Disney+ and Hulu add Red Eye, The Life of Chuck, and Together

Disney+ and Hulu are winding down the holiday window with a sharply curated group of prestige, pulse, and pure conversation-starter releases.

This week’s highlights:

• The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2020) on Hulu
• The creepy two-hander Together (Stephen Daldry, Justin Martin, 2021) on Hulu
• The return flight of UK thriller Red Eye with a fresh season

Introduce Disney+ event programming and a robust library refresh, and the bundle’s year-end approach seems tailor-made to keep you streaming long after the credits roll.

What’s new on Disney+ and Hulu this week, with highlights

So look for a three-pronged rollout: a high-profile film debut at Hulu, a buzzy horror original landing just in front of the popping champagne and a slick international thriller touching down shortly after the calendar flips. Disney+, on the other hand, goes full tentpole with music-event programming and family-first franchises, plus shared drop series that show up around the unified Disney+ experience for Hulu subscribers.

The Life of Chuck lands on Hulu with King adaptation

Mike Flanagan adapts Stephen King’s 2020 novella The Life of Chuck into a thoughtful, time-warping tale led by Tom Hiddleston and featuring Jacob Tremblay and Benjamin Pajak in other roles. The story is told in reverse, tracking three key chapters in one man’s life and considering whether a series of small moments can trump an apocalyptic backdrop. A tonal pivot from Flanagan’s Gothic crowd-pleasers, it’s closer in spirit to the humanist shimmer of “Stand by Me” than the dread of “The Haunting of Hill House.”

Early audience scores have been good (IMDb is in the low-7s), and that jibes with recent genre-crossing King adaptations that perform as character dramas before ticking off horror or thriller boxes. For Hulu, this is the exact sort of filmmaker-driven title that drives high-completion rates and keeps subscribers trying out adjacent thrillers and dramas, according to Ampere Analysis research on engagement with streamers.

Together brings body horror to New Year’s Eve on Hulu

Together stars Dave Franco and Alison Brie in “Together,” a rural-set horror that deploys intimacy as a weapon. A couple’s fresh start takes a strangely symbiotic turn after an unseen force brings them entirely too close for comfort. Real-world effects carry the queasy tone, and director Michael Shanks wisely keeps the frame tight, allowing sound design and performance to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Horror continues to be a dependable streamer magnet — Nielsen’s weekly rankings have frequently shown the genre over-indexing when it comes to completion and late-night viewing patterns — and Together taps into that ritualistic holiday-week appetite for quick, sharp shocks. If you appreciated “Speak No Evil” or The Invitation for its social dread, this falls in a similarly uneasy neighborhood.

Red Eye returns on Hulu with a fresh season of the UK thriller

Red Eye’s first season crammed a full-blown geopolitical thriller into the overstuffed quarters of an intercontinental flight, putting a Chinese detective at odds with a British suspect and allowing turbulence to take it from there.

Season two widens its focus while maintaining the breezy efficiency for which the show is known: quick episodes, clear stakes, and character dynamics that bend under stress. Jing Lusi heads an ensemble that returned the series’ declared intentionality (IMDb in the low-7s) and good word of mouth among fans of compact UK thrillers.

International series like this one tend to do especially well in the US, which Parrot Analytics has noted for years. Positioning a fast-paced, globally relevant thriller just as viewers are in search of a new binge is some shrewd counterprogramming on Hulu’s part against splashier fantasy fare.

Disney+ event TV and shared drops across the combined apps

On the Disney+ front, music mega-content is still more than proving its value. The last two episodes of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour companion content land, preserving one of the platform’s most robust engagement tales. That propensity was previously noted by third-party measurement firms this year, which reported outsized rewatch behavior on concert specials, and Swift’s releases usually drive spikes in social chatter that lead to discovery across rows of the service’s home page.

The week also contains the family-forward specials and ongoing shared-drop series popping up in both the Disney+ and Hulu realms of influence. With both being services that share a unified login and with the Hulu tile residing within Disney+, this kind of coordinated scheduling smooths out the handoff from daytime kid-friendly viewing to more adult-skewing picks at night. Disney has already indicated that the standalone Hulu app will be phased out soon, so anticipate more weeks like this where things premiere corporate-wide to such a degree that they’ll feel seamless no matter what surface you’re on.

Extra look-ahead picks and notable library additions

Library additions come as part of the headliners, which this month features a deep bench of action favorites on Hulu — lawmen, thieves, and extraterrestrial hunters among them — along with both halves of a fedora-and-whip adventure set on Disney+. Those catalog waves matter: Nielsen’s year-end tallies always find comfort rewatches surging when families are together, and classic franchises typically make up a meaningful share of total hours streamed.

Why this drop matters for Disney+, Hulu, and subscribers

For subscribers, the bundle is a tidy sampler: an introspective fantasy from an A-list horror auteur, a midnight-ready shocker, and a jet-speed thriller that’s back just as you’re in need of something else to devour.

For Disney, that’s an example of the integrated Disney+/Hulu playbook: lead with event TV, flank up with adult-skewing originals, and fortify with known library IP. That mix keeps households within the ecosystem — and that’s really the cliffhanger to keep an eye on as streamers fight for you to be their first watch of 2026.