Author: Daniel Jude "DJ" Anilao

Exodus, the sci-fi game announced for 2026, is probably the closest thing on the horizon if you want The Expanse’s political realism fused with Project Hail Mary’s science-driven tension. No movie, series, or game has been officially pitched as that exact mix.

Its marketing keeps circling the same ideas: a big, cinematic sci-fi story, grounded science, weighty choices, deep worldbuilding, and time dilation that affects gameplay, relationships, and the cost of travel. That’s the clearest connection to Project Hail Mary. Even so, Exodus doesn’t stay strictly in hard sci-fi territory the whole time. It’s also willing to go a little stranger, up to and including an octopus companion piloting a mech.

If you follow sci-fi at all, Exodus is one to keep an eye on, because 2026 is loaded. The Project Hail Mary film adaptation reaches theaters on March 20, with Ryan Gosling starring and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directing, after reports that the trailer pulled in 400 million views in its first week. Then Dune: Part Three arrives on December 18, adapting Dune Messiah and dealing with the fallout of Paul Atreides’ rule.

You can’t get any of them yet. But the bigger picture is hard to miss: sci-fi now accounts for 10% to 15% of fiction revenue, based on industry estimates. Emotional sequels and adaptations have real momentum, blockbuster attention keeps squeezing smaller international stories, and audiences still want first contact, political fallout, ethical dilemmas, and the human cost of survival.

Disney+ has started developing The Kane Chronicles as a series with 20th Television, which would make it the next Rick Riordan adaptation after Percy Jackson and the Olympians. The story centers on siblings Carter and Sadie Kane, who learn they’re descended from pharaohs, get pulled into a hidden world of Egyptian gods and magic, and try to rescue their father while a conflict among the gods threatens to get much worse.

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For the short version, think Percy Jackson filtered through Egyptian mythology. Carter and Sadie discover their lineage, step into a secret magical world, race to save their father, and end up in the middle of a fight among the gods. There’s also a bit of Marvel’s Moon Knight energy in the setup, especially in the avatar-style connection to the gods and the focus on ancient belief systems.

The series draws from The Red Pyramid, The Throne of Fire, and The Serpent’s Shadow, all part of Rick Riordan’s universe. Riordan’s books have sold more than 190 million copies, so the appeal is pretty easy to understand. Rick Riordan and Rebecca Riordan are executive producing, and Angela Robinson is co-creating the series and executive producing as well. If you’ve been hoping for a version that stays close to the books, that’s an encouraging sign.

This project has already taken a few turns. The Kane Chronicles was previously in development at Netflix as a film trilogy before the rights reverted in early 2024, and even now there’s still no release date, no cast, and no series order. Rick Riordan has also been clear that development doesn’t mean a show is guaranteed.

If you were part of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians audience, this darker Egyptian version looks like one to watch.

For now, you can watch Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+ while The Kane Chronicles remains in development.

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Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen is back for season 2 on Netflix, and Rotten Tomatoes has it posting the best score the franchise has seen so far.

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The new season is sitting between 81% and 82% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, which puts it ahead of both The Gentlemen season 1 and the 2019 film, each at 75%. It even touched 100% for a bit before settling back into the low 80s. The audience score looks good too at 78%, though that’s still a little below season 1’s 84%.

It’s moving up on Netflix, too. After landing at No. 3 in the Netflix Top 10, The Gentlemen season 2 has climbed to No. 1 on Netflix’s global viewership chart. That’s a strong follow-up to season 1, which drew 12.2 million views in its first week, based on Netflix’s numbers.

Most of the reviews are landing on the same idea: these episodes go darker, lean harder into drama, and aim bigger. Theo James and Kaya Scodelario are getting a lot of the credit, especially for how they hold together the power struggle at the center of the season.

If you liked season 1, this one’s probably worth a look. Some critics and viewers do think the wider scope leaves it feeling crowded, slower on the whole, and a little less light and chaotic than it was before.

You can stream The Gentlemen season 2 on Netflix now. This time the story pushes past the English countryside and into Italy, and Netflix has already renewed it for season 3.

