King Viserys might be dead but interest in House of the Dragon remains strong. So strong, in fact, that the season finale of the Game of Thrones spinoff has leaked online ahead of its scheduled debut.
An HBO spokesperson confirmed the leak, saying in a statement that the company is “disappointed that this unlawful action has disrupted the viewing experience for loyal fans of the show.” The leak “appears to have originated from a distribution partner in the EMEA region,” the spokesperson added. “HBO is aggressively monitoring and pulling these copies from the internet.”
Though not an ideal scenario for HBO—which wants as many people to watch what the spokesperson called “a pristine version” of House of the Dragon’s tenth and final episode on its platforms on Sunday night—it does show that fans are eager to see how the fight for the Iron Throne unfolds. House of the Dragon had the biggest new show premiere in the history of HBO when it debuted at the end of August, the company said at the time. The show’s viewership has remained consistent throughout the first season, with each episode averaging around 29 million viewers across all platforms. The popularity of both House of the Dragon and Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has offered valuable lessons for Hollywood as competitors search for their own platform-defining genre hits.
HBO renewed House of the Dragon in August, though the show will be without one of its co-showrunners moving forward. Miguel Sapochnik, who co-led the first season of the show alongside Ryan Condal and directed its premiere episode, said he would not work on the fantasy drama’s second season.
This isn’t the first time that the Game of Thrones franchise has faced online leaks ahead of its scheduled air date. An episode of the seventh season of the original series was also uploaded to torrent sites in 2017.
Listen to theStill Watching: House of the Dragonpodcast, and sign uptoreceive a weekly“Westeros Update”in your inbox.
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You know that shocking, stomach-sinking feeling you get when you catch a glance of your weekly screen time notification on your smartphone or tablet? Well, if they tallied up the hours I’ve spent scrolling through Netflix for a tv show or movie — hello, ANY-thing — to watch, I’d undoubtedly feel so much worse.
You know the routine: you close your WFH tabs, then open Netflix and settle down and search for satisfying content. But you don’t find anything. Before you know it, you’ve wasted an hour anxiously scrolling through every last one of the recommended titles. So — endlessly frustrated — you give up and doomscroll for hours. Is this your life?
It was mine until I got a Hulu subscription. I was lured in — like the best of us are — by Dylan O’Brien.
Hear me out. Earlier this year, Hulu released the much-anticipated comedy-of-errors, Not Okay, starring Zoey Deutch. This satirical comedy about social media is one of the most entertaining commentaries on a young adult life that I’ve seen in a while. The romantic lead? Dylan O’Brien with a blond buzzcut. Need I say more?
That was my first indication that I might have been sleeping on Hulu’s streaming library. Their latest romantic comedy, Rosaline, has cemented my theory: Hulu is fire.
Rosaline — starring Kaitlyn Dever — is Shakespeare in Love for Gen-Z. It’s a comedic take on Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of Romeo’s jilted ex-lover, Rosaline. It’s fun, fast-paced, and refreshing.
Here’s my theory: Netflix has been so focused on awards fodder that the rest of its content is glorified Hallmark — I’ll still be watching that new Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie, though. With all that mid-content and high drama surrounding its top-quality releases — like Luckiest Girl Alive and Dahmer — I’m tired of it.
But with Hulu releasing hit after hit and racking up its own share of awards, Netflix should sleep with one eye open.
Sure, HBO has Euphoria, Disney Plus has Hocus Pocus 2, and Peacock has that (terrible) new Pete Davidson feature. But if you’re looking for a new streaming service to explore, Hulu is that girl.
Don’t know where to start? Here are the best titles to stream on Hulu
Only Murders in the Building
This Selena Gomez smash is the best thing she’s been in since Wizards of Waverly Place. Alongside co-stars Steve Martin and Martin Short, Gomez plays a true-crime aficionado who stumbles into a murder mystery of her own. It’s the whodunnit for the true crime era. The newly released second season is just as fine as the first.
Booksmart
We’ve talked — and worried — enough about Olivia Wilde’s second directorial feature, Don’t Worry Darling. But her first film is where it’s at. Starring Beanie Feldstein (Jonah Hill’s sister, fun fact) and Kaitlyn Dever, it’s Superbad for the girls. It’s disarming, complex, and endlessly rewatchable.
