About a week and a half ago, the 97th Academy Awards came and went. In the Best Visual Effects category, Dune: Part Two took home the statue in a pool of nominees containing itself, Wicked, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Alien: Romulus, and Better Man. 4i2r5m

It’s that last one, however, that stands out more prominently than the rest. Where the other four nominees are disciples of strong IP filmmaking and vast, fictional landscapes, Better Man takes place in London and every other locale that British singing-songwriting icon Robbie Williams happened upon throughout his life. The only deviation from this real-world setting? Williams is portrayed by a CGI chimpanzee. Too niche a choice for theatrical audiences? Perhaps, but Paramount Plus subscribers are quickly learning what they missed out on.

Per FlixPatrol, Better Man has clambered up to second place on the Paramount Plus film charts in the United States at the time of writing, its lone barrier to glory taking the form of one Gladiator II, the Ridley Scott-helmed legacy sequel to the Ridley Scott-helmed historical epic of yore (yore, in this case, meaning the year 2000).

Better Man, led by a mo-cap Jonno Davies as the aforementioned monkey, follows the exorbitantly colorful life and career of Robbie Williams from his early days in the boy band Take That, through his solo career, all the way to the violent battle he now famously waged against his past selves at the Knebworth Festival. It’s a completely factual story in every way that matters.

Better Man was the only correct choice for the Best Visual Effects Oscar, full stop. It might be true that Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi spectacular brought Frank Herbert’s galaxy to stunningly evocative life on the big screen, but the achievement of Better Man‘s visual effects defy the boundaries of what such effects are expected to achieve.

To reiterate, Better Man is a biopic about Robbie Williams, meaning that this is not a film that needed these particular visual effects. The other four nominees, meanwhile, could have only existed if a hefty VFX budget was in play — Denis Villeneuve would never have made the Dune films if the sandworms were hand puppets (although, that’s a movie I’d love to see).

This illuminates the fact that Better Man made an active, conscious choice to present itself with these visual effects, which subsequently invites the question of why Robbie Williams is being portrayed by a CGI chimp here. Why indeed? The artist’s circus chimp-like impulse to entertain? The indictment of celebrity culture as “less-evolved”? The base distance from realism that allows Better Man to weave in dream sequences and aerodynamic choreography far more seamlessly? Yes, yes, yes, and more.

Better Man‘s visual effects don’t just look good — they were dreamed up precisely so that the film would be able to get its thematic identity across at all. They’re every bit the storytelling device that the script and the camera are, and a better world would have seen Better Man honored for such a feat in a more official capacity.

When Ridley Scott’s highly-regarded historical epic Gladiator first dropped in the year 2000, cinematic history was both quietly and loudly being made. References to Russell Crowe’s line “Are you not entertained">The New York Times, Scott also plans on fitting a Bee Gees biopic and an adaptation of the novel The Dog Stars into his filmography, both set to shoot this year, and the storied director isn’t getting any younger (he turns 88 this year).

Then again, it’s probably unwise to assume that anybody — including the Grim Reaper — is going to succeed in telling Ridley Scott what he can and cannot do, so if Scott decides we’re getting Gladiator III, then we’re probably getting Gladiator III.

The screenplay categories are well and truly the unsung MVPs of the Academy Awards. It’s often the Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay races that less popular Oscar contenders have to thank for their well-deserved recognition. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, May December, and Logan are three of the more exciting beneficiaries from these categories.

Of the nominees for this year’s show, September 5 stands out as yet another. Indeed, the Best Original Screenplay nomination for Tim Fehlbaum’s crackling newsroom thriller — penned by Fehlbaum, Mortiz Binder, and Alex David — is the only Oscar nod that this film has received following an impressive presence at the 82nd Golden Globes. It’s no difficult task to see why, as the many denizens of Paramount Plus can apparently attest to.

