Release dates and trailers for the biggest streaming movies and TV shows in 2024

It’s the first week of December, and the end of the year is coming in fast and with a lot to look forward to at theaters this month. That very cool-looking Lord of the Rings anime hits US theaters on the 13th; Sonic the Hedgehog 3 follows on the 20th; and I’m deeply excited to see Nosferatu on December 25th. (If you’re not with me on that last one, give Matt Zoller Seitz’s RogerEbert.com review of it a read and get back to me.)

While I’m waiting to go be unnerved by Robert Eggers’ new spooky vampire movie, let’s take a look at some good trailers from the last week.

Invincible season three is on its way, and Amazon has released a new trailer in which hero Mark Grayson takes on robots, rams a rocket in space, and chastises Oliver. He also gets a new blue suit.

“Mark’s speed has increased 65 percent; his endurance, 70 percent; and his strength, 138 percent,” says GDA agent Donald Ferguson (Chris Diamantopoulos), setting up the action-filled trailer. What follows are a Mortal Kombat-style beheading, nuclear explosions, and the promise of drama as Mark (Steven Yeun) tells GDA director Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins) that he’s quitting.

Amazon announced at CCXP in Brazil yesterday that season three of Prime Video fantasy series The Wheel of Time will start streaming on March 13th, 2025, writes Deadline. The company also released a new teaser trailer, setting stakes that include the life of at least one main character.

The trailer opens with Rand al’Thor (Joshua Stradowski) and others standing on a hill overlooking a fog-shrouded city. Rand and Moiraine Damodred (Rosamund Pike) are headed to the Aiel Waste “to uncover the true fate of the Dragon Reborn” in this season, according to the trailer’s description. If you haven’t watched the show or read Robert Jordan’s book series by the same name, Rand is the Dragon Reborn, a prophecied being who could save the world — or destroy it if he succumbs to the Dark.

There’s a lot of Star Trek: Discovery in the official trailer for the Star Trek: Section 31 movie that Paramount Plus just released — big drama, explosions, and some looming threat that’s “unlike anything that Starfleet’s ever seen.”

The trailer shows off a little more of the film, with moody corridors, some sort of electrified space ball, and brief looks at the spaceships that the show will feature. It also devotes more time to characters besides Michelle Yeoh’s Emperor Philippa Georgiou — namely Omari Hardwick’s Alok Sahar and Kacey Rohl’s future Enterprise C captain, Rachel Garrett. It’s still a mystery what trouble Emperor Philippa is leading her team into, though.

This week, I went to a theater to watch a showing of the black-and-white version of Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves. Old-heads like me may recall it as a bad mid-90s cyberpunk film (written by William Gibson!) about a data courier whose brain is the storage medium, but who had to have his childhood memories erased to make space for the work.

I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, and you know what? It’s still not a good movie. But if you ignore the plot holes, mostly awful acting, and terrible pacing, it’s at least very cool to look at. Also, I had totally forgotten about Ice T’s turn as J-Bone, leader of the Lo-Tek underground. It was fun enough, but it was weird to hear the theater audience erupt with applause at the end, though, knowing how it was received almost three decades ago.

Netflix released a new teaser for Squid Game’s second season on Thursday. Gi-hun, again played by Lee Jung-jae, is participating in the games again, but based on the trailer, it appears that he will try to convince he other contestants to rebel against the competition — and that, at times, he may not be successful.

“Three years after winning Squid Game, Player 456 gave up going to the states and comes back with a new resolution in his mind,” according to description of the show from the trailer. “Gi-hun once again dives into the mysterious survival game, starting another life-or-death game with new participants gathered to win the prize of 45.6 billion won.”

Star Trek: Section 31 will premiere as a direct-to-streaming movie on January 24th on Paramount Plus, which revealed the date during a Trek panel at the New York Comic Con. Fans will finally see Michelle Yeoh’s Star Trek: Discovery character, Emperor Philippa Georgiou, put her Mirrorverse skills to use as a super secret space spy.

When we last saw Emperor Georgiou (an alternate dimension version of Captain Georgiou Discovery’s first season) she was flung back in time by a being called the Guardian of Forever. Before that, though, she had been recruited as a member of Section 31, the clandestine organization that the Trek franchise often uses to illustrate that even the glossy Federation has a shady side.

