What’s New in Entertainment Next Week? The Biggest Movies, TV Shows, Music Releases and Comic-Con News for July 20–26, 2026
- Samantha Ann
- Jul 18
- 10 min read
Discover what’s new in entertainment next week, July 20–26, 2026, including must-watch streaming premieres, new music from Charli xcx and Tyla, Apple TV and Netflix comedies, Comic-Con 2026 and more.
Next Week’s Entertainment Calendar Is Doing the Absolute Most
The entertainment world clearly looked at the week of July 20–26, 2026, decided nobody needed sleep, and filled the calendar with new comedies, returning romantic dramas, major music releases and one enormous gathering of professionally enthusiastic people wearing superhero costumes in San Diego. Whether your ideal evening involves a prestige indie film, a chaotic Kevin Hart bachelor party, a romantic ranching dispute or watching celebrities explain highly classified franchise news without actually revealing anything, next week has something ready to consume your remaining free time.
The biggest overall entertainment event will be Comic-Con International in San Diego, but the streaming platforms are not politely stepping aside. HBO Max is launching a new expansion of The Big Bang Theory universe, Netflix is bringing viewers back to Ransom Canyon, and Apple TV is attempting to make pickleball even more unavoidable. Meanwhile, Charli xcx and Tyla are delivering two of the week’s most noteworthy albums. Your watchlist and playlists are about to become less like organized collections and more
like cries for help.
Comic-Con 2026 Is About to Take Over the Entertainment News Cycle
Comic-Con International returns to the San Diego Convention Center from Thursday, July 23, through Sunday, July 26, with Preview Night scheduled for Wednesday, July 22. Even viewers who are not attending should pay attention because Comic-Con has a habit of swallowing the entire entertainment-news cycle. Studios, streaming services, publishers, actors and creators use the event to preview upcoming projects, promote current releases and carefully produce the kind of surprise appearances that were definitely rehearsed three weeks ago.
Expect announcements involving movies, television, animation, comics, games and assorted franchises that already have more timelines than a graduate-level physics course. Trailer reveals and casting announcements will likely travel across social media within minutes, usually accompanied by shaky audience footage and captions consisting entirely of capital letters.
Comic-Con is also much broader than the giant movie and television panels that receive most of the headlines. The official event includes exhibits, artwork, educational programs, independent film activities, publishing events and creator-focused programming. That makes it both a pop-culture spectacle and a serious gathering for people working across visual storytelling, even though the internet will mostly spend the weekend arguing about who should play the next superhero.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Gives The Big Bang Theory a Very Stuart-Like Spinoff
HBO Max will premiere Stuart Fails to Save the Universe on Thursday, July 23, at 9 p.m. Eastern. The ten-episode comedy centers on Stuart Bloom, the socially uncomfortable comic-book-store owner played by Kevin Sussman in The Big Bang Theory. New episodes are scheduled to arrive on subsequent Thursdays.
The premise begins when Stuart accidentally causes a physics-related disaster connected to a project created by Sheldon and Leonard. He must then work with familiar characters including Denise, Bert and Barry Kripke to repair the damage. Lauren Lapkus, Brian Posehn and John Ross Bowie return alongside Sussman, giving the series enough recognizable faces to reassure longtime fans while moving the story beyond the original apartment-and-couch arrangement.
Choosing Stuart as the hero is either inspired comedy or an extremely elaborate workplace prank, which makes it perfectly appropriate for the character. He spent years existing at the edge of The Big Bang Theory ensemble, quietly struggling with his store, his finances and nearly every social interaction placed before him. Now he has been assigned the modest responsibility of saving existence itself. Frankly, this is what happens when management keeps adding duties without adjusting the salary.
The show is an obvious curiosity for viewers who miss The Big Bang Theory, but its success may depend on whether it creates a distinct identity rather than simply recycling familiar jokes. The science-fiction premise gives it room to become stranger, larger and potentially more visually adventurous than its predecessor. At minimum, Stuart finally gets to be the center of attention, although he would probably prefer a modest increase in store traffic and a working heating system.