Per FlixPatrol, September 5 has sprinted to the top of the Paramount Plus film charts in the United States at the time of writing, beating out a plethora of pop culture heavyweights in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator duology (second and ninth place), Transformers One (eighth place), Top Gun: Maverick (sixth place), and a pair of Sonic the Hedgehog adaptations (third place and 10th place).

September 5 stars John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason, the head of the ABC Sports control room in Munich, , who is gearing up for a broadcast of the 1972 Summer Olympics. The control room has no way of knowing, of course, that they’re about to be on the front lines of the 1972 Munich massacre — a terrorist attack famed for being the subject of one of the most viewed broadcasts in the history of network television, as well as having been covered by sports journalists.

Those familiar with the Munich massacre of 1972 already know how harrowing of a watch September 5 is. The attack was made by the militant group Black September, who killed two of the Israeli Olympic team before taking nine more hostage, using them to demand the release of 328 majority Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel. Seventeen people — including all aforementioned Israeli Olympic team , a West German police officer, and five of Black September — were killed as a result of the attack.

In September 5, this horrific tragedy contextualizes the ethical fallibility of a newsroom and the people who are operating it. The film paints a picture of a delicate balancing act between keeping the world informed (particularly those who have an emotional stake in the attack, such as the families of the hostages and the Jewish diaspora) and not allowing the attack to veer into sensationalism, lest the focus shift to how well the event serves the newsroom’s ratings rather than how well the newsroom serves the reality of the event.

Indeed, the characters here must reckon with a newsroom president who urges them to emphasize emotions over politics for the sake of a good broadcast, as well as obsessing over getting a good photo or angle of the events while innocent lives are being slaughtered. September 5 asks no easy questions and offers no easy answers, and therefore makes for a vital watch as today’s current events grow more and more disturbing every day.

The Sonic the Hedgehog films started about as strong as a massive, studio-backed blockbuster adaptation of a cartoonish video game series could have. Across its first two entries, this new franchise mostly understood that bringing Sonic to Earth and enabling his use of pop culture references would make for good teenager characterization, and the early Team Sonic dynamics were sturdy enough. Jim Carrey, meanwhile, reliably did Jim Carrey things.

Then Sonic the Hedgehog 3 came along and shot its merits right through the foot before blasting off each individual toe to boot. The worst part? An 85 percent critic approval, a 95% audience rating, and a $478 million global box office haul suggest that it managed to fool everyone into thinking this was a worthwhile route to take. Of course, any route is worthwhile in studios’ eyes so long as it makes money, and viewers probably would have eaten this one up on Paramount Plus either way.

Per FlixPatrol, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 has sped directly to the top of the Paramount Plus film charts in the United States at the time of writing, leaving its much more nutritious predecessors — Sonic the Hedgehog (fourth place) and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (eighth place) — in the dust. Also on its heels is Yellowjackets, courtesy of the streamer’s overall rankings, where Sonic the Hedgehog 3 sits in second place and the fan-favorite survival-thriller thriller series buzzes about in fifth place.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 follows the latest plight of Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and his best buddies Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba), who take it upon themselves to go up against Dr. Ivo Robotnik and his deadly new ally Shadow the Hedgehog (Keanu Reeves), lest the world get destroyed (because of course the fate of the world is at stake).

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is best viewed as a reminder that just because you’re destined to be regarded as a movie for children that will not be treated even somewhat seriously, in no way does that mean you should collapse on your laurels and commit to unimaginative audience winks. Indeed, it’s always sad to see a franchise go down the sugary meme culture path when it doesn’t have to.

A word of advice: having Sonic make a joke about “hate-watching Green Lantern from 2011″ grossly crosses the line between Sonic embodying a teenager and the film indulging in pop cynicism for cheap laughs. Having Jim Carrey look at the camera and say he’s playing a character in a movie is a demoralizing downgrade from the genuine eccentricity with which he’s defined this character up until now.

