Seth Rogen’s new movie has one job, and it’s to make you never want a houseguest again. The first look at Babies is here, and it stars Rogen and Anna Kendrick as a couple agonizing over whether to have kids — a debate that gets settled the old-fashioned way, when their newly divorced friend moves in. With her toddler. This is not a prank. This is the premise.
The film comes from Lauren Miller Rogen, Seth’s wife, who wrote and directed it. She’s previously directed Like Father and produces the pair’s charity comedy events, so the household clearly knows its way around a punchline — and you can safely assume the marriage anecdotes wrote half the script. Kendrick plays Annie, Rogen plays Aaron, and together they’re about to get a crash course in parenthood courtesy of a live-in child they cannot return. Nothing resolves a years-long “do we or don’t we” spiral quite like someone else’s kid drooling on your couch. It’s the ultimatum nobody asked for and everybody deserves.
And the supporting cast is genuinely stacked. Kate Berlant, Issa Rae, Dan Stevens, Zach Cherry, Ashley Park, Sharon Stone, Ed Helms, and David Strathairn all feature, which means Babies has roughly four times the ensemble a parenting comedy strictly needs. Sharon Stone doing childcare-adjacent comedy? Sold. Issa Rae dispensing wisdom, presumably while holding a coffee she never gets to drink? Doubly sold.
What works about Babies on paper is that it isn’t a baby movie so much as an ambush movie. The couple has the luxury of treating parenthood as an abstract, a spreadsheet, a someday. Then life hands them a toddler and a set of spare keys. Every couple knows a version of this story — the friends who “needed a place for a few weeks” and became furniture. And the genius cruelty of the premise is that Annie and Aaron can’t even be mad. The intruder is a child. Children don’t sign leases. Children simply arrive, annex the refrigerator, and redecorate your sleep schedule.
Comedy writes itself, apparently from experience.
The project has been moving quietly for a while, filming in Los Angeles and getting picked up for US distribution by Roadside Attractions and Vertical ahead of a planned 2027 release, with Amazon MGM holding rights in Canada. The project was packaged by Monarch, AGC, and CAA Media Finance, and first up, Babies gets its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. Expect the reviews to hinge on one question: does the film side with the couple, or with the chaos that ruins them? Smart money says the chaos wins. The chaos always wins.
For Rogen, it’s familiar territory executed at a higher voltage — the slacker persona forced into competence by forces beyond his control. For Kendrick, it’s another sharp, fast-talking lead role in a career full of them. And for audiences, it’s the rare comedy that might actually function as birth control. You can picture the pitch now: what if the ticking clock in a rom-com-adjacent comedy was just… a child. No bomb. No deadline. Just a small human being with opinions about crackers. That’s not an insult. That’s branding.
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