Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris Face Off in 'The Brink of War,' Opening August 14
Jeff Daniels plays Ronald Reagan and Jared Harris plays Mikhail Gorbachev in The Brink of War, a theatrical drama about the 1986 Reykjavik Summit that opened the door to a landmark nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. Angel Studios, the values-based distributor behind the film, releases it in wide theatrical release on Friday, August 14, 2026 (Variety).
The film carries a PG rating and runs 117 minutes (Wikipedia). Michael Russell Gunn wrote and directed it; the production companies behind the project are SK Global and 2521 Entertainment (Variety; Wikipedia). Hope Davis also appears in the cast (IMDb).
The story dramatises two days in Iceland that nearly changed everything. In October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik for talks that were by all accounts extraordinary — radical proposals floated, tempers tested, and an agreement that fell short on the day but paved the way for the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. IMDb's plot summary frames the film around Reagan "racing to save a nuclear deal with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as pressure mounts all around him" (IMDb).
For Angel Studios, The Brink of War arrives on the heels of a solid hit. The distributor's previous release, Young Washington, opened over the Fourth of July holiday and went on to earn nearly $47 million in theaters (Variety). That figure gives the studio a track record it can point to as it pushes a Cold War political drama into the late-summer corridor — a slot where audience appetite can be unpredictable.
Angel Studios first teased the project with an official trailer on its YouTube channel in April 2026 (YouTube). A press kit with resources for journalists is hosted on the studio's official website (Angel Studios).
The casting pairs two actors with deep reputations for playing complicated men. Daniels has moved between comedy and political drama for decades, from The Newsroom to The Looming Tower. Harris built a following as King George VI in The Crown and as the Soviet scientist Valery Legasov in Chernobyl — a role that already put him inside the world of Cold War nuclear politics. Seeing them square off across a negotiating table, even a dramatised one, gives the film its gravitational pull.