Sonic 3 is a film that screams a lack of pride in one’s work, and that’s hard to watch. It might be true that the world would spin no differently if this film actually was great, but it would be a development most charming if Sonic 3 — a film within a franchise that nobody expects anything from — went out of its way to indulge in smart storytelling all while preserving the spirit of these timeless characters. Indeed, just because this is a paycheck film, doesn’t mean it needs to be treated as such.

Products: the lifeblood of this corporatized hellscape and the manufactured poison to our honest humanity. Whether it’s your Tinder bio, one of the seven or more brands of mayonnaise, or a theatrical film, not a single clump of particles or pixels is safe from the specter of marketing.

And let’s not kid ourselves, this product-obsessed society is almost entirely the reason that the Sonic the Hedgehog films exist. That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re not capable of setting good storytelling examples. The second film, in fact, had quite a bit going for it, even if the meme dumpster that is Sonic the Hedgehog 3 tarnished that momentum almost entirely. Nevertheless, Paramount Plus viewers haven’t forgotten about the franchise’s high point.

Per FlixPatrol, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has broken the sound barrier and entered the Paramount Plus film charts in the United States at the time of writing, hot on the heels of Gladiator (ninth place), Transformers One (eighth place), and Jack Reacher (seventh place).

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 stars Ben Schwartz as the voice of the blue blur, who’s settled fully into his new life on Earth with his human friends, Tom and Maddie Wachowski (James Marsden and Tika Sumpter). Sonic’s nemesis, Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey), returns with dastardly intentions, and has brought the ultra-powerful Knuckles (Idris Elba) to assist him in his plans. But with the help of his new friend Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey), Sonic might just stand a chance.

Of the three Sonic the Hedgehog films, the second one sticks the strongest landing. It makes the mistake of involving Tom and Maddie too much, but it also understands that the human characters are necessary for Sonic’s pop culture references to make sense. It further understands that pop culture references are effective for characterizing teenagers, and it has Sonic employ them in a way that adds to his personality, rather than winking at the audience.

Moreover, it understands why Jim Carrey was cast in the role of Dr. Robotnik in the first place. His eccentric dialogue works on a mass-appeal level, but it also allows the actor to work in genuinely intelligent gags and subject matter (Dr. Robotnik namedrops the law of attraction in this movie, just to give an example).

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 does none of this, and plays almost exclusively to the TikTok-Fortnite programming that most everyone assumes is the default for kids and teenagers these days. Jim Carrey looks at the camera while saying he’s an actor playing a character in a movie, Sonic makes a joke about hate-watching “Green Lantern from 2011,” and the film tries to push the exact same emotional arc that we got in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 despite the fact that Sonic clearly doesn’t need one anymore.

The worst part? Everyone seems to be convinced that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the best movie in the franchise so far, which paints a profoundly dark picture for the trajectory of film criticism and discourse going forward. Indeed, the fight against influencer culture is a fight for intellectual survival.

On May 27, 2022, Top Gun: Maverick released to cinemas, and proceeded to nab almost $1.5 billion at the box office, get its ego inflated by just about every critic and awards body in sight, and receive the unofficial honor of Movie Theater Jesus for getting people back into cinemas after COVID-19 nearly rattled the market beyond repair.

A healthy moviegoing economy is of course a welcome development in most any context, but the dark side of this is that sometimes the movies that everyone goes to see aren’t actually that good. Perhaps this makes Maverick‘s many achievements all the more impressive, though; it’s a bad movie that believes so unwaveringly that it’s a good movie, that it tricked the entire world into believing that as well, all the way to the people who choose the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. And even now, people can’t keep their eyes off it.

Per FlixPatrol, Top Gun: Maverick continues to soar in second place on the Paramount Plus charts in the United States at the time of writing, continuing its 669-day charting streak while exceeding the likes of Gladiator (seventh place), Transformers One (eighth place) and Smile 2 (third place).

Set over 30 years after the original Top Gun, Maverick follows the plight of one Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a Navy Captain whose last lease on military life comes in the form of a teaching job at Top Gun, where he’s to train a group of young fighter pilots for a dangerous mission. One of these pilots is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Maverick’s deceased best friend and radar intercept officer Nick, and who inadvertently forces Maverick to confront his demons.

