The 10 Most Anticipated Movies and Shows Coming to Streaming in August 2026

August is the month streaming services throw everything at the wall before the fall prestige season kicks in. This year, the wall is holding up surprisingly well. Between a beloved comedy returning from the dead, a Green Lantern series that has been in development for half a decade, and a Star Wars anime project that actually sounds interesting, August 2026 has more than a few things worth scheduling your evenings around.

Here are the ten titles we are genuinely excited about, sorted by release date.

1. Futurama Season 14 (Hulu, August 3)

Futurama has now been cancelled and revived more times than any show should survive, but here we are at season 14 and the Hulu era has been surprisingly strong. The writers have settled into a rhythm that balances the old characters with new sci-fi premises, and the animation budget has actually gone up since the Comedy Central days. Billy West, Katey Sagal, and John DiMaggio are all back, and the show has figured out how to use its century-hopping premise to comment on current events without feeling dated by the time the episode airs. If you skipped the revival because you assumed it would be a pale imitation of what Fox cancelled in 2003, season 13 made a convincing case that this version knows what it is doing. Season 14 should build on that momentum with more standalone episodes and a two-part season finale the writers have been teasing as their most ambitious animated sequence ever.

2. The Librarians: The Next Chapter Season 2 (Kanopy, August 3)

The Librarians franchise refuses to die, and at this point that persistence is its defining quality. Season 1 of The Next Chapter found a new cast and a new tone that leaned harder into magical realism than the original TNT series, trading some of the goofier energy for a moodier, more serialized approach to the “library contains every magical artifact in history” premise. It took a few episodes to find its footing, but by midseason the new ensemble had chemistry and the writers had figured out how to do monster-of-the-week stories that still advanced a larger arc. The season finale set up enough unresolved threads with the return of a villain from the original series that season 2 has actual stakes to work with. Kanopy is a strange home for a genre show since it is primarily a library-connected free streaming service, but the series has made the distribution model work.

3. Ted Lasso Season 4 (Apple TV+, August 5)

Nobody thought this was happening. Season 3 ended with a finale that clearly read as a series wrap, complete with goodbyes, flash-forwards, and the kind of emotional closure that does not leave much room for a sequel. For two years every cast member gave interviews insisting season 3 was the end. Then Apple wrote a check large enough to change enough minds, and here we are. Jason Sudeikis is back as Ted, along with Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein, and Juno Temple, though Phil Dunster’s Jamie Tartt is reportedly in a reduced role due to scheduling conflicts. The bigger creative question is whether the show can justify a fourth season when the emotional arc of the first three felt complete. The early word is that season 4 shifts focus to the women’s team AFC Richmond launched in the finale, which at least gives it somewhere new to go. Either way, this is the biggest streaming premiere of the month by a wide margin and the one most likely to dominate social media for the back half of August.

4. Star Wars: Visions Presents — The Ninth Jedi (Disney+, August 5)

The original Ninth Jedi short from Visions season 1 was the breakout hit of that anthology: a self-contained Jedi story with incredible hand-drawn animation from Production I.G that fans immediately demanded more of. Set centuries after the Skywalker saga, it imagined a galaxy where lightsabers had lost their color and only a hidden forge master could reignite them. The mood was closer to a Kurosawa film than a Star Wars cartoon. Disney listened to the reaction. The Ninth Jedi now gets its own feature-length expansion, reportedly running close to 90 minutes, with Production I.G returning to animate and the original director Kenji Kamiyama expanding his story into something closer to his work on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Visions has been the most creatively free thing Star Wars has produced since the Disney acquisition, and giving one of its best shorts room to breathe is exactly the right call.

5. Monsters of God (HBO Max, August 6)

This one is flying under the radar in a month dominated by franchise returns, but the pedigree is hard to ignore. Monsters of God is a four-episode limited series about a 19th-century cavalry officer hunting a Comanche war leader in post-Civil War Texas. It stars Bill Camp as Colonel Rodman, a career soldier who has lost faith in the Army he serves, and Zahn McClarnon as the war leader whose tactics keep confounding a better-equipped enemy. It is based on the novel by John Shirley and directed by Scott Cooper, who made Hostiles and Out of the Furnace, which means it will look gorgeous and feel like a sustained punch to the gut. If you liked The English on Prime Video or Cooper’s earlier Western work, this is squarely in that lane: a brutal period piece that is more interested in moral collapse than heroism, anchored by two actors who can communicate more with a glance than most can with a monologue.

