Na Hong-jin’s Hope opened in South Korean theaters on July 15, 2026 — the director’s first feature since The Wailing a decade earlier. Hwang Jung-min plays Bum-seok, the police outpost chief of a coastal village called Hope Harbor near the Demilitarized Zone; Jung Ho-yeon (credited internationally as Hoyeon) is his rookie officer Sung-ae, and Zo In-sung is Sung-ki, the local who leads a hunting party into the mountains. Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton round out the ensemble. The film world-premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2026, and Neon releases it in U.S. theaters on September 9, 2026.
The music carries this film’s other major international credit. Na handed the score to Michael Abels — the American composer behind Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us, and Nope — and Abels delivered a large orchestral score recorded in Vienna. Reviewers coming out of Cannes singled it out repeatedly, including in notices that were otherwise unkind to the film. What follows is everything confirmed about the Hope soundtrack as of July 16, 2026, and everything that has not been released yet.
Hope Soundtrack (2026) Details
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Film | Hope (호프 / Hopeu) |
| Director / Writer | Na Hong-jin |
| Composer | Michael Abels |
| Production Companies | Forged Films, Plus M Entertainment |
| Distributor (South Korea) | Plus M Entertainment |
| Distributor (North America) | Neon |
| Distributor (Other Territories) | Mubi, Focus Features, Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions, Gaga (Japan), Star Ent. (India) |
| Theatrical Release (South Korea) | July 15, 2026 |
| Theatrical Release (U.S.) | September 9, 2026 |
| World Premiere | May 17, 2026 — 79th Cannes Film Festival (Main Competition) |
| Film Runtime | 156 minutes (Korean theatrical cut); approx. 160 minutes (Cannes cut) — see note below |
| Score Recorded At | Synchron Stage Vienna, Austria |
| Orchestra Size | Approximately 70 musicians |
| Score Album Label | Not announced |
| Score Album Release Date | Not announced |
| Total Tracks | Not published |
| Album Runtime | Not published |
Runtime discrepancy disclosed: Sources do not agree. The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline both put the Cannes cut at two hours and 40 minutes. Korean outlet Weekly Kyunghyang lists the domestic theatrical version at 156 minutes. Financial News reported that the Korean release runs roughly four to five minutes shorter than the version screened at Cannes. Both figures are reported here rather than silently resolved into one.
Hope Soundtrack Overview
The state of play is straightforward: as of July 16, 2026, no Hope score album has been released, announced, or scheduled.
That is not an assumption — it is a verified absence, checked against the sources that would carry the news first:
- Film Music Reporter, the industry’s standard record of scoring assignments and album announcements, has published exactly one item on the film: the May 7, 2026 report confirming Abels’ hire. Its running “Upcoming Soundtrack Albums” listing — which tracks every album tied to a U.S. theatrical release — contains no entry for Hope, including in the window around its September 9 U.S. date.
- FMDB (Film Music Database) lists no Hope release and carries nothing for it on its “Upcoming Releases” calendar.
- Apple Music’s Michael Abels artist page shows The ‘Burbs (Original Series Soundtrack), dated February 6, 2026, as his most recent release. No Hope album appears in his discography.
The absence is worth stating plainly, because it is itself the answer to the question most readers arrive with. There is no tracklist to publish because no tracklist exists in the public record.
What is confirmed is the shape and scale of the work. Abels wrote a large orchestral score, recorded at Synchron Stage Vienna in Austria with roughly 70 players — a detail carried in Plus M Entertainment’s Korean press materials and reported independently by News Instar (July 6, 2026) and Financial News (July 11, 2026). Korean coverage describes the result as expansive and richly instrumented, and frames the music as a core driver of the film’s action rather than a bed underneath it.
One production fact bears directly on how the score functions: Hope contains no night scenes at all. Na and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo shot the entire picture in natural daylight, capturing minute shifts of light rather than working in darkness.
Who Composed the Hope Soundtrack?
Michael Abels composed the original score for Hope. Film Music Reporter confirmed the assignment on May 7, 2026, days ahead of the Cannes premiere.
