Weekly

The Odyssey Lands, House of the Dragon Rages On

This week in movies and TV. Every big new release, what's airing right now, what's coming next, and the films everyone's arguing about online.

Sunday, July 19, 2026 · By MoviesPack

This Week in Movies & TV

Here's the funny thing about this week's slate: almost none of it is new. A three-thousand-year-old poem. A decade-old animated hit. A horror franchise that has technically died several times over. The calendar reads less like a list of premieres and more like a family reunion, which is either depressing or comforting depending on how you feel about Hollywood in 2026. The good news is that at least one of these reunions is genuinely spectacular. Let's get into it.

The one you actually need to see

The Odyssey (2026)

If you only make it to one theater this week, this is the one. The setup is the oldest adventure in the Western canon. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, spends ten brutal years trying to sail home from the Trojan War while vengeful gods, sea monsters, and his own pride keep knocking him off course. Homer's epic has been adapted more times than anyone can count, but rarely at this scale and rarely with this much confidence. It opened as the most-watched title on our entire database, and the strong 7.6 audience score suggests the ambition mostly landed. What makes it worth seeing isn't the story, because you already know the story. It's the sheer size of it, the willingness to treat a myth like a myth instead of shrinking it to fit a streaming thumbnail. It's also the movie the internet decided to argue about this week. The discussion thread on r/movies filled up within hours of release, which is usually a good sign that a film is doing something people feel compelled to talk about. If it leaves you hungry for more sprawling, myth-sized filmmaking, that's exactly what our similar-films tool for The Odyssey is built for, and you can see where it's streaming once it makes the jump home.

The remake debate rolls on

Moana (2026)

And here's the week's other big swing, Disney's live-action machine reaching the ocean at last. The story's unchanged. A young wayfinder sails past her island's reef for the first time, a reluctant demigod in tow, to set right what's gone wrong for her people. So your reaction probably depends entirely on where you stand in the great remake debate, and Moana isn't going to change your mind either way. The songs are the songs, the water looks incredible, and the animated original still exists if this isn't your thing. The reviews have been notably split, and it's sitting well below the beloved original, but "divisive" and "hugely popular" are not mutually exclusive. This is one of the most-watched releases of the past two weeks regardless. If you've got kids, the decision's been made for you. If you're curious how it stacks up, the ratings breakdown tells the story better than any one critic can, and here's where to watch it.

Also out, briefly

The rest of the week is genre comfort food, and there's no shame in that. Horror fans get Evil Dead Burn (2026), and the premise is a nasty little hook. A grieving widow moves in with her late husband's family, who happen to be experts on demonic possession, and then the in-laws start turning, one by one, into things that feed on fear. It's the latest resurrection of a series that refuses to stay buried, and unusually for a late-run horror sequel it's landing well with the people who'd know. The younger crowd gets Descendants: Wicked Wonderland (2026), where a time-travel fix goes sideways, spawns a brand-new villain, and sends the young heroes on a Wonderland rescue mission. It knows exactly who it's for. And Heartstopper: Forever (2026) gives one of the most quietly beloved coming-of-age stories its feature send-off, catching Nick and Charlie at the school year where every young couple starts dreading the same question: what happens after graduation. Have tissues ready. If you'd rather just grin for ninety minutes, Kung Fu Soccer (2026) hands a women's martial-arts team the tournament draw from hell and lets them fight, often literally, for every goal.

What's worth your couch time

Theaters are only half the story. Television right now is stacked with reigning champions, and two of them are appointment viewing.

House of the Dragon is still the loudest show on air, and the Targaryen civil war has the fandom in a state it hasn't been in since the mothership ended. If it's reignited your Westeros obsession, you can chase it with more shows like it, or better, go settle some scores and rate every era of Game of Thrones while the wounds are fresh. The other one to clear time for is Silo, the claustrophobic sci-fi mystery that keeps tightening its grip. At an 8.2 with a fiercely loyal audience, it's the rare puzzle-box show that seems to actually know where it's going. Try shows like Silo if you're already caught up.

Rounding out the heavy rotation, Rick and Morty is somehow still one of the most-watched animated series on the planet, and the procedural juggernaut Criminal Minds is riding yet another wave of viewers who apparently cannot be stopped. Comfort TV, both of them, and there's a reason shows like Criminal Minds never go out of style.

Coming next week

Two of the summer's biggest are almost here. The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender (2026) lands July 24, following the world's last Airbender as he races to find an ancient power before it falls into the wrong hands. It's carrying some of the highest anticipation of the month, so if you can't wait, start here. Then five days later, on July 29, the MCU drops its summer headliner, Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The hook is genuinely intriguing: Peter Parker fights crime in a city that no longer remembers he exists, a loneliness that starts to change him in ways he can't quite control. Reason enough to spend the wait ranking the eras of the MCU and arguing about where this one might land.

What everyone's talking about

If you eavesdrop on film Twitter and the movie subreddits this week, three conversations keep surfacing. The first is The Odyssey, obviously, with the kind of genuine event-movie chatter that hasn't happened much this year. The second is pure nostalgia. This week marked forty years since James Cameron's Aliens quietly rewrote the rulebook on how to make a sequel, and a lot of people used the anniversary to argue it's still never been topped. And the third, as always, is people fighting about nothing. The week's most-upvoted debate was about so-called "plot holes" that, on closer inspection, are just moments the complainers weren't paying attention to.

Television's mood was spikier. There's a very online argument raging about whether a certain prestige-adjacent drama is actually good or just impeccably marketed, plus real frustration over a hit sci-fi adaptation trimming its next season down to fewer episodes. If you'd rather skip the discourse entirely, our Discover tool will hand you something worth watching in about ten seconds, no comment section required.

The bottom line

See The Odyssey on the biggest screen you can find. It's the one this week was built around. Staying in? Silo and House of the Dragon are as good as television gets right now. And next Friday the whole conversation resets, with The Last Airbender and Spider-Man about to eat the calendar. See you then.