Can you feel it? There’s a slight chill in the air, the Sun is retiring earlier, and the leaves are beginning to change (at least in my Midwestern city). We’re wading right into the time of year when everyone starts posting the vampire Kermit the Frog meme to show how ready they are for Halloween. I’m even starting to eye that Shudder re-subscribe button.

October has its own vibe at the cinema, and theatrical releases this month include Operation Blood Hunt, a movie about 1944 special forces fighting werewolves in the Pacific theater, and Seven Cemeteries, a Danny Trejo-starring film about a guy who hires a witch to resurrect his posse to save a woman’s ranch. And let’s not forget Rumours, which I’m very excited for.

Amazon Prime has released a trailer for its spin on the Shark Tank concept: Buy It Now, a JB Smoove-hosted show where people put their product ideas before a panel of investors. The twist is that they’ll also be judged by “The 100,” which Amazon says is an audience of “potential customers” (otherwise known as “people”), and if their products are picked, Amazon will sell them in a special section of the store.

The company announced the show earlier this year but has now released a trailer showing what it will look like. Contestants pitch their ideas to the audience. If the crowd votes for them, then the panelists pick which ones will show up on Amazon’s Buy It Now Store: a new storefront launching alongside the show that viewers can reach using a QR code that shows up during episodes. One presenter per episode will get a $20,000 prize, too.

This week, I’ve been slowly catching up on Dark Matter; I’m about 20 hours into Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on the Switch; and I’m still trying to work a trip to the movie theater into my schedule to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

I’m behind, in other words! And this week’s trailers shoveled so much more onto my need-to-watch pile, from the next Marvel MCU film, Thunderbolts, to the amusingly bizarre black comedy Rumours, to Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple TV Plus series. That’s to say nothing of all the game trailers from Sony’s State of Play event this week.

This week brought a few noteworthy movie and TV trailers — the big one being Sonic the Hedgehog 3. And while I won’t include them here, you should check out some of the trailers included with our coverage of the most recent Nintendo Direct (shoutout to the Nintendo DS Castlevania games collection).

It’s clear that summer is winding down, and so are the big blockbusters. Things will liven up a bit with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice next week, but things are looking quiet for a little bit after that.

In the official trailer for Time Bandits, the new Apple TV Plus series from Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement seems to revel in every bit of the dreamlike pseudo-reality of the 1981 film it’s based on. The show focuses on a young kid named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) who finds a time portal in his room and links up with a band of time-hopping thieves. It’s set to premiere on July 24th for Apple TV Plus subscribers and runs for 10 episodes.

While the series is an adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, the trailer makes it clear it’s also its own thing with different characters, time periods, and situations. The show controversially replaced the Time Bandits themselves, originally played entirely by a cast of little people, with actors like Lisa Kudrow and Rune Temte.

Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got its first official trailer yesterday, revealing that the Mutant Mayhem spinoff will debut August 9th, with a 12-episode run on Paramount Plus. And from the looks of things, it’s just as gorgeous as the 3D-animated movie it sprang from.

The new trailer sees the four brothers split up by a mysterious villain named Bishop and forced to fight murderous robots without the help of their siblings. Bishop herself appears in the belly of an especially large robot that very vaguely resembles a mouser with arms and feels a lot like a hint at Krang, the evil brain from Dimension X that terrorized the Turtles in the 1987 cartoon series.

Disney’s newest Star Wars show, The Acolyte, is just a month away on Disney Plus, and the newest trailer for it hints that the show will pull on a thread that Rian Johnson’s Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi tugged on back in 2017: Is the Jedi order actually all that good?

Set well before the events of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, The Acolyte sees High Republic-era Jedi master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) investigating a string of murders (which include at least one Jedi). Today’s trailer reveals that the mysterious black-clad Mae (Amandla Stenberg), is a former student of his, and it seems like she’s probably a suspect in the murders. It also reinforces the idea that this will be a particularly grim series.

When we last left The Boys, Homelander’s (Anthony Starr) political dabbling was humming along and Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) had a terminal illness. Two years and a new spin-off later, Homelander’s supercharging of a presidential campaign continues to be a dark mirror of the US political climate and Butcher looks to desperately reckon with his diagnosis.

The official trailer sees Butcher considering something very much like the X-Men legacy virus — a biological solution that can kill the series’ supes. There’s plenty of carnage, some teeing up of weighty, consequential moments, someone’s skull apparently spewing bubbles when cleaved with a hatchet, a Butcher standoff with Black Noir, and even a chicken chest-burster.