High Fidelity
Hulu took a mid-90s rom-com and turned it into the coolest show with the coolest clothes. Euphoria can set aside. I’d raid the High Fidelity costume closet in a minute. And don’t even get me started on the soundtrack. One of those Gossip Girl teens is in it, too. Tragically, it was canceled after one season, but all the best shows are.
Andrew Garfield is fire in this strange, dark series based on a Jon Krakauer stunning nonfiction book of the same title. Garfield stars alongside Daisy Edgar-Jones in this detective drama about LDS community in Salt Lake City. If you liked him in Tammy Faye, you’ll love him in this.
Normal People
Skip the Conversations with Friends series. Normal People is by far the superior Sally Rooney novel and superior limited series. It catapulted the careers of Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones into the stratosphere, so we can thank it for that.
Wondering where you can stream the beloved, Emmy-winning Abbott Elementary? Hulu has got you covered. Don’t miss Quinta Brunson’s masterpiece — and join us as we patiently await the second season.
Ramy
The third season of Ramy is out right now and making headlines for the Bella Hadid cameo. But there’s more to it than that. This award-winning series is both hilarious and earnest, and an absolute must-watch.
Don’t miss the best of Hulu. It’s waiting for you to binge.
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PARK CITY, UT – JANUARY 26: Emma Roberts of ‘Paradise Hills’ attends The IMDb Studio at Acura … [+] Festival Village on location at The 2019 Sundance Film Festival – Day 2 on January 26, 2019 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for IMDb)
Getty Images for IMDb
If you’re like me, then you have multiple subscriptions to several different streaming platforms—which are all constantly adding new movies. Which begs the question each successive week: What do I watch?
For me, it helps to have all of those new films in one place. So in this article, I’ll run through the biggest new movies on major stream platforms, such as Netflix NFLX , Amazon AMZN Prime, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, Mubi, Apple AAPL TV+, Peacock, and Paramount PARA +.
At the end of the article, you can find a full list of all the new films available to stream this week.
The Peripheral: Season 1 (Amazon Prime)
Set in the future when technology has subtly altered society, a woman discovers a secret connection to an alternate reality as well as a dark future of her own.
Abandoned (Hulu)
After a couple move into a remote farmhouse with their infant son, the woman’s struggles with postpartum psychosis begin to intensify.
Raymond & Ray (Apple TV+)
Half-brothers Raymond and Ray reunite when their estranged father dies — and discover that his final wish was for them to dig his grave. Together, the process who they’ve become as men, both because of their father and in spite of him.
Love is Blind: Season 3 (Netflix)
Singles try to find a match and fall in love — without ever seeing each other face-to-face, as emotional connection attempts to conquer physical attraction.
The Fastest Woman on Earth (HBO)
A story that follows Jessi Combs’ epic seven-year quest to break the land speed racing records.
Spider-Man: The New Animated Series: Season 1 (Disney+)
He’s Peter Parker the college student — and then he’s Spiderman, crime-fighter extraordinaire.
The Grudge (Paramount+)
A detective investigates a murder scene that has a connection to a case that her new partner handled in the past. The killings occurred in a haunted house that passes on a ghostly curse to those who dare enter it. Soon, the curse spreads to a terminally ill woman and her husband, and another unsuspecting couple who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The African Desperate (Mubi)
A sculptor struggles with success, graduation, friends, and family.
