New Movies & Shows Coming in September 2026: Our Top Picks

🎬 September 2026: What We’re Actually Excited to Watch

This is not an everything-hitting-streaming-this-month list. There are enough of those, and most are useless, because they bury the three things you would actually clear an evening for underneath forty things you would not. This is our shortlist across every major platform we pay for: what we are looking forward to, why, and where to find it.

And this month the list is long, because September 2026 is genuinely stacked. A Star Wars film lands on Disney+ two days in. Two Spider-Man sequels follow two days after that. Apple brings back the best spy show on television, Amazon finally gives its best supporting character her own series, and Paramount+ quietly drops nine boxing films on the first of the month.

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Neagley, the first Reacher spin-off, streams exclusively on Prime Video from September 16.

🏰 Disney+

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (September 2) is the headline of the month and it is not close. The first Star Wars film in five years leaves theatres and lands on Disney+ on a Wednesday, which is Disney putting it in front of families rather than chasing a weekend number. We reviewed it during its theatrical run and gave it a 4 out of 5 — a film that works because it stays small, and never once pretends to be a saga entry. Our Mandalorian and Grogu review has the full verdict, including the one act that drags. If your household is new to Din Djarin, the Mandalorian series hub collects all three seasons in order, starting with season 1.

LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian (September 2) arrives the same day, and pairing them is the smartest scheduling decision Disney has made in a while. It retells all three seasons of the live-action show as comedy, in brick form, and it is the version you put on when the seven-year-old wants what dad is watching but not the parts with the Dark Troopers. We covered the announcement in our LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian news piece. If it sends your kid looking for the actual bricks, the two sets to know are LEGO Grogu (75446) and the Mandalorian & Grogu Anzellan Starship (75445), and the LEGO Star Wars hub has the rest of the theme.

Spider-Man: Far From Home and Spider-Man: No Way Home (September 4) both arrive on the same Friday, which makes for an easy weekend. No Way Home in particular is the one MCU film that rewards a rewatch more than it did a first watch, because you already know where it is going and can spend the runtime watching how carefully it gets there. If the multiverse mechanics were a blur the first time, our No Way Home multiverse explainer untangles it without spoiling the emotional beats. We also ranked every Spider-Man film for dads, and made the case for why Tom Holland is the right Spider-Man. For anyone with a Spider-Man obsessive in the house, the Spider-Man gift guide covers the rest.

Kraven the Hunter (September 13) rounds out the Sony corner, and we are including it with a caveat rather than enthusiasm. It scored a 3 out of 5 from us: a genuinely committed Aaron Taylor-Johnson performance stuck inside a film that never decides whether it is a origin story or a revenge thriller. Our Kraven the Hunter review is the honest version. Worth a Sunday evening if you have already seen the good ones, not worth a night you were saving.

Toy Story 5 (September 23) closes the month and is the biggest arrival on this list by some distance. It took $1.13 billion worldwide after opening on June 19, making it the highest-grossing Toy Story film ever and handing Pixar its largest global opening weekend at $310.2 million — numbers that say more about how many households were waiting for it than about whether it is any good. We have not reviewed it yet, so we are not going to hand you a verdict we have not earned; what we can tell you is that it lands on Disney+ on the Wednesday, one day after the 4K Blu-ray, and that Taylor Swift wrote an original song for it. If you want to run the whole thing properly first, the Toy Story series hub has all four predecessors in order, and Toy Story 3 remains the one that will take an unsuspecting father apart in the final ten minutes.

📡 Hulu

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (September 1) is the one people argue about, and we came down on the side of the volcano. It earned a 4 out of 5 from us, largely on the strength of the back half, which abandons the theme-park formula entirely and turns into a gothic haunted-house film with a raptor in the hallway. Our Fallen Kingdom review makes the full case. It also matters more than it looks in franchise terms — the opening ties directly into the animated series, which we unpacked in how Fallen Kingdom’s intro sets up Camp Cretaceous. The Jurassic World series hub has every film and season in timeline order.

ParaNorman (September 1) is the family recommendation we would push hardest this month. Laika’s stop-motion ghost story is genuinely creepy, genuinely funny, and one of the very few kids’ films that treats being an outsider as something other than a problem to be solved by the third act. It is a perfect early-autumn watch, and it holds up for the adult in the room in a way most animated films do not.

🎞️ Netflix

Netflix front-loads the month. September 1 brings Battleship, Big Daddy, the full Jaws run and both Alien and Aliens in one drop.

Big Daddy is the one we would actually put on. Adam Sandler’s 1999 comedy about accidentally adopting a five-year-old is far better than its reputation, and it has aged into something unexpectedly relevant for anyone currently doing the job — the joke is never on the kid, and the film knows exactly how much of parenting is improvisation. It gets more laughs out of a room with kids in it than almost anything else landing this month.

Battleship is the other kind of pick: a genuinely stupid alien-invasion film built around a board game, played completely straight, with a naval battle in the third act that has no business working as well as it does. We put it alongside the rest of the dumb-but-committed canon in our guide to the best classic action movies for dads. Jaws and Alien need no recommendation from us, but if you have never watched either with a proper subwoofer, both are on the shortlist in our disaster and thriller sound-test guide.

