What's New To Streaming In October 2023

Stack up that watchlist for your fall weekend!

Happy Friday, readers! We’re back with the best of what’s new to streaming in October for your weekend enjoyment. Before we get to that, make sure you are subscribed to the podcast because we have some exciting episodes coming up! This week we had a Martin Scorsese movie draft, where we both drafted five Marty films to see who ended up with the better lineup. Listen and share with another Marty lover! 

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Drew recommends…

The Firm

It’s hard to imagine now, but legal thrillers and courtroom dramas in the 1990s used to cash in at the box office. These movies – A Few Good Men, Philadelphia, The Pelican Brief, A Time to Kill, Primal Fear, Double Jeopardy – were right near the center of movie culture, due to their A-list movie star power, prestige Oscar-friendly trappings, or both. The Firm is a prime example of a 90s legal thriller that had both in spades. The formula was simple: 1) Get a respected director and screenwriter to adapt a hot-off-the-presses John Grisham novel. 2) Add one of the biggest movie stars in the world and a deep bench of capable actors. 3) Profit. 

Released in the summer of 1993, The Firm made $270 million on a $42 million budget, so you could say the formula worked. The Pelican Brief, the other Grisham adaptation of 1993, fared pretty well thanks to its stars Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, but not quite as well as The Firm, which had the superstar that everyone wanted to see. Coming off A Few Good Men the year prior, you’d think maybe audiences would tire of seeing Tom Cruise as a lawyer, but no, they were hungry for more. As Mitch McDeere, a top Harvard Law graduate that lands a job at a boutique firm in Memphis, Cruise was the perfect vessel to escort viewers into a world of legal deception, blackmail, and murder. 

The Firm’s story may strain believability at points, but it’s a supremely entertaining film with a stacked cast. Whether it was the draw of working with Cruise, director Sydney Pollack (Out of Africa, Three Days of the Condor), or a Grisham adaptation, The Firm recruited a supporting cast of Gene Hackman, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter (nominated for Best Supporting Actress), Hal Holbrook, and David Strathairn. At over 150 minutes, The Firm has no business having that runtime, but you don’t mind when you’re watching it. With this much talent and entertainment value, this expert legal thriller flies by. 

Streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video

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Billy recommends…

Scream

This is a re-post from August 2021

A horror movie that ushered in a new era of awareness that the horror movie genre had not seen much of. Wes Craven had created classics in the 70s and 80s that were game changers before he came to Scream with The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Those classics fit perfectly into the slasher era they were made in. By the time of Scream there were copycat after copycat trying to recreate the 70s/80s horror magic. So instead of one more lesser attempt Craven decided to create a meta horror that is equally a spoof on the genre while being horrifying at the same time. 

What makes this movie timeless is how it approaches the tropes of a genre that often become stale. It subverts and adheres to the cliches at the same time. It has a masked killer and dumb high school kids. Their dumb is heightened even more though because these characters are aware of horror movies cliches. For example, we have a character in Scream that is watching a horror movie and yelling at the screen when a character isn’t noticing the killer behind her. All while a killer is coming up behind him.

That’s enough of explaining how it is subverting the genre because I want to reiterate how horrifying this movie is. A classic slasher movie, sure, but it opens with the best iteration of a “it’s coming from inside the house” moment in horror movie history. A legendary Drew Barrymore performance as a “scream queen” that sets a new tone for the horror genre for a whole generation. Now that we are transitioning into fall, use this movie as a perfect gateway into the horror genre. It will scratch that itch for any horror junkie plus it has the perfect amount of laughs to soften the blow for any horror novice.

Streaming on Max

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New To Streaming In October 2023

Netflix

A Beautiful Mind
American Beauty
Casper
Catch Me If You Can
Dune
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Gladiator
Mission: Impossible
My Best Friend’s Wedding
Runaway Bride
Saving Private Ryan
Scarface
It Follows (October 11)
Silver Linings Playbook (October 17)

Amazon Prime Video

Crawl
Hotel Rwanda 
It’s Complicated
Lawless
Legally Blonde
Moneyball
Sicario
The Apartment
The Shop Around the Corner 
The Untouchables
The Wedding Singer
Renfield (October 10)
Long Shot (October 16)

Hulu

Dazed and Confused
Drive
Easy A
The Empty Man
Funny People
Interview With the Vampire
Leprechaun
Little Miss Sunshine
Nightmare Alley
Shaun Of The Dead
Sleepless in Seattle
Stoker
Pain & Gain
It Chapter Two
Doctor Sleep

HBO and Max

The Asphalt Jungle
Badlands
Beetlejuice
Blade Runner 2049
Blindspotting
Final Destination
The French Connection
If Beale Street Could Talk
Poltergeist
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Warm Bodies