Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of December’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)
New to Amazon Prime Video
‘Fallout’ Season 2 Starts streaming: Dec. 17
Season 1 of this ambitious video game adaptation provided a nice change of pace from the usual postapocalyptic action-adventure TV, adding colorful characters, eye-catching locations and a wicked sense of humor to its depiction of a world recovering from a nuclear melee. The story began with Lucy (Ella Purnell) leaving the underground vault where she had been born and raised, only to find that the missile-scarred surface world was more populated than she had been led to believe, with scavengers, mutants and heavily armored soldiers having formed their own new communities and cultures in the centuries that society’s elite had been bunkered. As Season 2 begins, Lucy and an irradiated gunslinger known as The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) are setting off on a quest to New Vegas to find her father (Kyle MacLachlan), who is one of the people responsible for the strange and dangerous place Earth has become.
Also arriving:
Dec. 1 “The Merchants of Joy”
Dec. 3 “Oh. What. Fun.”
Dec. 6 “Surely Tomorrow”
Dec. 10 “Merv”
Dec. 12 “Tell Me Softly”
Dec. 18 “Human Specimens”
Dec. 22 “Miss Sophie: Same Procedure as Every Year”
New to AMC+
‘Reflection in a Dead Diamond’ Starts streaming: Dec. 5
The French filmmaking duo (and spouses) Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani make aggressively experimental movies, using the European pulp cinema of the 1960s and ’70s as an inspiration for imaginative abstract art. Their latest picture, “Reflection in a Dead Diamond,” is a riff on James Bond-inspired spy stories, with Fabio Testi and Yannick Renier playing the same secret agent, John Diman, at different points in his life. The story is ostensibly about the older John vacationing on the French Riviera and investigating a mysterious disappearance that reminds him of a case from his youth. But while the premise is fairly straightforward, a clever plot is not really the point here. Cattet and Forzani use their hero’s mission as an excuse to string together some stylish and ultraviolent fight scenes.
Also arriving:
Dec. 1 “The Haunted Season: The Occupant of the Room”
Dec. 8 “Midsomer Murders” Season 25
Dec. 12 “Influencers”
Dec. 15 “The Madame Blanc Mysteries Christmas Special”
Dec. 19 “Queens of the Dead”
Dec. 25 “Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale” Season 2
Dec. 26 “The Jester 2”
New to Apple TV
‘F1: The Movie’ Starts streaming: Dec. 12
One of 2025’s biggest box office hits, this thrilling underdog sports drama stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, an aging Formula 1 driver who gets one more shot at greatness when he joins a new team, owned by an old friend (Javier Bardem). Damson Idris plays Joshua Pearce, a hotshot rookie who spurns his veteran teammate’s advice whenever Sonny urges him to take more chances. The director Joseph Kosinski and the screenwriter Ehren Kruger — who previously collaborated on the blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick” — build their story around multiple big races, each with their own dramatic twists and turns, and each staged with a white-knuckle intensity. The movie is also filled with rich supporting performances, including a terrific turn by Kerry Condon as an innovative automotive engineer who helps her drivers gain the edge they need.
Also arriving:
Dec. 5 “The First Snow of Fraggle Rock”
Dec. 19 “Born to Be Wild”
New to Disney+
‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ Season 2 Starts streaming: Dec. 10
This family-friendly fantasy series had an eventful first season, adapting Rick Riordan’s young adult novel “The Lightning Thief.” The adolescent hero Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell) — secretly the son of the Greek god Poseidon — embarked on a cross-country adventure with other gods, demigods and magical creatures, on a quest to rescue his mother and prevent a destructive deity-versus-deity war. Season 2 adapts “The Sea of Monsters,” the second book in Riordan’s series, in which Percy reunites with his young peers at Camp Half-Blood before leading them on a new quest: to find the Golden Fleece. As is the case in the books, this series pulls monsters and concepts from the ancient myths and drops them into modern life, generating old-fashioned spectacle.
‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour — The End of an Era’ Starts streaming: Dec. 12
The pop star Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras world tour was designed to track her evolution as an artist, with the show divided into sections dedicated to specific albums and styles. Swift now says goodbye to the period with “The End of an Era,” a six-episode docuseries that goes behind the scenes on the tour, from the planning and rehearsals to its record-breaking run. In addition to getting into the nuts-and-bolts of mounting such an expensive and logistically complicated production, the documentary also covers Swift’s high-profile romance with the N.F.L. player Travis Kelce — a variable that neither she nor her team had factored in when this project began.
Also arriving:
Dec. 2 “Wonderful World of Disney: Holiday Spectacular”
Dec. 3 “Are You Sure?!?”