Folks, let me give it to you straight; if the creative storytelling instincts of Top Gun: Maverick took place in absolutely any other film, that film would skate to the finish line with a 40 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and get slapped with many a poetically-rendered anecdote about its lack of inspiration. The set pieces are entirely in service to themselves rather than the contrived emotional core that the characters dance around with vaguely connected revelations about doing what needs to be done, and the dialogue literally tells us when we’re supposed to think Maverick is a badass, as well as when something good or bad happens during the mission.

Combine that with catchphrases for the sake of catchphrases, callbacks for the sake of callbacks, and gratuitous orchestra flourishes that let us know when we’re supposed to feel inspired or emotional, and it becomes thoroughly amazing that Top Gun: Maverick got to where it did on a cultural level.

If you want to watch a naval aviation movie that actually respects its audience and soars on genuine emotion rather than contrived ego, go and queue up Devotion, the 2022 biographical war drama based on the friendship between Korean War veterans Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner. Jonathan Majors’ presence in the lead role may be a turn off for some, given his new and not-improved real-life reputation, but if you can look beyond that, an enrichingly humanist tale awaits. The kicker? It’s also on Paramount Plus.

Summer blockbusters aren’t what they used to be, but then, the theatrical market hasn’t well and truly been the same since 1994. Indeed, even without the likes of the Minions, semi-predatory nostalgia, and VFX-heavy nonsense saturating the cinema, you’d be hard-pressed to replicate the energy of a year that saw Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption, and Forrest Gump all hit the big screen for the first time.

All of these films have endured over thirty years later, but none quite like Forrest Gump, which nabbed six Oscars from thirteen nominations and is still beloved by audiences of all generations and persuasions thanks to its open-hearted sweetness, sincerity, and humor. And appropriately enough, it’s kicking off the new year with some streaming dominance.

Per FlixPatrol, Forrest Gump is running circles around fifth place on the United States’ Paramount Plus film charts at the time of writing. Down in ninth place, meanwhile, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back shuffles about, putting Gump‘s ingenious casting of Tom Hanks into even better perspective; indeed, maybe the five-foot-eight Tom Cruise wasn’t the best choice for the canonically six-foot-five Jack Reacher.

Forrest Gump stars Hanks as Forrest Gump, an Alabamian man and accidental entrepreneur who bumbles through life with matter-of-fact optimism and a simple-but-unwavering moral com. His adventure from boy to man puts him in the middle of some of the most definitive events in American history, but all he cares about is reuniting with the love of his life Jenny (Robin Wright).

Forrest Gump has been adopted by viewers all over the political spectrum, but has more widely been dubbed a conservative film on of Jenny (who epitomizes the countercultural climate of 1960s America) being miserable all the time, while Forrest finds great success and even joy in his more traditional approach to life.

And yet, Hanks’ protagonist is one of the most glaringly apolitical characters that come to mind. One need only cast their mind to Forrest’s cross-country marathon to clue in to the heart and soul of this character and, by extension, the film itself. The fame he garners from this excursion leaves all of his followers wondering why he’s running, what purpose he’s running for, and what all of this running stands for.

Forrest has no answer to any of these questions; he’s running because he decided he wanted to run. It’s not a matter of having figured life out or standing for something; he’s simply following his heart, which is what he does in absolutely every context he finds himself in. None of his actions are done from a place of trying to satisfy his ego, make a point, have an opinion, or anything of that sort; he runs because he wants to run, and he loves because he wants to love. He never pushes his sphere of influence wider than his own body, and, like the film itself, he leaves one hell of a beautiful impact as a result. Indeed, is it any wonder that folks of all political alignments see themselves so clearly in a film that puts emphasis on one’s humanity? Maybe we should trying seeing that in each other.

