Fall Preview: Is it, maybe, back to normal at the movies?

That will be less of an issue as the fall season ramps up. “Wakanda Forever” (Nov. 11) and “The Way of the Water” (Dec. 16) may each vie with the summer smash “Top Gun: Maverick” ($1.36 billion worldwide and still counting) for the year’s top film. Less clear, though, is if the fall’s robust slate of adult-driven films and Oscar contenders can once again drive moviegoing. Last year’s best-picture winner, “CODA,” from Apple TV+, ran the awards gauntlet without a cent of box office.

Among the most anticipated films hitting the fall festival circuit and theaters are Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans” (Nov. 23); “Blonde” (Sept. 16), starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe; Todd Fields’ “TÁR” (Oct. 7), with Cate Blanchett; Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light” (Dec. 9); “The Son” (Nov. 11), Florian Zeller’s follow-up to “The Father”; Chinonye Chukwu’s Emmett Till saga “Till” (Oct. 14); Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin” (Oct. 21); James Gray’s “Armageddon Time” (Oct. 28); and the Cannes Palme d’Or winner “The Triangle of Sadness” (Oct. 7).

Superhero films (“Black Adam,” Oct. 21, starring Dwayne Johnson), kids movies (“Lyle Lyle Crocodile,” Oct. 7), horror flicks (“Halloween Ends,” Oct. 14) rom-coms (“Ticket to Paradise,” Oct. 21, with Julia Roberts and George Clooney) and more high-flying adventures (“Devotion,” Nov. 23) will also mix in, as will prominent titles from streamers. Those include Amazon’s “My Policeman” (Oct. 21), with Harry Styles; and Netflix releases “Bardo” (in theaters Nov. 4), by Alejandro González Iñárritu; “White Noise” (in theaters Nov. 25) by Noah Baumbach; and Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” (streaming Dec. 9).

However, if much of the fall movie season is about restoring what was lost the last few years, for some upcoming movies, change is the point. “Woman King” (Sept. 16), directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and starring Viola Davis, is muscular fact-based epic about a West African army of female warriors. To Prince-Bythewood, the filmmaker of “Love & Basketball” and “The Old Guard,” “Woman King” represents “the chance to reframe what it means to be female and feminine.”

“I don’t think we have ever seen a movie like this before. So much of our history has been hidden or ignored or erased,” Prince-Bythewood said. “‘Braveheart,’ ‘Gladiator,’ ‘Last of the Mohicans.’ I love those movies. Now, here was our chance to tell our story in this genre.”

“Bros” (Sept. 30), too, is something different. The film, starring and co-written by “Billy on the Street” comedian Billy Eichner, is the first gay rom-com by a major studio (Universal). All of its principal cast members are LGBTQ. Comedies have struggled in theaters in recent years but “Bros,” produced by Judd Apatow, hopes a new perspective will enliven a familiar genre.

“It’s a historic movie in many ways,” Eichner said. “That’s not something we thought about when we were first developing it. Nobody sits down and says, ‘Let’s write a historic movie.’ We said, ‘Let’s make a hilarious movie.’ It will make people laugh but it’s unlike anything the vast majority of people have seen.”

“Bros” and “Woman King” are productions meant to challenge the status quo of Hollywood. That’s also part of the nature of “She Said” (Nov. 18), a dramatization of New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigation into movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” (Dec. 2) likewise chronicles a real-life female uprising. It’s based on events from 2009, when Bolivian Mennonite women gathered together after having been drugged and raped by the men in their colony.

Olivia Wilde’s buzzed-about “Don’t Worry Darling,” starring Florence Pugh and Harry Styles as a married couple living in a 1950s-style suburban nightmare-slash-male fantasy, approaches some similar themes through a science-fiction lens.

“I want to make something that is just really entertaining and fun and interesting, but actually is my way of provoking conversations about real issues like body autonomy,” Wilde said. “I didn’t know it would be as timely as it is right now. Never in my wildest nightmares did I believe Roe would have been overturned right before the release of this film.”

Other movie production timelines seem to exist almost apart from our earthly reality. James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of the Water” will debut 13 years after 2009’s “Avatar” (still the highest grossing film ever), a follow-up originally scheduled for release in 2014. Since then, so many dates have come and gone that the sequels — four films are now slated to launch in the next five years — have sometimes seemed like blockbuster Godots that might forever wait in the wings.

Speaking from the New Zealand where “The Way of the Water” was being mixed and scored, producer Jon Landau promised the wait is, in fact, nearly over.

“This is finally happening,” Landau said. “Those delays, as you would call them, were really about us creating a foundation for a saga of movies. It wasn’t about going: ‘Let’s get one script right.’ It was about: ‘Let’s get four scripts right.’”

Measuring the change in the movie industry is even harder when it comes to the span in between “Avatar” installments. When the first “Avatar” was in theaters, 3-D was being billed (again) as the future. Barack Obama was in the first year of his first term. Netflix was renting DVDs by mail.

“A lot has changed but a lot hasn’t,” Landau said. “One of the things that has not changed is: Why do people turn to entertainment today? Just like they did when the first ‘Avatar’ was released, they do it to escape, to escape the world in which we live.”