The Gentlemen season 2 (September 3) brings Guy Ritchie’s crime series back, with Theo James and Kaya Scodelario returning as Eddie Horniman and Susie Glass. If you liked the register, our Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare review covers the same fast-talking, well-dressed violence. Note that this is the first of two Ritchie-adjacent crime dramas this month, with MobLand landing on Paramount+ two weeks later.

Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 season 2 (September 17) returns barely five months after the first season, with ten episodes running under half an hour each. The short runtime is the feature: it is the rare franchise spin-off you can actually watch with a ten-year-old on a school night without committing to an hour.

LEGO ONE PIECE (September 29) closes the month and it is the one we are most curious about. LEGO’s One Piece theme launched this summer and immediately became one of the more interesting things the company has done in years, so an animated adaptation landing three months later is either very good timing or a very obvious tie-in. Our best LEGO One Piece sets guide covers the wave, the One Piece anime guide explains where to start with a series that is over a thousand episodes deep, and we gave season 2 of the live-action show a 4.5 out of 5.

🎥 Paramount+

Paramount+ has the best single day of the month, and almost nobody is talking about it. On September 1 the platform drops the entire Rocky run — all six films — plus all three Creed films, Deep Impact and Machete Kills.

Nine boxing films in one day is a legitimate weekend project, and the Rocky films specifically reward being watched in order rather than cherry-picked, because the thing they are actually about is a man aging in real time across thirty years of cinema.

Deep Impact is the pick we would defend hardest here. It is the disaster film that chose grief over spectacle, and it is still the best in the genre at the thing disaster films almost always get wrong, which is what ordinary people do when they cannot fix anything. We gave it a 4 out of 5 in our Deep Impact review, it anchors our space-threat disaster hub, and it sits high in our top 10 natural disaster movies. If you only know it as the other 1998 asteroid film, this is the month to fix that.

South Park season 29 (September 16 on Comedy Central, streaming September 17) is the reliable one. Twenty-nine seasons in, it is still one of the few shows willing to say the thing everyone else is tiptoeing around.

MobLand season 2 (September 18) picks up the Harrigan family’s crime empire with Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren all back, across ten episodes dropping weekly on Fridays through November 20.

🍎 Apple TV+

Slow Horses season 6 (September 16) is the other genuine event of the month. Six episodes, weekly through October 21, adapting Mick Herron’s Joe Country and Slough House — the books where the series stops circling Slough House’s own history and walks into it. Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb remains one of the great unglamorous protagonists on television: a man who solves every case by being ruder and more competent than everyone who underestimated him. Six seasons in, the show has never had a bad one, which is a sentence almost no other prestige drama has earned.

Mayday (September 4) is the wildcard. A Cold War action-comedy with Ryan Reynolds as a stranded Navy pilot and Kenneth Branagh as the ex-KGB agent who finds him, going straight to streaming rather than theatres. That usually reads as a warning sign, but Reynolds at full motor-mouth against Branagh playing it completely straight is a premise worth ninety minutes.

📦 Prime Video

Neagley (September 16) is the one Reacher fans have been waiting three seasons for. Maria Sten’s Frances Neagley has been quietly stealing scenes since the first season, and she finally gets her own case — all eight episodes at once, no weekly wait. Alan Ritchson guest-stars, but this is not his show, and the smartest thing the series could do is resist making it one.

We covered the Neagley trailer and release date when it dropped and the Reacher season 4 premiere alongside it. If you want the run-up, we gave Reacher season 3 a 4.5 out of 5, the Jack Reacher hub tracks every book, film and season in order, and the Lee Child reading order is where to start on the novels. Stream it on Prime Video.

🟢 HBO Max

No new premiere this month, but Lanterns is mid-run and worth catching up on. The DCU’s Green Lantern series started August 16 and releases weekly on Sundays: episodes land September 6, 13, 20 and 27, with the finale on October 4. Eight episodes total, Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre as Hal Jordan and John Stewart, and a deliberately slower, more procedural register than the DCU has tried before. Our Lanterns premiere-date brief has the setup. Three episodes in is the right moment to start if you have been waiting to see whether it holds.

❓ FAQ

When does The Mandalorian and Grogu come to Disney+?

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu starts streaming on Disney+ on Wednesday, September 2, 2026. The animated special LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian arrives the same day.

What day does Slow Horses season 6 premiere?

Slow Horses season 6 premieres September 16, 2026 on Apple TV+, with new episodes arriving weekly on Wednesdays through the October 21 finale. The season adapts Mick Herron’s novels Joe Country and Slough House.

When does Neagley come out?

Neagley premieres September 16, 2026 on Prime Video. All eight episodes of the first Reacher spin-off arrive at once.

Which Spider-Man movies are coming to Disney+ in September 2026?

Spider-Man: Far From Home and Spider-Man: No Way Home both arrive on Disney+ on Friday, September 4, 2026. Kraven the Hunter follows on Sunday, September 13.

What are the best family movies streaming in September 2026?

LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian on Disney+ from September 2, ParaNorman and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom on Hulu from September 1, Big Daddy on Netflix from September 1, and LEGO ONE PIECE on Netflix from September 29.