Zendaya’s the woman of the moment: Oscars, The Drama, Dune Part 3 and Spider-Man - she’s doing it all

There was no escaping Zendaya this week. The American superstar is everywhere you look.

On Monday, she was at the Oscars presenting the coveted Best Director award. On Tuesday, she and co-star Robert Pattinson walked the red carpet at the premiere of their latest film, The Drama.

On Wednesday, she was at a launch event to drop the first teaser trailer for Dune Part 3. On Thursday, the Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer was released and broke a record for most views within a 24-hour period — 719 million hits.

And that’s after two weeks of “Zendaya and Tom Holland are secretly already married” discourse, after her stylist Law Roach let the cat out of the bag on the red carpet at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Those photos online of her and her beau on their wedding day? They’re AI fakes, but their ubiquity means you can’t open a social media feed without seeing Zendaya (or an image approximating her).

She is the woman of the moment — and not just this week.

Her increased presence these past few days, tied to three different films, is a reflection of 2026 as the year of Zendaya.

Not only does she have The Drama, Dune Part 3 and Spider-Man: Brand New Day on her schedule, there is also the upcoming third season of Euphoria and The Odyssey.

Only Anne Hathaway (with five films — The Devil Wears Prada 2, Flowervale Street, Mother Mary, Verity and also The Odyssey) is going to be as busy as Zendaya this year.

Because she was a child star on the 2010 Disney Channel TV show Shake It Up, released a self-titled album not long after, and has been in high profile productions such as The Greatest Showman and the Spider-Man trilogy, not to mention the countless ad campaigns for the likes of Louis Vuitton, you forget that Zendaya is only 29 years old.

She has been a powerful force on red carpets thanks to her creative collaboration with Roach, who has balanced the demands of theme dressing to promote her films (remember the Dune Part 2 and Challengers tours) with more general fits.

And she is Anna Wintour-approved, having already co-hosted the 2024 Met Gala.

Her dress for The Drama premiere this week was drawn from her own archives, bringing back a bridal-coded Vivienne Westwood number she wore to the 2015 Oscars. The ivory silk dress was perfect for the film, which is about a couple whose pending wedding is under threat after she confesses a secret.

It also ties in perfectly with the “Zendaya is already married” discourse, and she once again wore a gold band with her engagement ring.

The Drama, directed by Kristoffer Borgli, is being produced by and released by A24, the indie studio with serious cool cred and its own cult following that’s behind the likes of Moonlight, Lady Bird, Hereditary and Marty Supreme.

That combination of A24, Zendaya and Pattinson, plus an excellent, intriguing trailer, guarantees at least a curiosity factor.

The film is due for release in Australia on April 2, but that’s only the first of Zendaya’s big projects, which means there will be another four press tours worth of outfits and red carpets.

Following that will be the third season of Euphoria, returning on April 19 after a break of more than four years.

The HBO drama, for which Zendaya has won two Emmys, becoming the youngest person ever to triumph in the Best Actress in a Drama Series category, is a massive audience play for the network.

With its confronting themes and explicit scenes of teen sex and drugs — Zendaya plays a self-destructive addict — Euphoria is not for everyone, and certainly there are lots of people who don’t vibe with creator Sam Levinson’s creative choices, which has been criticised as exploitative and extreme.

But it is a big deal among younger demographics. Its second season averaged 16.3 million viewers in the US, and is HBO’s second most popular series behind only Game of Thrones.

The long delay between seasons — there will be a five-year jump in the series — has often been put down to its ensemble cast’s (also includes Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney) rising fame and therefore busier schedules but Zendaya said in 2024 during the promo tour for Challengers that she had been available for the past two years.

Euphoria will run until the end of May, and then you only have to wait six weeks until mid-July for the next Zendaya project: The Odyssey.

She is part of a large ensemble, and has even said that she didn’t get to interact too much with writer and director Christopher Nolan, which suggests that her role isn’t enormous.

But given that she and Holland are one of the internet’s favourite couples (they met during the chemistry read for the 2017 film Spider-Man: Homecoming), expect a lot of fuss to be made of the two appearing together in a non-Marvel movie.

For her fans, her presence on the press tour — hopefully paired with Holland — will probably end up being a bigger deal than her role in the movie. She is slated to play Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. Holland will be Telemachus, Odysseus’s son who sets off to find his wayward father.

Nolan’s version of Homer’s epic is expected to be one of the biggest films of the year, and will also star Hathaway, Pattinson, Matt Damon, Lupito Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Himesh Patel, Benny Safdie, Mia Goth, Will Yun Lee and Elliot Page.

While The Odyssey is still doing business in the cinema, Spider-Man: Brand New Day will arrive two weeks later on July 30.

The previous Spider-Man film, No Way Home, remains one of the most commercially successful films in the post-Covid era, having earnt $US1.9 billion at the box office, and defied the “superhero fatigue” talk.

There are huge expectations for Brand New Day, and the onscreen story will have extra investment for all those fans with a parasocial relationship to Zendaya and Holland’s real-life love story.

In Brand New Day, Peter Parker and MJ are separated by a decision he made at the end of the previous film, in which he has himself wiped from the memories of everyone who knew him and his by then not-so-secret superhero identity.

Four years later, Peter is a stranger to MJ, but he yearns (yearns!) for her. The clamour for the two to reunite will be strong — you just want to see those two kids back together.

She will have a bit of a break — just enough time for everyone to miss her — until December 17, when Dune Part 3 will premiere.

In perhaps fortuitous timing, both she and Holland are not expected to be in the Marvel team-up movie Avengers: Doomsday, which will be released on the exact same day. That clash of blockbuster titans already has the industry perplexed and a little nervous given they’re both sci-fi franchises with crossover audiences, rather than the counterprogramming of Barbenheimer.

It does mean there will be no conflict of promotional collisions or split loyalties on opening weekend grosses.

Dune director Denis Villeneuve has already said that while the third chapter is a thriller, the heart of the film will be the relationship between Chani, a Fremen warrior, and Dune hero Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet).

Pattinson is also in Dune Part 3, because he and Zendaya seem destined to circle each other this year.

Pattinson maybe-joked at the Dune Part 3 trailer launch that it was during production on The Drama that he had asked his co-star how he could get on a Dune movie, and obviously she had the hook-up.

It’s definitely going to be a packed 2026 for Zendaya, her fans, casual observers and anyone who spends even five minutes a day on social media.

But it sounds like while she’ll be everywhere, she won’t be sharing any more of herself than she does now. Don’t expect her to gush about the details of her probably-wedding when she never even personally confirmed her engagement.

In a Q&A she did with Pattinson for Interview magazine, she said, “At the end of the day, you’re a public figure, there’s nothing you can do, but some things are meant for yourself and for your loved ones.

“I do try to have privacy, not just for characters, but for me in real life. I try to be honest to who I am when I am in public, but I also try to keep things for myself.”