Ever since the turn of the decade, animated films have been having quite the moment. Guillermo del Toro — off the back of his Best Animated Feature Oscar win for his stop-motion Pinocchio film — has emerged as a leading proponent of giving animation the respect it deserves as a medium, while Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Boy and the Heron, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and Pixar’s mortal essence have continued to smash boundaries and redefine them.

The year of 2024 has had its fair share of boundary-smashers as well, most notably DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot, but it’s Transformers One that, despite its discouraging box office performance, just may have pulled off the most remarkable animated feat in recent memory. Topping the streaming charts is kind of impressive too, I guess.

Per FlixPatrol, Transformers One is currently bossing the Paramount Plus charts in first place in the United States at the time of writing. Under its boot is its disgustingly inferior IP cousin Transformers in eighth place, while Gladiator — likely owing its success to the imminent theatrical release of Gladiator II — trails behind in second place.

Transformers One — an animated reimagining of the Transformers cinematic canon — stars Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry as Orion Pax and D-16, two miner robots and best friends living in the city of Iacon who spend their days getting by on hard labor and waning enthusiasm. But they soon get wrapped up in a conspiracy that sends them throttling towards their destinies, fracturing their relationship as Orion Pax becomes Optimus Prime and D-16 becomes Megatron.

The genius of Transformers One lies not in its brilliant storytelling fundamentals, but in how it transforms the challenges of IP filmmaking into strengths (especially with an IP as vast and storied as Transformers). As a compartmentalized story that’s adhering to the history of Transformers rather than any sort of canon, Transformers One was tasked with building out a new world for its proceedings to take place in, and a lesser film would have dumped all of this info on us, and subsequently expect us to invest in a world that hasn’t earned our attention with a good story.

But Transformers One, being anything but lesser, doesn’t fall for that trap. Every single worldbuilding detail is rooted directly in the emotions of the characters and the specific journey that they’re on. In this way, the world, scope, and spectacle of Transformers One gets to breathe in a way that it should in any Transformers film, but it’s never at the expense of the story that viewers actually care about, and in fact enhances that story. The film’s opening scene is the greatest example of this.

So while a film like The Wild Robot will likely steal the animated crown on the back of its robustly elite emotional storytelling, Transformers One represents a way forward for IP storytelling that’s desperately needed right now. Why not explore more standalone canons that are inspired by source material rather than directly adapted from it (and therefore create more room for original story beats and arcs with characters and worlds that so many people love)? Why not take more advantage of flexible animated frames that allow action and emotion to unfold more honestly than their live-action counterparts, which seem increasingly addicted to spectacle for the sake of spectacle?

Indeed, can you imagine how refreshing it would be if Marvel Studios released an animated trilogy of Avengers films that weren’t beholden to the MCU’s collapsing canon and branding ethos?

Fans who expect to watch the long-awaited page two of the fifth season of Yellowstone on Paramount Plus when it premieres Nov. 10 were in for a rude awakening: despite the fact that the streamer has the rights to Yellowstone spinoffs 1883 and 1923, the second part of the fifth season of Yellowstone itself will only be available on the basic cable channel Paramount Network.

If you don’t have Paramount Network, the best way to watch the episodes is by streaming them on Hulu + Live TV, Sling, Philo, or DirecTV Stream. Subscriptions to Hulu + Live TV begin at $80/month.

As fans recall, the first part of season 5 ended with the Duttons in complete disarray; Beth and Jamie weren’t getting along, and John Dutton III’s future in politics was murky at best. Here is what we know about how you can watch the second part of the fifth season of Yellowstone.

When does season 5 part 2 of Yellowstone come on? 4t6a3u

The second part of Yellowstone’s fifth season will premiere on Dec. 10 at 8 p.m. ET/PT. The show will also air on CBS but will be shown simultaneously — it will air at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

The show’s star Kevin Costner will be notably absent from the second part of season five. Costner previously explained on Instagram that he had no plans to return to the series due to legal issues that he hasn’t fully specified.