Every new movie and show you can stream this week
Netflix
Dracula Untold (October 16)
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (October 16)
Waffles + Mochi’s Restaurant (October 17)
Gabriel Iglesias: Stadium Fluffy Live From Los Angeles (October 18)
LiSA Another Great Day (October 18)
Somebody Feed Phil: Season 6 (October 18)
Unsolved Mysteries: Volume 3 (October 18)
The Green Glove Gang (October 19)
Love Is Blind: Season 3 (October 19)
Notre-Dame (October 19)
The School for Good and Evil (October 19)
The Stranger (October 19)
28 Days Haunted (October 21)
Barbarians II (October 21)
Descendant (October 21)
From Scratch (October 21)
High: Confessions of an Ibiza Drug Mule (October 21)
ONI: Thunder God’s Tale (October 21)
Pokémon Ultimate Journeys (October 21)
LOL Surprise! Winter Fashion Show (October 22)
Amazon
May I Help You (October 19)
American Horror Story S10 (October 20)
Torn Hearts (October 20)
Modern Love Tokyo (October 21)
The Peripheral (October 21)
Argentina, 1985 (October 21)
Hush Hush (October 22)
Hulu
Being Flynn (October 16)
Benediction (October 16)
Sinister 2 (October 16)
The Paloni Show! Halloween Special! (October 17)
Duncanville: Final 6 Episodes (October 18)
Annabelle: Creation (October 20)
Bitterbrush (October 20)
Matriarch (October 21)
Abandoned (October 21)
Wyrm (October 21)
The Hair Tales: Two-Episode Series Premiere (October 22)
HBO
Mr. Pickles (October 17)
The Vow: Part Two (October 17)
Batwheels, Season 1B Premiere (October 18)
By Design: The Joe Caroff Story (October 18)
Mama’s Boy (October 18)
Meet the Batwheels: Season 1A (October 18)
Year One: A Political Odyssey (October 19)
Legacy: Season 1 Premiere (October 20)
The Fastest Woman on Earth (October 20)
Restoration Road with Clint Harp: Season 3 (October 21)
Teen Titans Go!: Season 7D (October 21)
Vale Dos Esquecidos: Season 1 Premiere (October 21)
Disney+
Dancing with the Stars: Episode 5 (October 17)
Dancing with the Stars: Episode 6 (October 18)
Alice’s Wonderland Bakery: Season 1, 4 episodes (October 19)
Bear in the Big Blue House: Seasons 1-4 (October 19)
PB&J Otter: Seasons 1-3 (October 19)
Raven’s Home: Season 5, 8 episodes (October 19)
Spider-Man: The New Animated Series: Season 1 (October 19)
The Incredible Dr. Pol: Season 21 (October 19)
The Spectacular Spider-Man: Season 1 (October 19)
Wicked Tuna: Season 11 (October 19)
Andor: Episode 7 (October 19)
The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers: Episode 204 “Draft Day” (October 19)
Hall of Villains (October 21)
Apple TV+
Raymond & Ray (October 21)
Acapulco: Season 2 (October 21)
Ghost Writer: Season 3 (October 21)
Paramount+
The Grudge (October 17)
Drunk History: Seasons 1 – 6 (October 19)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Season 2 (October 19)
PAW Patrol: Mighty Pups (October 19)
Inside Amy Schumer: Season 5 Premiere (October 20)
Blacklight (October 21)
Mubi
She Mad: Bitch Zone (October 17)
The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain (October 18)
Kim Petras is one powerful pop star. On tonight’s episode of Los Espookys, the blonde, Barbiecore US Ambassador Melanie Gibbons (played by Greta Titelman) has finally met her match in Secretary of State Kimberly Reynolds—her even blonder and Barbie-r boss—played by Petras, making her acting debut. “I was super nervous,” Petras admits to Vanity Fair between intermittent pulls from her vape pen in a joint Zoom interview with Titelman. “I got an acting coach to explain to me how acting works and did all this research.”
The hard work paid off, as Petras is delightful on the show as a politician with a Paris Hilton vibe, in a role that Los Espookys creators Julio Torres and Ana Fabrega wrote specifically for her. “When I got the scripts for season two, Julio mentioned to me, ‘I think we’re getting Kim Petras to be your boss,’” Titelman says. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, we wrote the part for her. We think she’s down to do it.’” But then, of course, a global pandemic occurred, creating a three-plus year gap between season one and season two of the HBO comedy, forcing Titelman to keep Petras’s involvement on the show secret from even her closest confidants, like Fire Island and I Love That for You’s Matt Rogers, a close friend and frequent collaborator. “I didn’t tell Matt. I didn’t tell any of our other friends,” says Titelman. “I was like, ‘It’s so major, I can’t spoil it.’”
