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Kylee Evancho
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is hinting his company will soon offer cheaper, streaming-only subscriptions in the US. For folks who sign up it means no more DVDs arriving in the mail, and comes on the heels of a similar plan announced for the Canadian market.
The move makes sense. It would cut out the cost of postage ,which has to be one of the biggest line items in the Netflix budget. And it could help Netflix leverage its enormous investment in online video. Netflix has made several deals over the past few months to add thousands of new TV and movie titles to its streaming service through deals with Warner Bros., NBC Universal, and EPIX, a joint venture between Viacom Inc., Paramount Pictures unit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., and Lionsgate.
IN RELATED NEWS: Blockbuster goes bust: Files for Chapter 11. And reporter Adriene Hill wonders how the video rental store even lasted this long. Also, the video vending-machine company, Redbox rents its 1 billionth movie.
Netflix is dropping titles that are sure to shine all August long, so get ready to check out the best movies and shows streaming now. You can count on Netflix to lead the way with incredible and innovative new content like Netflix Original movies The Union and The Deliverance, in addition to Netflix Original series The Umbrella Academy: Season 4 and Emily in Paris: Season 4, Part 1, and so much more.
All month long, people have been eagerly waiting to see what new titles would be coming to Netflix. From old classics to brand new films having their premieres, Netflix is full of top-notch movies, documentaries, and comedy specials this August, but there were two that in particular stuck out above the rest. Here are the best new movies on Netflix this month.
This August, the shows on Netflix are more exciting than ever before, but two of those titles stand out above the rest. Here are some of the best new shows that Netflix is bringing your way this month.
So, Indigenous moviemakers have been working for decades in the independent film world to tell their stories. But over the past few years, the number of movies and television shows with a strong Indigenous presence both in front of and behind the camera has been rapidly growing. And Native creatives based in or hailing from Oklahoma are playing key roles in many of the hot new titles.
One of the most critically acclaimed shows out now follows four Native teenagers in rural Oklahoma, while the most popular title ever on one major streaming service is a long-running film franchise's latest installment, which features an Indigenous heroine.
Filmed primarily in Oklahoma, the FX Networks hit debuted in 2021 to almost universal acclaim and premiered its sophomore season last year to more high praise. It has blazed trails as the first mainstream TV show on which every writer, director and series regular performer is Indigenous.
Co-created and executive produced by Oscar-winning New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi ("Thor: Love and Thunder"), who is of Maori ancestry, and Tulsa-based moviemaker Sterlin Harjo ("Barking Water"), who is Seminole and Muscogee, the bawdy and uproarious coming-of-age comedy focuses on four present-day Native teenagers who set out to escape their rural Oklahoma home for sunny California.
The long-awaited big-budget series based on Oklahoma-born and bred novelist Tony Hillerman's best-selling mystery novels about fictional Navajo detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee debuted in summer 2022. The series was created by Chickasaw Nation citizen and Ardmore native Graham Roland.
With Cheyenne-Arapaho filmmaker Chris Eyre (best known for the groundbreaking 1998 indie film "Smoke Signals") directing many of its episodes, the series counts film icon Robert Redford and "Game of Thrones" mastermind George R.R. Martin among its executive producers, along with Roland.
Set in the 1970s, the series stars Lakota actor Zahn McClarnon ("Reservation Dogs") as Leaphorn and Hualapai actor Kiowa Gordon ("The Twilight Saga") as Chee. The six-episode first season made a powerful enough impression that the show was quickly renewed for a second.
The show centers on the lifelong friendship between Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms, "The Office"), a descendant of the titular town's white founding family, and Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding, who is Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux and now has a hilarious recurring role on "Reservation Dogs"), the head of the cultural center for the fictional Minishonka Nation.
The latest installment in the long-running "Predator" sci-fi film franchise is set in the Northern Great Plains of the Comanche Nation in 1719. Filmed in the Stoney Nakoda Nation near Calgary, Alberta, Canada, with a largely Indigenous cast, the prequel pits one of the now-iconic alien trophy hunters against Naru (Amber Midthunder, "The Ice Road"), a Comanche woman determined to prove herself as a warrior.
