Weekly

Whalefall Swallows the Weekend, Street Fighter Throws the First Punch

This week in movies and TV: Whalefall and Street Fighter open in theaters, Ben Affleck's Animals tops Netflix, VisionQuest brings Ultron back on Disney+, plus the new releases coming next and what everyone is arguing about online.

Friday, October 16, 2026 · By MoviesPack

Look at this week's releases side by side and you'll notice that nearly all of them run on a stopwatch. A diver has one hour of air left inside a sperm whale. A couple has a few hours to find a ransom they can't afford. Elizabeth Holmes has thirty-four days before she reports to prison, and she spends them with a camera crew. Even the found-footage horror anthology ends its pitch by begging the tape to stop. Hollywood has decided that the fastest way to hold your attention in October is to put a clock in the corner of the frame.

The one exception is a video game movie about two men punching each other in 1993, and honestly, it's nice to have something that isn't counting down.

Before we start, a quick check on last week. The early scores I flagged for The Social Reckoning and Other Mommy were small samples, and both have come back to earth. The Social Reckoning has settled at a respectable 7.0 on nearly a hundred votes. Other Mommy slid harder, from an 8.2 to a 6.0, which is what usually happens when a horror movie's first audience is its most devoted one. Small samples lie. Keep that in mind for everything below.

The one that gets swallowed

Whalefall (2026)

Here is a premise you can pitch in one breath. After his father dies, a young man dives off the central California coast to find his remains, gets swallowed whole by a sperm whale, and has sixty minutes of oxygen to work out how to get back out. The twist in the engine is that the only tools he has are the lessons his father drilled into him, which means a survival thriller is quietly also a movie about grief. Whalefall opens in theaters today, and the name to watch is the director, Brian Duffield. He made No One Will Save You, a home-invasion alien movie with almost no dialogue that turned out to be one of the smartest genre films of its year. Duffield likes a single trapped person and a ridiculous problem, and he takes the ridiculous problem completely seriously. That's the right instinct here. A man inside a whale is either a pressure cooker or a punchline, and the whole film depends on him refusing to wink. Austin Abrams carries it, with Josh Brolin in the cast. Abrams did an AMA on r/movies this week, which is a sign the studio wants this one talked about rather than just shown. The early audience score is a 7.6, but on only seventeen votes, so see the paragraph above. If you come out wanting more people versus the ocean, Jaws is the obvious next stop, and In the Heart of the Sea is the less obvious one, a film that gives the whale its due as a force of nature rather than a monster. For one-person-one-space survival, 127 Hours and Buried are the two that still make people shift in their seats.

The one that doesn't count down

Street Fighter (2026)

The other wide release, Street Fighter, is pure arcade. It's 1993, and Ryu and Ken, two Street Fighters who no longer speak to each other, get dragged back into the ring when the mysterious Chun-Li recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. Of course there's a conspiracy behind the brackets, and of course it eventually forces the old friends to fight each other. Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo lead, with David Dastmalchian and Eric Andre in support, and Kitao Sakurai directs. That last name is the interesting one. Sakurai comes out of absurdist comedy, and the cast list has the same energy. Putting Eric Andre in a Street Fighter movie is a statement of intent: this isn't trying to be a gritty reboot. Setting it in 1993, the exact year the arcade cabinets ruled every mall in America, tells you the target is nostalgia with a wink. The early score sits at 6.5, which for a video game adaptation is practically a standing ovation. If you only know the franchise from the infamous 1994 Street Fighter with Jean-Claude Van Damme, the bar is on the floor and this film just has to step over it. For a similar game-to-screen fix, Mortal Kombat is the closest cousin.

The one you can watch tonight

Animals (2026)

The biggest new movie in our database this week didn't open in a single multiplex. Animals landed on Netflix on October 9, and it has held the highest popularity score of any new movie in our database ever since, with a 7.2 on more than 370 votes, which is a real sample for once. Ben Affleck directs and stars. The setup is a classic Affleck tightrope: the son of a Los Angeles mayoral candidate is kidnapped, and he and his wife have a few hours to raise a ransom with most of their money already burned on the campaign. Getting it means doing things that would end the campaign if anyone ever found out. Kerry Washington plays the wife, and Gillian Anderson and Steven Yeun are in there too, which is a lot of firepower for a streaming thriller. Affleck as a director is always at his best in this register, a city, a crime and people making bad choices for understandable reasons. If Animals works for you, his Gone Baby Gone and The Town are the obvious double bill, and Ransom is the Mel Gibson version of the same nightmare. You can check where to watch Animals if your Netflix region is being difficult.

Also out, briefly

The documentary of the week is a strange one. You Can See Everything opens in theaters today, built around Silicon Valley's most famous fraud: thirty-four days before prison, Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to follow her, and what starts as a portrait turns into a three-year descent. It runs almost three hours, which is either a commitment to the subject or a sign she kept talking. It got its own discussion thread on r/movies, so people are watching.