It all began, as so many surprise collaborations do, backstage at a concert. “In 2019, Julio came to my show at Terminal 5 in New York—Julio and [Saturday Night Live’s] Bowen Yang,” Petras recalls. “We talked backstage. I’m a big fan of Julio and of Bowen, and we just had a good time and linked up.” Naturally, that backstage kiki led to a correspondence that set everything in motion. “A couple weeks later I got an Instagram DM like, ‘Would you ever be down to be in Los Espookys? Because we have been listening to ‘Turn Off the Light’ nonstop writing it.’”
Even though her guest spot was put on hold by the pandemic, Petras was always determined to make it happen. “[During] those two years. I was like, ‘Well, once this is over, I’m going to shoot Los Espookys. Fuck everyone.’” A fan of the show and all things Halloween-related, Petras says that she and her friends watched season one “three times over” and “are all addicted to it.” “I’m a spooky girl. I love to be spooked,” she says. “So it was kind of a no-brainer. I was like, ‘Yes, absolutely.’”
“I didn’t want to act one day,” Petras tells VF. “I was a songwriter, studio rat my whole life.” But once she arrived on the Los Espookys set in Santiago, Chile, it clicked that the blonde and powerful political figure Torres and Fabrega wrote for her was an extension of the pop star persona she had already perfectly crafted. “Once I got there, it was like, ‘We wrote this for you,’” Petras says. “It’s kind of your stage character, just in politics. Move the stage character to politics.”
Given that one of Petras’s most beloved refrains goes, “I want all my clothes designer / I want someone else to buy ’em / If I cannot get it right now / I don’t want it, I don’t want it, I don’t want it at all,” it wasn’t all that tricky to get into character. “I can be a bitch who gets what she wants onstage—that’s the persona I’ve created,” says Petras. “It was easy bringing that into Melanie Gibbons’s office and being Secretary of State.”
Titelman maintains that Petras felt like a pro on set. “Kim was so easy,” Titelman says. “I was intimidated, obviously, because I am a huge Kim fan. I was singing Kim’s songs to her on set.” (“I loved it,” chimed in Petras.) “It didn’t feel like Kim was acting for the first time,” Titelman continued. “She just immediately fit into the Los Espookys universe because she has the same sensibility, knows the same references. We’re all a part of the same kind of culture. She just got it.”
The strangest little corner of the DC Universe has survived all the mass chaos over at WB/Discovery. That would be Titans and Doom Patrol, two refugee series from the DC Universe streaming service which was turned into a comic thing and its shows fled to HBO Max.
Titans is a gritty version of Teen Titans that has attracted a surprisingly large audience over the last few years, and remains one of the most in-demand comics series out there. Doom Patrol is easily the most absurd comic show in existence, even considering the likes of Harley Quinn and Peacemaker, an R-rated comedy that everyone, critics and fans, seem to love for its weirdness.
Now, both shows are about to return for their respective season 4s. We have release dates, and we have trailers. Albeit one shows a lot more than the other.
Titans season 4’s release date is November 3 on HBO Max, just a few weeks from now. HBO just released this new trailer teasing the season, which reveals that the villain the crew is facing this time is Brother Blood, a famed baddie in Teen Titans lore.
Meanwhile, Doom Patrol season 4’s release date is December 8, and features uh, carnivorous butts, which we’ve seen previously. And a lot more footage than Titans’ Brother Blood spot, without giving too much away:
Both of these shows are being broken up into two parts for season 4, where the first half will start now, and the second half will air some time in 2023. This is kind of unusual for these series, but with 10-13 episode seasons, they are longer than some similar superhero productions, so maybe that’s a factor.
DC’s TV content strategy is nearly as all over the place as its movie strategy, but I’d argue it’s going quite a bit better. I didn’t love last season of Titans, but it has its fanbase. Doom Patrol is always great. Harley Quinn and Peacemaker are fantastic. A Penguin series out of The Batman universe sounds promising, and an Arkham show may be coming later. Literally only one piece of all that is directly connected to the DCEU (Peacemaker) and I think the lineup is better for that. Over on film, we’re about the get the launch of Black Adam as The Rock attempts to change the power dynamics of the DC universe, and projects like The Flash and Aquaman 2 remains plagued with issues via their real-life actors.
I’m certainly looking forward to the return of Titans and Doom Patrol, and we don’t have long to wait now. Stay tuned.