Game of Thrones: Legends, the mobile game, says its House of the Dragon quest event lands on September 9. Just don’t read that as a TV announcement: the September 9 update is in-game content for Game of Thrones: Legends on mobile, not a new episode, a bonus episode, or an early HBO/Max return for the House of the Dragon series.

So yes, there’s new House of the Dragon material coming to Game of Thrones: Legends. It follows the mini-arc that hit the mobile game Game of Thrones: Conquest on August 10, 2026. The show itself, meanwhile, already wrapped season 3 on August 9 after premiering June 21 for an eight-episode run that covered the Battle of the Gullet and Rhaenyra’s capture of King’s Landing. Filming for that season ran from March to October 2025.

There’s also the bigger picture for the show. HBO has already renewed House of the Dragon for season 4, which is expected to be the final season, with pre-production expected to start in October 2026, filming set for early 2027, and a likely air date in 2028.

If you follow House of the Dragon closely, this kind of announcement will still catch your eye. But vague “mark your calendars” posts can sound a lot like a streaming tease, especially around a series whose season 2 premiere still pulled in 7.8 million viewers, down 22% from nearly 10 million in 2022 and still the biggest single-day audience Max had seen at the time.

Prime Video has locked in the end of Maxton Hall – The World Between Us. The third and final season will premiere on December 9, 2026.

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The new season runs six episodes and will launch globally in more than 240 countries and regions. It adapts Save Us, the final novel in Mona Kasten’s bestselling trilogy. Prime Video says the series is wrapping up in line with the books, rather than pushing the story past its natural ending. Season 3 picks up right after season 2’s cliffhanger: Ruby Bell has been suspended from Maxton Hall, her dream of Oxford is suddenly at risk, and she and James Beaufort are trying to prove her innocence while strain on their relationship and buried secrets threaten to unravel everything.

If you’ve been watching from the start, there’s some weight behind this final stretch. According to Prime Video, season 1 delivered the platform’s biggest first-week global debut for an international original series and reached number one in more than 120 countries and territories. Damian Hardung has also said that a fourth season could weaken the story, so this ending is being presented as a creative decision, not a cancellation that came out of nowhere.

The final season will be available on Prime Video starting December 9, 2026.

DC Comics has finally shown off the Justice League of Mount Everest in writer Ryan North’s current The Flash arc, a new team with one of the oddest names DC has come up with in a long time.

The lineup puts Green Arrow in charge of Red Tornado, Aquaman, Superman (Jon Kent), Wonder Woman, and Martian Manhunter. They come together in response to Wally West’s new “Flashes of Insight,” a power that lets the Flash sort through massive amounts of information at super-speed and spot crimes, accidents, and other threats before they happen.

Green Arrow sees that kind of preemptive justice as a serious ethical problem, way too close to surveillance for comfort, so he puts together a secret League on Mount Everest. His reasoning is simple: he figures Everest is one place the Flash is less likely to appear without warning and shut the whole thing down.

If you’ve been keeping up with DC Comics after Death of the Justice League and through the Dawn of DC reset of the brand, this is one to pick up, because it turns a familiar superhero standoff into an argument about prevention, control, and how easily good intentions can slip into the logic of mass surveillance.

You can read the team’s debut right now in the current issues of DC Comics’ The Flash.

Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi film Mickey 17 is suddenly back in the conversation. It’s started trending on HBO Max in the U.S. and has landed in Netflix top 10 lists in some international markets, based on the platforms’ own rankings, giving it a fresh wave of attention after a theatrical run that fell short.

It was Bong’s first feature since Parasite, and it wasn’t cheap. Reports put the budget at about $118 million, while worldwide box office came in around $133.3 million. That’s well below the roughly $236 million to $295 million that industry estimates usually say a movie at that scale needs to reach. Still, streaming has people looking at it again, and critics and fans are starting to treat it as one of the year’s messier, louder, more ambitious studio swings.

The film adapts Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7. It follows Mickey, an “expendable” worker on a space-colonization mission who’s expected to die whenever the job requires it, then come back in a newly printed body with most of his memories still there. Robert Pattinson plays both Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, and a lot of the praise around the movie has gone to the way he handles the mix of dark comedy, panic, and existential dread.

