September is doing a lot of heavy lifting for HBO Max‘s movie library. The streamer is adding dozens of films on September 1, including everything from major Oscar winners to the beginnings of several horror franchises. There is enough arriving at once that deciding what to watch first may be the harder part.

Horror fans are particularly well served as spooky season gets underway. Beetlejuice returns alongside Carrie, Pearl, MaXXXine, The Craft, and multiple Final Destination movies. Anyone looking for something less terrifying can jump to Rain Man, Mission: Impossible, Magnolia, or The Maltese Falcon. That’s an unusually deep first-of-the-month drop.

The best additions also span more than five decades of filmmaking. September brings back one of Stanley Kubrick’s most controversial classics, a near-perfect 1990s action movie, and a recent A24 horror hit that quickly became a genre favorite. There is also a sweeping historical epic starring Tom Cruise that deserves another look more than 20 years after its release.

All seven movies below arrive on September 1, 2026, making the beginning of the month particularly stacked for Max subscribers. The standout additions include major Oscar-winning performances, hugely rewatchable crowd-pleasers, and one $533 million survival epic that finally earned Leonardo DiCaprio his long-awaited Academy Award.

Beetlejuice

Tim Burton had already made Pee-wee’s Big Adventure when Beetlejuice arrived, but this was the movie that really established what a “Tim Burton movie” could look like. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play Adam and Barbara Maitland, a recently deceased couple who discover that death hasn’t freed them from an even greater irritation: strangers moving into their house.

Michael Keaton barely appears for much of the runtime, yet his wonderfully obnoxious Betelgeuse dominates the movie whenever he turns up. Winona Ryder is equally memorable as Lydia Deetz, the goth teenager who can actually see the Maitlands. With Halloween approaching, September is pretty much the ideal time for Beetlejuice to return to streaming.

Misery

Release Date

November 30, 1990

Runtime

107 minutes

Director

Rob Reiner

Producers

Andrew Scheinman

Stephen King adaptations vary wildly in quality, but Misery sits comfortably near the top. James Caan plays novelist Paul Sheldon, who crashes his car in a snowstorm and wakes up in the home of Annie Wilkes. She is his number one fan, a description that becomes considerably less reassuring once she discovers what Paul has done to her favorite character.

Rob Reiner barely needs to leave Annie’s isolated house to make the movie unbearable in the best possible way. Kathy Bates won the Academy Award for Best Actress for a performance capable of switching from overly cheerful to genuinely terrifying almost without warning. More than 35 years later, the infamous hobbling scene remains something many viewers would happily watch through their fingers.

Talk To Me

Release Date

July 28, 2023

Runtime

95 minutes

Director

Michael Philippou, Danny Philippou

Writers

Bill Hinzman, Danny Philippou

Producers

Kristina Ceyton, Samantha Jennings

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A24 found one of its biggest horror successes with Talk to Me, the Australian debut feature from brothers Danny and Michael Philippou. Sophie Wilde plays Mia, who joins a group of teenagers experimenting with an embalmed hand that allows them to communicate with the dead. Naturally, there are rules. Equally naturally, teenagers are not particularly good at following them.

What makes Talk to Me work is how quickly the supernatural ritual starts to feel like another dangerous thing kids are filming for entertainment. Mia’s grief over her mother’s death gives her a reason to push things much further than everyone else, and Wilde sells every increasingly desperate decision. If you missed the movie during its theatrical run, its arrival on Max is an excellent excuse to see why it became such a word-of-mouth hit.

The Last Samurai

Release Date

December 5, 2003

Runtime

154 minutes

Director

Edward Zwick

Writers

Edward Zwick, John Logan, Marshall Herskovitz

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Tom Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a traumatized former U.S. Army captain hired to train Japan’s newly formed Imperial Army in Western warfare. After being captured by samurai leader Katsumoto, played by Ken Watanabe, Algren spends months living among the people he was originally sent to fight and begins questioning whose side he wants to be on.

Edward Zwick delivers the kind of sweeping production that makes The Last Samurai an easy fit alongside the best historical adventure movies, even if its relationship with actual Japanese history is considerably more complicated than the movie sometimes suggests. Watanabe earned an Oscar nomination, and the large-scale battle sequences still give this 2003 epic plenty of weight.

A Clockwork Orange

Release Date

October 28, 1971

Runtime

137 minutes

Producers

Max L. Raab

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  Patrick Magee

  Mr. Alexander

There aren’t many movies that feel unmistakably like themselves within seconds, but A Clockwork Orange is one of them. Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel follows Alex DeLarge, played by Malcolm McDowell, through a dystopian Britain where his appetite for violence eventually makes him the subject of the government’s experimental Ludovico Technique.

More than half a century later, it remains deliberately difficult viewing. Kubrick isn’t asking the audience to sympathize with Alex so much as forcing us to consider what it means when the state removes someone’s ability to choose between good and evil. The production design and unconventional use of classical music have been copied endlessly, but very few films have managed to recreate its deeply unnerving atmosphere.

Speed

Release Date

June 10, 1994

Runtime

116 minutes

Director

Jan de Bont

Writers

Graham Yost

Speed has one of those action-movie premises so beautifully simple that the title basically explains it. Keanu Reeves plays LAPD officer Jack Traven, who learns that a city bus has been rigged to explode if its speed drops below 50 mph. Sandra Bullock’s Annie Porter ends up behind the wheel, leaving the two of them to somehow navigate Los Angeles traffic without slowing down.

Jan de Bont takes that ridiculous problem seriously enough to make it thrilling without draining away the fun. Reeves and Bullock have effortless chemistry, Dennis Hopper makes the villain suitably nasty, and the movie keeps finding new complications without losing the audience. Among great adventure movies built around an irresistible central hook, Speed remains very difficult to beat.

The Revenant

Release Date

December 25, 2015

Runtime

157 minutes

Director

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Writers

Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mark L. Smith

Producers

Alejandro González Iñárritu, Arnon Milchan, James W. Skotchdopole, Keith Redmon, Mary Parent, Steve Golin

Leonardo DiCaprio had been nominated for acting Oscars four times before The Revenant, so by 2016 his inability to win had practically become its own awards-season storyline. Alejandro G. Iñárritu finally ended it. DiCaprio won Best Actor for playing Hugh Glass, a frontiersman who is mauled by a bear and abandoned in the wilderness after John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy, decides he isn’t going to survive.

The movie earned more than $533 million worldwide, an extraordinary result for a bleak survival story built around long stretches of DiCaprio freezing, crawling, bleeding, and saying very little. Emmanuel Lubezki’s largely natural-light cinematography makes the landscape spectacular without ever making it inviting. The Revenant can be brutal viewing, but on a big screen with the lights down, it is easily one of the most impressive movies joining Max in September.