Soon after the movie premiered in July 2022, 20th Century Studios revealed that the action-thriller, which earned strong reviews, scored the biggest premiere on the Disney-owned streamer to date, topping all film and TV series debuts. Based on hours watched in the first three days of its release, "Prey" also marked the most-watched film premiere on Star+ in Latin America and Disney+ under the Star Banner in all other territories, according to a news release.
Disney and Trachtenberg recently confirmed that "Prey" is the rare streaming-only movie to get a physical media release. It was unleashed Oct. 3 on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD. According to Slash Film, the Blu-ray release includes the Comanche audio track as well as two hours of bonus features, including a making-of featurette, panel discussion, alternative opening sequence, deleted scenes and audio commentary.
Filmed in Oklahoma in early 2020, the crime drama marks the feature film debut of Native American writer-director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. (Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians) and made its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
Chickasaw Nation Productions spent years turning the epic life of the titular Chickasaw Rancher, Montford Johnson, into a biopic that spans from his birth in 1843, through the tumultuous years of the Civil War and its aftermath and on to the Land Run of 1889.
The son of an Englishman and a Chickasaw woman, Johnson (Martin Sensmeier, who is Tlingit and Koyukon-Athabascan) befriended Cherokee fur trader and merchant Jesse Chisholm (Chickasaw citizen Eddie Easterling), who convinced him to establish cattle ranches and trading posts in the newly created Indian Territory to serve his fellow First Americans. At the height of his ranching operations, Johnson accumulated a herd of more than 35,000 head of cattle grazing over a million acres.
Marvel Studios leaps into Native storytelling with this new series, with all five episodes set to debut Jan. 10, 2024, on both Disney+ and Hulu. They'll be available on Hulu until April 9. "Echo" also marks the first Marvel Studios series to drop all episodes at once for maximum binge-watching.
As part of the "Hawkeye" series, Native actress Alaqua Cox, who is Menominee and Mohican, was introduced in late 2021 in the role of Maya Lopez/Echo, the fearsome commander of the criminal organization the Tracksuit Mafia.
Although it was filmed in Georgia, the show also is a milestone for Oklahoma: Maya is depicted as Choctaw, and much of the series' action is set in her small-hometown in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. When Yellow Bird learned three years later that a young, white oil worker had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became concerned.
The book (and presumably the intended series) chronicles her obsessive search for clues, which takes her on two divergent paths: to her own tribe, altered by oil-boom wealth, and to the non-Native, down-on-their-luck oilmen, including many who traveled hundreds of miles to find work toward the end of the Great Recession.
2024 has been filled with futuristic concepts transformed for the small screen so far. There's been an expanse of offerings from iconic TV hits of old finding new life, to much-loved shows spawning spin-offs, to new original shows. And they've all stormed their way onto our screens and into our hearts. No matter what streaming platform you're watching, there's a little something for everyone. And there's plenty more to come.
For the rest of 2024 and into 2025, the slate of sci-fi TV shows is abundant. There's a multitude of dates to mark on your calendar, including an array of genres mixing with sci-fi including dark comedy, thrillers, spy action shows, and books to TV show adaptations. Some of the entries for 2025 are thin on the ground with information, but we'll be sure to update them as soon as we hear anything. And while you're here, there's plenty more highly-anticipated sci-fi to enjoy with our upcoming sci-fi movies of 2024 guide. For now, let's turn our attention to the small screen and see what's coming up in 2024 and 2025.
If you want to check out what's currently available to stream across a range of streaming platforms, our guides to the best sci-fi movies and TV shows to stream on Disney Plus, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Paramount Plus, as well as our streaming deals page will point you in the right direction.
One of the standout villains of Gotham City is getting a TV show spin-off on Max and it comes directly from 2022's The Batman. Reprising his role as The Penguin, Colin Farrell will star as Oswald Cobblepot and his epic rise to power in Gotham's criminal underworld just a week after the events of the movie.
While The Penguin fights to take down the crime world for his own, he comes up against the head, Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong) and his daughter, Sofia (Cristin Milioti). Despite various delays, this new addition to the DC Multiverse and the Batman-verse will arrive in September.
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