HBO Max is ending the year on a high note with a distinguished lineup featuring One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s DC Elseworlds-like foray into animation and myth in pre-colonial Mexico; a mega-hit sequel from China’s animation boom, Ne Zha II; and a behind-the-scenes doc on kids’ music culture with stars like the Wiggles.
It’s a week made for awards watchers, animation enthusiasts, and families out to have some fun.
The headliner: One Battle After Another leads the lineup
Paul Thomas Anderson gets right back into muscular genre filmmaking with One Battle After Another, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as a former revolutionary who’s called to return to action when a corrupt officer from his past returns to power.
Look for tense set pieces, moral ambiguity, and character work that lingers — the signatures of Anderson’s approach since There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread. With DiCaprio facing off against Sean Penn and a strong ensemble, this squarely falls in the corridor where guild nominations often coalesce — something we’ve seen time and again when looking at voting patterns over Oscar history and industry rumblings courtesy of trades like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
As for what people will decide to prioritize watching this week, this is the consensus “must,” and it also checks the box for major, high-profile R-rated action that’s increasingly scarce on streaming premieres. HBO’s strong performance with high-profile premieres remains one up as the streamer wars escalate; Nielsen’s The Gauge has had interest in streaming tipping over 40% of TV usage since 2023, making attention wins like this more precious than ever.
Aztec Batman reimagines a legend in 16th-century Mesoamerica
Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires continues DC’s Elseworlds tradition — like an Aztec anachronism, if you will, in the mold of Gotham by Gaslight — with a story that takes Dark Knight lore and positions it within 16th-century Mesoamerica. Here, a teenage nobleman, Yohualli Coatl, assumes a fearsome identity to avenge his parents’ murder in the wake of Spanish conquistadors; Hernán Cortés becomes an imperialistic villain while a scarred priest devolves into a Joker-like fanatic.
Yet beyond novelty, the project puts Indigenous aesthetics, Nahua-influenced iconography, and historical power dynamics seldom seen in superhero cinema front and center. DC’s animated movies have been a reliably big draw among fandom, and this R-rated offering leans into brutalism and cultural specificity as opposed to a one-to-one Batman retread — the kind that we’ll probably be talking about across comics circles and animation forums.
Ne Zha II continues a box office phenomenon
Ne Zha II is a high-octane sequel to last year’s fantasy smash that first introduced many Western viewers to the vanguard of Chinese animation. Doubling down on slick martial-arts choreography, mythic stakes, and kinetic visual humor (not to mention little mice wearing gnawed sardines as hats), the new chapter continues to press a familiar theme: self-determination versus destiny. Chinese box office tracking app Maoyan and analysts at research group Artisan Gateway have been among those to flag the return of massive local animation tentpoles in recent years, with Ne Zha II frequently mentioned as one of the year’s biggest wins.
If you want to catch up, the original Ne Zha is also on HBO Max — making this a tidy two-film marathon. That pair is strategic: completionist packages keep engagement high and can help platforms jack up total viewing time, a metric streamers are courting harder as churn battles heat up.
Documentary spotlight: Happy and You Know It
Happy and You Know It is a look at children’s music — its touring economies, its punishing schedules, and even the unexpected cultural footprint of acts like the Wiggles and other preschool superstars.
For perspective, Pollstar has listed kids’ brands as top-grossing among family tours in North America and Australia on multiple occasions, illustrating how this niche functions like a well-oiled entertainment machine.
The doc also delves into how AI is seeping into songwriting and production pipelines. In industry groups like the Recording Academy and the Copyright Office, authorship and training-data transparency have been actively debated, and the film funnels those big questions through a kid-entertainment lens — helpful for parents wondering just what on earth is behind the earworms.
Also new on HBO Max this week: series and specials
Completing the roster, there are fresh episodes and specials of reality TV and nonfiction series that fit comfortably into holiday-week viewing:
- House Hunters (new volume and deep-season run)
- Teen Titans Go! (including new season drops for the animation crowd)
- Adult Swim’s The Elephant (for fans of late-night comedy)
- A new season of Secrets in the Sand (for history and archaeology enthusiasts)
- The Last Captains (for docu-series junkies)
- A special presentation, The Exorcists: The Whole Story, with Anderson Cooper
- The latest installments of Guy’s Grocery Games (for culinary comfort food)
The breadth here matters. The HBO Max strategy — to couple a marquee awards hopeful with cult-friendly animation and family pivots — hits multiple demos in one drop. It’s that mix that enables platforms to reduce idle time on the home screen. If you’re picking and choosing, begin with One Battle After Another, throw on some Aztec Batman for a visual break from the day and something wildly not of our own cultural context, and queue up Ne Zha II as your high-action animated double feature before Happy and You Know It.
