It’s important to start your new year off on the right foot, so if movies and TV factor into your 2019 plans, and you’re an HBO subscriber, you’ll want to stay on top of everything the premium channel’s streamer is adding in January. What follows is our handy breakdown of HBO Now’s incoming highlights, lowlights and everything in between.
We’ll begin on the small screen, where HBO’s most exciting January addition lives: True Detective, returning for a much-anticipated third season on Jan. 13, 2019. The Nic Pizzolatto-created crime-drama anthology wowed critics and audiences alike with its debut season in 2014, winning five Emmys in the process, but fell off hard in its 2015 second installment, leaving the show in limbo … until last spring, when reports revealed that Pizzolatto had started work on a third season, which would set Oscar winner Mahershala Ali to star that summer and receive an official green light in September. Fast-forward to now, almost two years later, and True Detective season three will finally be a reality—at least on our television screens. The new season’s story sounds awfully similar to that of season one—two detectives, one horrific crime, three timelines—which, all things considered, is probably a positive sign. We begin in 2015, when retired detective Wayne Hays (Ali), his memory failing, recalls the disappearance of 12-year-old Will and ten-year-old Julie Purcell, looking back on the days and weeks immediately following the 1980 crime, as well as on when he and his former partner, Roland West (Stephen Dorff), were subpoenaed a decade later after a major break in the case. True Detective’s eight-episode third season begins with two new episodes on Jan. 13, followed by single episodes on subsequent Sundays. Here’s hoping the third time’s a charm for Pizzolatto’s show, which isn’t the only notable HBO series beginning its third season in January: Comedies Crashing, starring stand-up comedian Pete Holmes as a young and striving version of himself, and High Maintenance, starring co-creator Ben Sinclair as a New York City cannabis purveyor known only as The Guy, both debut on Jan. 20. Not to be forgotten, also, is the debut HBO comedy special from Insecure star Amanda Seales, Amanda Seales: I Be Knowin’, whereas the new season of Real Time with Bill Maher most definitely is to be forgotten.
That brings us to the feature film side of things, where HBO Now streamers are in for a good—if not great—start to 2019. Leading the way are a number of high-profile theatrical premieres, none quite as exciting as Ocean’s 8 (Jan. 12), the all-women Ocean’s 11 spinoff that parlayed its cocktail of glamor, thrills and laughs—not to mention its obscenely stacked cast of Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina, Helena Bonham Carter and Rihanna, among others—into success both critical and commercial. Don’t overlook Tully (Jan. 19), either—the Diablo Cody-penned, Jason Reitman-directed, Charlize Theron-starring motherhood drama recently received a Golden Globe nomination for Theron’s lead performance as Marlo, a struggling mother of three who comes to form a unique bond with her young night nanny, Tully (Mackenzie Davis). We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though: Theatrical premieres coming earlier in the month include long-awaited Broken Lizard sequel Super Troopers 2 (Jan. 5) and Uma Thurman-starring fantasy-horror-drama Down a Dark Hall (Jan. 6), with controversial Benedict Cumberbatch drama Brexit (Jan. 19), disastrous disaster film Geostorm (Jan. 20) and stranger-than-fiction studio comedy Tag (Jan. 26) following after. And HBO’s film slate has plenty to offer beyond theatrical premieres, with titles like Tim Burton’s Big Fish, Dave Chappelle-starring stoner comedy Half Baked, the Wachowski’s divisive sci-fi epic Jupiter Ascending, 2017 superhero standout Logan, early-2000s rom-com My Big Fat Greek Wedding, 1985 Chevy Chase/Dan Aykroyd comedy Spies Like Us, Francis Ford Coppola coming-of-age drama The Outsiders and Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning drug war drama Traffic all arriving on Jan. 1.
Of course, there are also a number of movies making their way out of the HBO library in 2019, as well, all of which exit on Jan. 31. Those titles include Gore Verbinski’s underrated A Cure for Wellness, Tom Cruise-starring crime caper American Made, Oscar-winning Michael Oher story The Blind Side, rom-com classic Bridget Jones’s Diary, animated adventure How to Train Your Dragon, 2017’s massively successful IT adaptation, disappointing sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, wonderful sequel/spinoff The Lego Batman Movie, beloved (and highly quotable) adventure story The Princess Bride and more.
See HBO Now’s full January slate below.