Horror fans with a Shudder subscription got V/H/S/Mixtape on October 9, the latest in the found-footage anthology series, this time framed around cursed music videos. It's rated the lowest of the week at 4.5 on a small sample, so if you're new to the franchise, V/H/S/94 is the better place to start. And Rajinikanth's retired jailer is back in Jailer 2, out in US theaters this week, going undercover as a driver to take down a syndicate that comes for his family. At nearly three hours, it shares a runtime with the Holmes documentary and absolutely nothing else.

What's worth your couch time

TMDB's list of what's on the air this week is the usual wall of talk shows, soaps and procedurals. Two new series cut through it, and both are sequels to things people love.

The big one is VisionQuest on Disney+. The setup: with a bounty on his head, Vision has to confront what he is and resist Ultron's influence to survive. The headline is that James Spader is back as Ultron, and r/marvelstudios reacted like fans who had waited eleven years for exactly this. Spader and showrunner Terry Matalas did an AMA there this week, and the first two episodes have their own discussion thread. It holds a 9.1 on TMDB right now, early and inflated but loud. It's eight episodes. If you never watched how Vision got here, WandaVision is the required reading, and you can argue about where this lands in the MCU eras rankings once you're caught up.

The other is Avatar: Seven Havens on Paramount+, the first Avatar series set after Korra. The premise flips the whole franchise: after a cataclysm, a young Earthbender learns she's the next Avatar, and in this era that title marks her as humanity's destroyer rather than its savior. She and a long-lost twin get hunted by humans and spirits alike. That's a bold place to take a story built on hope. Start with Avatar: The Last Airbender if you somehow haven't, and The Legend of Korra to bridge the gap.

For October comfort, American Horror Story is back on the air in exactly the month it was built for. And on r/television, the Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake got its premiere discussion thread, which tells you where the slasher crowd is spending its evenings.

Coming next

Next Friday, October 23, is crowded. Clayface, Wicker and Wildwood all open that day, and I covered their setups last week, so here's the update. Wicker had been listed for October 21, but its actual US theatrical date is the 23rd, after a long festival run that started at Sundance in January. Wildwood got some extra love on r/movies when it came out that a single sequence, the murder of crows, took Laika's animators more than five years to finish. That's the stop-motion studio in a sentence, and it's the reason to see it on a big screen.

The new name for that weekend is Klara and the Sun, based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel. An Artificial Friend named Klara forms a deep bond with a sick young girl and becomes a source of hope for a grieving family. Ishiguro is the writer behind Never Let Me Go, and anyone who has read either book knows that "hope" is doing a lot of quiet, devastating work in that description. For more films about machines that love better than people, Ex Machina is the colder version.

Further out, the one I'm counting down to is Godzilla Minus Zero, which hits IMAX on November 3 before opening wide on November 6. It picks up two years after the events of Godzilla Minus One, with Japan finally clawing its way back to normal life just as a new threat arrives. Minus One was the best monster movie in a generation, a war film disguised as a kaiju film, and the sequel has a lot to live up to.

What everyone's talking about

The r/movies megathread this week bundled Street Fighter, Whalefall and You Can See Everything together, with Street Fighter also earning a review thread of its own. But the news cycle was louder than the releases. The biggest headline was a sequel nobody thought would really happen: the new Mummy film is officially titled The Mummy: Book of the Dead, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz back and an October 2027 release date. Anyone who grew up on the 1999 original spent the week being nine years old again.

The behind-the-scenes stories had a sharper edge. Reports that David Fincher walked away from Netflix after clashing over budget and creative control on his Cliff Booth project got a lot of people asking what a streamer is for if it can't keep Fincher. The same week, Netflix's chief content officer Bela Bajaria was out, with Peter Rice replacing her, and both r/movies and r/television read the two stories together. Elsewhere, Steven Soderbergh is reportedly stepping in to help Matt Reeves finish the final weeks of shooting on The Batman Part II, Zendaya signed on for Alex Garland's next sci-fi film at A24 (fans of Annihilation took notice), and Sony is reportedly considering releasing all four of Sam Mendes' Beatles films on the same day.

Television nostalgia did the rest. I Love Lucy turned 75, The Leftovers marked fifteen years since its departure, and Aaron Sorkin said a revival of The West Wing would be very tricky in the current environment, which is about as diplomatic as Sorkin gets. The best argument of the week was a thread asking whether eight-episode seasons are just two-hour movies stretched out with filler. VisionQuest, conveniently, is eight episodes. If you want to skip the discourse, our Discover tool will pick something for you in about ten seconds.

The bottom line

If you're going out, see Whalefall, because a movie set inside a whale deserves a dark room and a big screen. If you want noise and nostalgia, Street Fighter is the friendlier choice. Staying in? Animals is the best new thriller you can stream tonight, and VisionQuest is the TV event. Next Friday, Klara and the Sun quietly makes everyone cry.

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