Disney+ and Hulu release a trio of headline-grabbers with a new Avatar making-of documentary, the small-town thriller Sovereign on Hulu, and Freakier Friday, in which a beloved body-swap comedy gets an unusual twist. With Hulu crammed into Disney+ for many subscribers, this week’s slate of originals highlights the pitch that you can get prestige behind-the-scenes, adult-leaning suspense, and broad four-quadrant comfort viewing in one place.
Avatar doc leads with rare access and real tech
Fire and Water: Making the Avatar Films offers the kind of access VFX enthusiasts and filmmakers covet. Look for deep dives into the underwater performance-capture pipeline developed for The Way of Water, which included the production’s epic training regimen and that cavernous water tank — if you believe earlier reports it contained hundreds of thousands of gallons — that allowed adult actors to deliver long, unbroken shots while submerged. Previously publicized details like Kate Winslet’s breath-hold record of more than seven minutes give a sense of how hard the team pushed performance to serve the tech.
And beyond the spectacle, the documentary is worth caring about because Avatar still stands as the economic and technical north star for effects-heavy cinema. The Way of Water earned more than $2.3 billion worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo, and the franchise has won praise from groups like the Visual Effects Society for rewriting toolsets that other productions now use. Everyone from VFX supervisors to the western indie filmmakers who’ve been going big underwater will want to hear directly from James Cameron and his leading cast what worked — and didn’t.
For Disney, it’s just the sort of premium “how it’s made” content that keeps superfans engaged between tentpole releases. Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings are often a reminder that franchise-adjacent titles can buoy time spent on the platform, not just the mainline films.
Hulu’s Sovereign offers slow-burn suspense
Sovereign arrives with the cold, Coen-esque tension that has long played on Hulu, focusing on a gonzo “sovereign citizen” whose roadside stop morphs into a statewide manhunt. Instead of relying on action, it wrings suspense from paperwork and procedure, the gauze of fringe legal theorizing against institutions and norms. Early user scores are in the mid-6s on IMDb, indicating a solid word-of-mouth thriller that rewards patience.
The premise is taken from a real-world phenomenon that law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have been following for years. That topicality adds an additional layer of unease to the film, even as it remains rooted firmly in genre territory. Such a grounded, regionally textured story like this one often overperforms in completion rates among Hulu’s audience — which has historically been stronger on adult thrillers and true-crime-adjacent fare — much as trends tracked by firms like Parrot Analytics have shown.
Freakier Friday returns with multi-gen hijinks
Freakier Friday resurrects the body-swap shenanigans with a twist: This time, multiple generations are sluiced through the blender, heightening both the comedy and the empathy. It returns with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis giving perfect performances that offer an appealing self-consciousness about the original’s reputation, and for how the family dynamic has changed yet stayed annoyingly similar even amidst a generation of increasingly enlightened schoolyard politics.
Family co-viewing continues to be one of Disney+’s superpowers, and light, PG-13 comedies have a way of playing above their station on the service. Since the 2003 movie was a cable staple and catalog streamer when it wasn’t just playing in your living room, this new incarnation arrives with that surprise-inside-the-box nostalgia to serve off the bat and an even larger cast of teenage terrors to lure younger eyeballs. Look for batches of new reaction clips on TikTok and perpetually feed-worthy one-liners circulating throughout social platforms as voices are found — expect this one both topically and otherwise — over time.
What else arrives this week on Disney+ and Hulu
Disney+ gives music fans a front-row livestream of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, an uncommon event that tends to precipitate hefty next-day on-demand viewing.
And on Hulu, it’s the season for a new crop of unscripted and true-crime titles — including new seasons of “Sister Wives,” “The First 48 Presents Critical Minutes,” and “Elizabeth Smart Finding Justice,” as well as History-branded franchises like “Biography: Dolly Parton” and the network’s own “History’s Greatest Mysteries.”
Movie-night classics come to Hulu with A Star Is Born, Labyrinth, and Don’t Breathe 2, while Disney+ adds in some anime influence in Disney Twisted-Wonderland: The Animation and more kid-friendly takes with Marvel’s Iron Man and His Awesome Friends.
For faith-and-history storytelling, The Book of Clarence arrives on Hulu in tandem with a Spanish-language version — a nifty access note that dovetails with the increasing portion of bilingual streaming households counted by research groups like Horowitz and Pew.
How to watch on the combined Disney+ and Hulu apps
Several subscribers will be able to open up Hulu programming inside Disney+ with a single login while content filters and profile-level PINs prevent little monsters from getting their mitts on the wrong titles. Ampere Analysis has called the combining of family and adult libraries “an uplift move,” and one that decreases churn by making discovery easier — which is exactly what this week’s cross-promotion shows us.
If you like Hulu’s standalone app, it will stay around for now, but the Disney+ hub experience is only expected to grow. For homes, there are profile ratings that you can set before you even head into Sovereign, so the kids don’t end up on Freakier Friday or Iron Man and His Awesome Friends.
Bottom line: The Avatar doc is essential for tech and film nerds, Sovereign scratches the grown-up thriller itch, and Freakier Friday handles families.
It’s a well-rounded lineup designed to make the Disney bundle feel like one single library.