When is the season 5 part 2 Yellowstone finale? 4d5f1e

The show will air five new episodes each week until its finale on Dec. 15, 2025.

Why isn’t Yellowstone on Paramount Plus? 3b1t20

Previous seasons of Yellowstone can still be streamed on Peacock, as NBC secured the streaming rights to the series before Paramount+ was created. That deal is the reason why the show doesn’t stream on Paramount Plus at all.

In 2020, Paramount and NBC Universal settled on a deal that dictated the network would have streaming rights to the show, something that NBC has since held on to as the show’s popularity has grown — much to the frustration of fans, who understandably want to watch Yellowstone and all its spinoffs on the same streaming platform.

Look, I get it; everyone likes to complain that Hollywood subsists on a diet of regurgitated IPs in the form of superhero franchises, remakes of films that made a lot of money, and whatever can most optimally weaponize nostalgia and any given moment.

But it’s a tired talking point for two reasons. The first is that fantastic original films are also getting released every other day, and the second is that it’s 100 percent possible for said IP films to be good. Nevertheless, sometimes those groans are earned, and Mean Girls was one such time.

But that didn’t stop it at the box office, and it’s not going to stop it now. Per FlixPatrol, the 2024 Mean Girls film based on the stage musical based on the original 2004 film (yes, this is the era we live in) has begun making a play on the Paramount Plus charts in the United States at the time of writing. Debuting in ninth place, its opponents include the sixth- and seventh-place Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, as well as Quentin Tarantino’s alternate-history Nazi-killer Inglorious Basterds.

The film stars Angourie Rice as Cady Heron, a sixteen-year-old girl who was homeschooled in Kenya for most of her life before moving back to the United States to attend school for the first time. There, she comes to learn the nuances of high school cliques from her new friends Damian and Janis. She becomes fascinated with the “Plastics,” a group of three girls led by the ruthless Regina George (Reneé Rapp). Cady begins hanging out with them at the behest of the secret-seeking Janis, but a Plastic metamorphosis unknowingly awaits her.

Okay, so maybe Mean Girls (2024) isn’t a remake of the original Mean Girls in the purest sense, since it’s based on the Broadway musical that’s based on the original film. But that nevertheless scrutinizes its need to exist even more. Tina Fey struck gold with her screenplay back in 2004 to the point where it would be entirely fruitless to improve upon it, and Mean Girls (2024) certainly demonstrated such a thing.

The best parts of the musical film owe themselves entirely to the material that it’s based on, and while some of the choreography is richly cinematic, the musical numbers themselves do very little as either compartmentalized set pieces or storytelling assets. As for the slightly-altered ending from the original film, it’s a far cry from the slick conclusion that greeted us 20 years ago, which did a much better job of unpacking the indiscriminatory nature of emotional pain in teenagers and in human beings as a whole.

The moral of the story, then, is to save the remakes for the movies that would actually benefit from getting a new pair of creative hands on them, rather than dres old success for the modern era for the sake of making a fast buck. A Mean Girls remake was never going to be anything noteworthy, but could you imagine what someone could accomplish by remaking something like But I’m a Cheerleader?

Let’s clear something up right out of the gate. Many people misunderstand the word “auteur” and take it to be a testament to the subject’s talent as an artist. This is not the case. An auteur is simply someone whose films can be identified as their own based on how the film presents itself. The auteur film can be good or bad, but are always distinctly from the mind of their creators. The auteur’s mortal essence is their calling card.

Notable auteurs include Yasujirō Ozu, Lars von Trier, Wes Anderson, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino, but the subject of today’s topic is Michael Bay, who absolutely qualifies as an auteur given his unique filmmaking techniques that, presumably, are engineered specifically to create intestinal dissonance and yet-to-be-discovered neurological diseases. Such is the legacy of his Transformers run, which Paramount Plus subscribers are unthinkably subjecting themselves to at the moment.