Abels was born on October 8, 1962, in Phoenix, Arizona, and spent his early childhood on a small farm in South Dakota with his grandparents. The family piano got to him early: he was drawn to music at four, his grandparents talked the local piano teacher into taking him on despite his age, he began composing at eight, and by thirteen he had a completed orchestral work performed. He went on to the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, studying with James Hopkins and Robert Linn, and in 1985–86 studied West African drumming with Alfred Ladzekpo at the California Institute of the Arts, while singing in a predominantly Black church choir.
His feature debut was Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), whose main title “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga” set Swahili vocal warnings against orchestral unease. Us (2019) followed, winning him the World Soundtrack Award and the Jerry Goldsmith Award, earning a Critics Choice nomination, landing on the Academy’s Best Original Score shortlist, and being named “Score of the Decade” by TheWrap. Nope (2022), his third Peele collaboration, was also Oscar-shortlisted and took Outstanding Original Score for a Studio Film at the 2023 Society of Composers & Lyricists Awards.
He is not solely a film composer. In 2023 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Omar, the opera on the life of Omar ibn Said co-composed with Rhiannon Giddens — part of a concert catalogue that also includes Global Warming (1990), Delights & Dances (2007), Winged Creatures (2018), the Grammy-nominated Isolation Variation for Hilary Hahn, and At War With Ourselves for the Kronos Quartet. His orchestral pieces have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra, among many others. He is a co-founder of the Composers Diversity Collective, an advocacy group working to raise the visibility of composers of color across film, gaming, and streaming.
More recently he scored Disney+’s Star Wars: The Acolyte (2024), winning an NAACP Image Award for it in 2025 and co-writing “The Power of Two” with Victoria Monét and D’Mile; Netflix’s Sirens (2025); and Peacock’s The ‘Burbs (2026), which brought an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music.
How Na Hong-jin Found Him
At the Cannes press conference on May 18, 2026, Na explained that his team edits on set, dropping temporary music against cuts to feel out structure. At some point he reviewed what had accumulated and realized every piece of temp music in the film was Abels’ work — so he asked his producer to bring the composer in. Na described Abels as “someone like a teacher to me,” said he learned a great deal from the collaboration, and credited him with the film’s music.
Beyond Hope, Abels’ upcoming slate includes Justin Lieberman’s drama An Ode to Mary Jo and Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! (Searchlight, December 4, 2026), on which he is one of nine composers assembled as the film’s “Behemoth! Collective.”
Hope (2026) Official Tracklist
No official tracklist has been published. There is no score album, no digital single, and no announced release, and so there are no track titles or durations to report.
To be specific about what was checked and what came back:
| Source | Status as of July 16, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Film Music Reporter — album announcement | None (only the May 7 scoring assignment) |
| Film Music Reporter — Upcoming Soundtrack Albums | Not listed |
| FMDB — release entry | None |
| FMDB — Upcoming Releases calendar | Not listed |
| Apple Music — Michael Abels discography | Not present (latest: The ‘Burbs, Feb 6, 2026) |
| Namu Wiki — Hope soundtrack section | Section exists but is empty |
This article will not estimate, reconstruct, or approximate a tracklist. When Plus M, Neon, or a label issues the album, the track titles and per-track durations will be added here from the official listing.
Score Highlights
Without a tracklist, individual cues cannot be named. What can be reported is how critics who heard the score in context described it — and the consistency across otherwise divided reviews is notable.
- The daylight approach. The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney grouped the music with the film’s defining strengths, writing that this rare action thriller unfolding almost entirely in broad daylight pulls the viewer in immediately through its virtuoso camerawork, “pulse-pounding” score, adrenalized pacing, and sharply drawn characters. Rooney judged the film an instant cult classic.
- Orchestral scale. Deadline‘s Cannes review described Abels’ orchestral score as huge, ranking it alongside Hong Kyung-pyo’s cinematography, Kim Han-joon’s visual effects, and Yoo Sang-seop’s stunt coordination as elements delivering at a level Hollywood might envy at a fraction of the cost.
- The strings. World of Reel‘s Cannes dispatch noted that Abels’ score “goes insanely hard with the strings,” tying the music to the film’s sweaty, chaotic energy.