Its trouble in theaters probably came from a few things hitting at once: marketing that was hard to pin down, release-date changes, and a genuinely strange blend of grotesque sci-fi, political satire, and ideas about identity, labor, corporate power, colonialism, and class. Those themes will feel familiar if you’ve seen Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer, Okja, and Parasite.

If you skipped Mickey 17 in theaters, this second life on streaming looks like a good reason to give it a shot. It’s on HBO Max in the U.S. and on Netflix in some international markets.

Capcom has two Resident Evil releases landing in September 2026: a new live-action reboot hits theaters on September 18, and Resident Evil: Death Island Volume 1, the first manga volume based on the CG film, arrives on September 29.

It makes for a crowded month. It also comes right after Resident Evil Requiem opened 2026 on a strong note, with the planned Resident Evil: Veronica remake still on deck for 2027. Put together, it’s a clear sign that Resident Evil keeps pushing past games and further into film, comics, and manga.

Zach Cregger’s movie is reportedly telling a new present-day story that runs alongside Resident Evil 2. Austin Abrams plays a medical courier who gets pulled into the Raccoon City outbreak. On the manga side, Resident Evil: Death Island adapts the 2023 CG movie, with Chris Redfield, Leon S. Kennedy, and Jill Valentine dealing with an outbreak tied to Alcatraz.

So far, the movie seems to be off to a decent start. Test screening chatter has reportedly singled out its tense horror tone, and North American opening weekend projections are sitting in the $40 million to $50 million range. Still, the reaction to the reboot’s different angle has been mixed, international marketing is still pretty limited, and there aren’t many early manga reviews out yet.

If you keep up with Resident Evil outside the games, September looks like a month to pay attention to.

The new live-action Resident Evil reboot opens in theaters through Sony on September 18, and Resident Evil: Death Island Volume 1 will be available from Titan Comics on September 29.

Wen Muye’s Once Upon a Time in the Middle East stayed at No. 1 at the mainland China box office for a third weekend in a row on Aug. 28-30, taking in 174.4 million yuan ($25.6 million). Since opening on Aug. 11, it has already pulled in more than 1.7 billion yuan ($253 million) in mainland China, and current forecasts now have it finishing around 2.5 billion yuan.

You can see the effect in the broader market. China’s summer box office has now passed 12.4 billion yuan ($1.84 billion), its strongest showing in three years, while the country’s total 2024 box office moved past 27 billion yuan, or about $4 billion, by Aug. 22. Daily revenue also stayed above 100 million yuan for more than 40 consecutive days.

Four of China’s five biggest summer releases are local films. If you’ve been keeping an eye on the country’s theatrical rebound, this streak deserves attention.

The movie comes from Dying to Survive director Wen Muye, with producer Dirty Monkeys, the company founded by Ning Hao, behind it. That pairing looks like a big reason Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is landing as both a prestige title and a broad commercial hit.

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is now playing across mainland China, with a wider rollout still to come in Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East. Its box-office run is also feeding China’s growing “film+” business, which links movie success to tourism, dining and merchandise.

DC Studios has dated Clayface for October 23, 2026. That makes it the DC Universe’s first live-action stop in Gotham, and it’s arriving as an R-rated body horror movie, not as an introduction to the new DCU Batman.

So the first Gotham story in this continuity belongs to a villain. It follows Matt Hagen’s transformation and shows the city through something tragic and grotesque, not through Batman, his allies, or his war on crime. It may also be James Gunn’s clearest test so far of his promise that the DC Universe won’t be locked into a single tone or genre.

There’s another reason this one matters. It could help set the feel of this Gotham before The Brave and the Bold. Matt Reeves’ production company, 6th & Idaho, is producing. James Watkins is directing. Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini are writing. Clayface has already appeared in Creature Commandos, and there are still unconfirmed rumors about a possible connection to The Batman Part II and its Elseworlds continuity.

If you’ve been waiting for DC to make projects that lean fully into specific genres instead of squeezing everything into the usual superhero mold, keep an eye on this one. Whether Clayface works or doesn’t could say a lot about how far audiences are willing to follow DC when it gets weirder and takes bigger swings.

You’ll be able to see Clayface in theaters on October 23, 2026.