Per FlixPatrol, this day of Oct. 18 has seen not one, not two, but three different Bay-era Transformers films shoehorn their way into the Paramount Plus film rankings in the United Kingdom. At once defined almost entirely by how loud and incoherent they are, Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon have long since gone down in history as some of the most notoriously rancid efforts to ever come out of the Hollywood machine.

Bay once hit back at his critics by saying he makes movies for teenage boys, perhaps not appreciating that teenage boys are not defined by ogling at Megan Fox and cynically-constructed robot battles, and in fact deserve stories that don’t forsake their capacity for genuine emotion or try and irresponsibly appeal to the less-savory aspects of their developing masculine identities. Don’t put your shortcomings on the teens, Bay; do better.

In any case, Transformers has long since ended that toxic relationship, having since branched out into the likes of Bumblebee, an origin story for the titular yellow Autobot refreshingly rooted in a story about family and belonging; Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, a somewhat-successful merging of the Bay-era scope and the Bumblebee emotional core that also made the insane decision to kick off a Hasbro Cinematic Universe that’s probably already dead in the water; and Transformers One, the first film in a brand new Transformers continuity whose deft storytelling intelligence is matched only by the assuredness of its identity as a popular IP film.

It’s that last one that stands out as the true vanguard of Transformers‘ cinematic potential. Without the encumbrance of the Bay-plagued canon, Transformers One was able to build its world from the ground up, complete with a vibe that was capable of wonder, laughter, intensity and heartbreak. All this, while remaining entire faithful to the essence of the characters that have been garnering fans for generations; Transformers One, you see, understands that the key to adapting popular IPs lies not in respecting canon, but respecting history.

So if you’re in the U.K. and you’re planning to queue up some Bay schlock on Paramount Plus, you’re much better off taking a jaunt down to the cinema and catching the still-playing Transformers One on the big screen. Besides, the proposed trilogy for this new canon hinges on box office success, so you’d also be able to check off your weekly good deed in the process.

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Yellowstone is back to complete the final half of its fifth season, after over a year of absence from screens. Due to disruptions from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that took up much of 2023, as well as lead actor Kevin Costner’s exit from the series, the wildly popular western series took a longer sabbatical from screens than planned.

Season 5, part 2 of Yellowstone will premiere on its usual home, the Paramount network on Sunday, November 10th at 8 p.m. Eastern Time (ET), or 7 p.m. Central Time (CT). If you don’t have access to Paramount, worry not – this is your handy guide to keeping up with all the drama.

Where can I watch the second half of Yellowstone season 5, other than Paramount? 725y4n

Peacock customers can stream Yellowstone after the episodes premiere on the Paramount network. However, only the first season is available on the free version of Peacock’s streaming services, with the first four and a half seasons currently streaming on Peacock (both the $4.99 a month with ads and $9.99 a month ad-free tiers). 

Due to a licensing agreement, Yellowstone is not available to stream on Paramount Plus, Paramount’s designated streaming service – despite the fact it airs on the Paramount network. Instead, the agreement dictates that the cult series goes straight to Peacock for streaming.

In addition to its live premiere on Paramount, Yellowstone season 5, part 2 will also premiere on the CBS network. CBS will air the new episode on Sunday, November 10th, from 10 p.m. Eastern Time (ET), or 11 p.m. Central Time (CT) – just two hours after it airs on the Paramount network. Previously, CBS has only aired the first three seasons of Yellowstone on its network, but due to demand, a second channel will be showing the premiere. It is likely that CBS will air season four and season 5 part 1 once scheduling closer to the time becomes more concrete, either before or after the new episode premieres – so CBS viewers should keep their eyes peeled if they’re looking to catch up.

As of September 2024, episodes of Yellowstone are available to purchase or rent through Apple TV, Microsoft Store, and Amazon Video. The three streaming services currently offer all five seasons of Yellowstone, available to purchase either as individual episodes or in full seasons, often as part of a discounted bundle price. It is of note, however, that there can often be a delay between episodes premiering on network television and arriving on purchase-tier streaming sites.