- The climactic chase. Next Best Picture singled out the film’s late set piece — a pursuit involving horses and a police car that the review compared to Mad Max: Fury Road — and credited Abels’ propulsive score with elevating the sequence into a crowd-pleaser alongside the practical stunt work, kinetic camerawork, and sound design.
- The trailer as a preview. Per Plus M’s press materials, the international main trailer uses Abels’ actual score from the film, not library trailer music. That makes it the only sanctioned public sample of the score currently available.
The characterizations above are drawn from published critical reactions and confirmed production details. No scene-to-cue mapping is claimed, because no cue titles have been released.
Hope Licensed Songs / Needle Drops
No licensed songs or needle drops have been confirmed for Hope.
Searches of Tunefind and WhatSong, the two databases that index licensed song placements, return no entry for Hope (2026). The film’s IMDb soundtrack page likewise lists no songs.
This is a documented absence rather than a confirmed one. The databases in question are partly community-maintained and often lag a film’s release, and Hope has only been in Korean theaters since July 15 and does not reach U.S. theaters until September 9. If songs surface once indexing catches up, this section will be updated.
Michael Abels Filmography
| Year | Title | Format |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Get Out | Film |
| 2017 | Detroit | Film (additional music) |
| 2019 | Us | Film |
| 2019 | See You Yesterday | Film |
| 2020 | All Day and a Night | Film |
| 2020 | Bad Education | Film |
| 2021 | Fake Famous | Documentary |
| 2021 | Nightbooks | Film |
| 2021 | Allen v. Farrow | Docuseries |
| 2022 | Nope | Film |
| 2022 | Breaking | Film |
| 2023 | Landscape with Invisible Hand | Film |
| 2023 | The Burial | Film |
| 2024 | The American Society of Magical Negroes | Film |
| 2024 | Star Wars: The Acolyte | Series |
| 2025 | Sirens | Series |
| 2026 | The ‘Burbs | Series |
| 2026 | Hope | Film |
| 2026 | Behemoth! | Film (one of nine composers) |
Composer credits per Wikipedia’s filmography for Michael Abels. Abels also composed, produced, and/or orchestrated the on-screen performances for Searchlight’s Chevalier (2023), a credit distinct from a scoring assignment.
Where to Listen to the Hope Soundtrack
There is currently no way to stream the Hope score — no album exists on Spotify, Apple Music, or any other service, and none has been announced by Plus M Entertainment, Neon, or a record label. For now, the only sanctioned sample is the international main trailer, which uses Abels’ actual score from the film rather than library music. The film itself remains the only place to hear the score in full: it is in South Korean theaters now via Plus M, and opens in U.S. theaters on September 9, 2026 via Neon, with no PVOD or streaming date set.
FAQs
Who composed the music for Hope (2026)?
Michael Abels composed the original score. Film Music Reporter confirmed the assignment on May 7, 2026, and the credit has been corroborated by The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and the film’s Korean production credits. Abels is best known for scoring Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us, and Nope, and won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music for the opera Omar.
Is the Hope soundtrack out yet?
No. As of July 16, 2026, no score album has been released, announced, or scheduled. Film Music Reporter’s upcoming-albums listing, FMDB’s release calendar, and Apple Music’s Abels discography all come back empty for Hope.
Where was the Hope score recorded?
At Synchron Stage Vienna in Austria, with approximately 70 musicians. This detail comes from Plus M Entertainment’s press materials and was reported by News Instar (July 6, 2026) and Financial News (July 11, 2026).
How did Na Hong-jin end up working with Michael Abels?
Na explained at Cannes that his team edits on set using temporary music. When he reviewed what had accumulated, he found every temp cue in the film was Abels’ work — so he asked his producer to bring the composer in. Na has since described Abels as “someone like a teacher to me.”
Where can I watch Hope?
It is in South Korean theaters now (released July 15, 2026, via Plus M Entertainment) and opens in U.S. theaters on September 9, 2026 via Neon. It had its North American premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival on July 20, 2026. No streaming or PVOD date has been announced.