6. Flex x Cop Season 2 (Disney+, August 7)

The first season of this Korean action-comedy was a genuine surprise when it dropped in early 2025: a chaebol heir played by Ahn Bo-hyun gets forcibly enlisted into a violent crimes unit and partnered with a hard-nosed veteran detective played by Park Ji-hyun, and the show somehow balanced slapstick comedy with action set pieces that looked like they had triple the budget they probably did. The buddy dynamic worked because both actors committed fully to their characters instead of coasting on the premise, and the cases of the week were genuinely twisty. Season 2 picks up with the leads now running their own unit within the Seoul Metropolitan Police, which should open up the format into something with more serialized tension. Korean dramas have a rough track record with second seasons, but Flex x Cop built enough goodwill in its first run to earn the benefit of the doubt.

7. Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Seattle Seahawks (HBO, August 11)

Hard Knocks is officially a summer ritual at this point, and the producers have gotten very good at finding teams with the right mix of ambition and uncertainty. This year the cameras land in Seattle, where new head coach Sean McDermott is trying to rebuild a defense that fell apart in the second half of 2025 and develop a young quarterback who looked brilliant in stretches and completely lost in others. The Seahawks are a compelling choice precisely because they are not a disaster and they are not a dynasty. They are a team caught in the middle, trying to figure out whether they should reload or rebuild, and that tension between veterans who think they are one piece away and rookies who represent a longer timeline is where Hard Knocks does its best work. The quarterback battle alone is worth watching.

8. Women in Blue Season 2 (Apple TV+, August 12)

Season 1 of this Spanish-language crime thriller followed Mexico City’s first female police unit in 1971 and was one of the best reviewed international series of 2025, earning comparisons to The Wire for its unflinching look at institutional resistance to reform. Season 2 jumps forward to 1977 with the unit now facing political pressure from a new administration that would prefer they quietly disband. Bárbara Mori returns as the unit’s leader, now battling both the criminals her team is supposed to catch and the government officials who see her unit as a PR problem. The period details are meticulously researched, the performances are uniformly strong, and the show has something real to say about what happens when reform runs into entrenched power. If you missed season 1, the two-season arc now forms a complete, tightly-plotted binge that clocks in at under 20 episodes total.

9. Lanterns (HBO Max, August 16)

This is the big one for genre fans, and it has been a long time coming. Lanterns is HBO’s Green Lantern series, and after years of development hell, multiple creative overhauls, and an entire first draft that was scrapped and rewritten from scratch, it is actually arriving. The show stars Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan, the veteran Lantern who has seen too much, and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, the younger Lantern trying to prove himself in an organization that does not trust him. The early footage screened at San Diego Comic-Con suggested something closer to True Detective in space than the cosmic spectacle some fans expected, with the two leads investigating a murder on Earth that traces back to a conspiracy within the Green Lantern Corps itself. That is almost certainly the right approach: focus on two compelling characters in a grounded mystery, build the world slowly, earn the spectacle later. Damon Lindelof is listed as a consulting producer and co-wrote the pilot with showrunner Tom King, whose comic book work on Mister Miracle and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow demonstrated exactly the kind of emotionally grounded superhero storytelling this series is reaching for. The eight-episode season drops weekly, which means this will dominate genre conversation for the rest of the month and well into September.

10. Dark Matter Season 2 (Apple TV+, August 28)

Season 1 of Dark Matter was one of Apple’s quietest success stories: a multiverse thriller based on the Blake Crouch novel that did not waste time on exposition and kept its emotional stakes grounded even as the plot spiraled into increasingly disorienting alternate realities. Joel Edgerton played Jason Dessen, a physicist who wakes up in a version of his life where he made different choices and has to fight his way back to his family, and Jennifer Connelly was his wife Daniela, who ends up being the show’s true anchor. Season 2 reportedly picks up right where season 1 left off, with the Dessen family trying to build a normal life in a world where the walls between realities have grown thin and multiple versions of Jason are still out there, some of them hostile. Where season 1 was a chase story about escaping the multiverse, season 2 is shaping up to be about what happens when the multiverse refuses to let you go. Crouch is back as showrunner, and the early reviews from critics who have seen the first four episodes suggest it has not lost the propulsive, unpretentious energy that made season 1 work.

---

August has always been a weird month for streaming. The spring premieres are finished, the fall prestige slate is still a few weeks away, and historically the platforms have used August as a dumping ground for library titles and shows they did not have enough confidence in to schedule during the regular season. That is emphatically not what this August looks like. Between Ted Lasso returning from what everyone assumed was a series finale, Lanterns finally emerging from development hell looking like the most ambitious superhero show HBO has made since Watchmen, and The Ninth Jedi proving that Star Wars can still surprise you, the month has more genuine heavy hitters than some entire quarters have managed. If you can only watch a few things, start with Ted Lasso for the cultural conversation, Lanterns for the genre ambition, and The Ninth Jedi for the reminder that Star Wars works best when it stops trying to connect everything to everything else. The rest can wait for a rainy weekend.