young isn't the first person to make this argument, but he may be the first to make it with this caliber of above-the-line talent attached and zero IP safety net. That's not an art-world gesture. That's a business proposition dressed as an exhibition.
The question isn't whether In Other Worlds is good art — it almost certainly is. The real question is whether any studio executive watches footage from this exhibition and decides to give Young a feature film budget. That would change something. That would prove the model works at a different scale.
I keep coming back to that tension: Young using the machinery of blockbuster filmmaking while refusing its narrative logic. Whether that produces something genuinely transformative or just a very expensive art installation that name-drops Blade Runner, visitors will answer for themselves.
The Timeline and What's Confirmed
The Barbican run closes September 6, 2026. After that, the exhibition's future is unconfirmed. Young's production studio is based in Los Angeles, so an international touring version or a US venue run remains plausible — but nothing has been announced yet.
Trailer content and behind-the-scenes material from the Barbican production is circulating online. A documentary about the making of In Other Worlds would be the logical next step; given Young's connections in the film and TV world, a streaming platform would pick that up quickly. Watch the Barbican's programming announcements and Young's studio social channels for touring dates, digital release windows, or broadcast deals. Movie OTT will have the where-to-watch picture across UK, US, India, and Spain the moment it changes.
Hard to say if this becomes a landmark in immersive storytelling or a beautiful one-off. Either way, it's the most serious argument anyone's made in 2026 for what science fiction could be when it stops serving a franchise and starts serving thought.