Dec. 5 “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw”
Dec. 8 “Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures” Season 3
Dec. 10 “Secrets Declassified With David Duchovny”
Dec. 12 “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour — The Final Show”
Dec. 19 “Discovered by Disaster” Season 1
Dec. 20 “Inside the Enchanted Waterways”
New to HBO Max
‘Mad Men’ Seasons 1-7 Starts streaming: Dec. 1
HBO Max is the new streaming home for one of the 21st century’s best TV dramas, now carrying all seven seasons — 92 episodes in all — of “Mad Men.” Set at a fictional New York City advertising agency in the 1960s, the series is partly a story about the way American office culture changed across a tumultuous decade. But it’s more about one mercurial creative genius, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a womanizing alcoholic with a shady past and an uncanny knack for understanding what kinds of commercial pitches appeal to consumers. Created by Matthew Weiner, “Mad Men” is a beautifully written, directed and acted show, which unlike most of the prestige television of its era is like a collection of finely crafted, thematically linked short stories, rather than an epic novel.
‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’ Starts streaming: Dec. 4
The singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley died in 1997 at age 30, leaving behind an astonishing debut album, “Grace,” that found a devoted yet relatively small fandom in his lifetime. Since his death, that record — along with some scattered live recordings and unfinished songs — have been perennially popular, with Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” becoming a modern pop standard. The director Amy Berg faced a challenge in making her documentary “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” given that her subject’s career didn’t last long enough to generate a lot of archival footage. Fortunately, Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert — along with some of the musician’s girlfriends — provided Berg with some rare video, audio and photos, to help tell the story of a phenomenal musical talent who sometimes felt crushed by the pressures of greatness.
Also arriving:
Dec. 1 “Paul Anka: His Way”
Dec. 2 “Hard Knocks: In Season with the NFC East”
Dec. 4 “Architecton”
Dec. 5 “The Family McMullen”
Dec. 9 “Fixer Upper: Colorado Mountain House”
Dec. 11 “Wizkid: Long Live Lagos”
Dec. 12 “Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh” “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues”
Dec. 18 “Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately?”
Dec. 24 “Ne Zha II”
Dec. 25 “Happy and You Know It”
New to Hulu
‘The Life of Chuck’ Starts streaming: Dec. 26
It’s hard to describe the plot of this heartwarming drama, which is adapted from a Stephen King novella but largely eschews horror, except for the existential kind. “The Life of Chuck” begins with the end of the world. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a middle-school teacher named Marty who watches, month after month, as the Earth’s climate collapses while society keeps plugging away, trying to keep everything normal. The story then moves backward, to tell the story of an accountant named Chuck — as an adult (Tom Hiddleston), as a teenager (Jacob Tremblay) and as a preteen (Benjamin Pajak and Cody Flanagan) — who lives a life torn between his math-loving grandfather (Mark Hamill) and his love of dancing. All of this fits together, thanks to the writer-director Mike Flanagan, who follows King’s lead and makes a larger point about how everyone’s life is a series of choices and challenges — minuscule and massive.
Also arriving:
Dec. 16 “Chevalier”
Dec. 19 “Kumail Nanjiani: Night Thoughts”
Dec. 22 “The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball” Season 2
Dec. 23 “Strange Harvest”
Dec. 31 “Together”
New to Paramount+
‘Predators’ Starts streaming: Dec. 8
This expectation-defying documentary begins as a look back at the heyday of “To Catch a Predator,” the NBC true-crime docuseries that baited would-be sex offenders into outing themselves to hidden cameras. The “Predators” director David Osit approaches this subject from multiple directions. He considers the ethics of the show’s methods, examines the wave of “To Catch a Predator”-inspired amateur sting operations that have proliferated online, and asks what the whole “trap-a-criminal-before-the-crime” phenomenon has ultimately accomplished. “Predators” does not offer any easy answers to any of its tough questions. Instead, Osit tries to understand how a well-intentioned hunger for justice can have dreadful unintended consequences.
Also arriving:
Dec. 1 “Guns Up”
Dec. 2 “5-Star”
Dec. 11 “Little Disasters”
Dec. 12 “Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” Season 2
Dec. 19 “Dora” Season 4
New to Peacock
‘The Copenhagen Test’ Season 1 Starts streaming: Dec. 27
Simu Liu takes the lead in this science-fiction-tinged spy series, playing Alexander Hale, an intelligence analyst who discovers that someone, somehow, has figured out how to hack into his brain, accessing everything he sees and hears. Because Hale works for a supersecret agency, this development could compromise him — or it could provide a rare opportunity to deceive his agency’s enemies. Brian D’Arcy James and Melissa Barrera co-star as people in Hale’s circle whom he may not be able to trust. Created by Thomas Brandon (who is also the co-showrunner with Jennifer Yale), “The Copenhagen Test” is an action show drawn from contemporary anxieties about the surveillance state, generative A.I. and all the other technological advancements that complicate our perceptions of reality.
Also arriving:
Dec. 8 “Here Come the Irish” Season 2
The post The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Disney+, Amazon, HBO Max, Peacock and More in December appeared first on New York Times.