Ransom Canyon Season 2 Brings Romance, Ranches and Beautifully Lit Problems Back to Netflix
Netflix’s Ransom Canyon returns for its second season on Thursday, July 23. Minka Kelly and Josh Duhamel are back as Quinn O’Grady and Staten Kirkland, whose slow-burning relationship moved forward during the first season. Naturally, because happy couples cannot be allowed to relax for longer than seven minutes on television, Season 2 will place new pressure on their relationship and their competing ideas about the future.
Quinn must decide whether life in the small Texas community is truly enough for her, while Staten continues fighting for his family’s ranch and legacy. That provides the essential ingredients of a modern Western romance: sweeping landscapes, complicated family histories, emotionally unavailable attractive people, property disputes and at least one conversation held beside a fence while the wind behaves dramatically.
Patricia Clarkson joins the season as a guest star, adding another formidable performer to the ensemble. The series already mixes romance, family conflict and ranching dynasties, so Clarkson’s presence should introduce additional tension, authority or both. She rarely arrives on screen merely to ask whether anyone would like more iced tea.
Ransom Canyon is best suited to viewers who enjoy polished romantic melodrama and small-town stories where every resident appears to know everyone else’s personal business before breakfast. It offers emotional comfort and chaos in almost equal amounts, with scenery attractive enough to make viewers briefly consider rural life before remembering that ranches require actual physical labor.
The Dink Turns Pickleball Into a Full-Blown Apple TV Comedy
Apple TV will premiere The Dink on Friday, July 24. Jake Johnson stars as Dusty “The Hammer” Boyd, a washed-up tennis professional who reluctantly enters the world of pickleball while trying to save a struggling country club and earn his father’s respect. The movie also features Mary Steenburgen, Ed Harris, Ben Stiller, Patton Oswalt and Aaron Chen.
The premise combines the familiar sports-comedy underdog formula with the cultural phenomenon of pickleball, a game that appeared one day and immediately occupied every available court, park and neighborhood group chat in America. Dusty has apparently made a sacred vow never to play it, which is exactly the sort of declaration a comedy protagonist makes five minutes before joining a tournament.
Jake Johnson is particularly well suited to this kind of character. He has perfected the art of playing a man who is exhausted, defensive and only one inconvenience away from delivering an unnecessary speech. Place that energy inside a sports movie featuring country-club politics, family disappointment and tiny plastic balls, and the result could be one of the week’s easiest comedy recommendations.
The movie runs approximately one hour and 42 minutes and carries a PG-13 rating. It is not likely to settle the ongoing debate over whether pickleball is an exciting modern sport or tennis played after somebody misplaced half the court, but it may at least make the argument more entertaining.
Kevin Hart Has 72 Hours to Survive a Netflix Bachelor Party
Netflix will release 72 Hours on Friday, July 24. Kevin Hart stars as a man who is accidentally added to a group chat and becomes involved in a bachelor-party trip with a significantly younger group. The cast includes Marcello Hernández, Kam Patterson, Ben Marshall and Mason Gooding.
The accidental-group-chat setup is painfully believable. Most people would simply leave, silence the notifications or spend three days reading messages without admitting they were there. Kevin Hart’s character instead joins the trip, because responsible decision-making has historically produced very few successful studio comedies.
The generational mismatch appears to be the main source of humor, with Hart attempting to keep up with a group of twenty-somethings during a chaotic celebration. This is the kind of movie in which one small misunderstanding will almost certainly lead to property damage, emotional revelations and somebody waking up in a location that raises both legal and geographical questions.
For viewers seeking something light, loud and deliberately ridiculous, 72 Hours could be a reliable Friday-night choice. It also provides another reminder that entering the wrong group chat can apparently lead either to embarrassment, international conspiracy or a Netflix production deal.
Indie Film Fans Have Blue Heron and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
The week is not entirely composed of franchise extensions and celebrity comedies. Blue Heron, the acclaimed feature debut from filmmaker Sophy Romvari, begins streaming on the Criterion Channel on Tuesday, July 21. The deeply personal film blends fiction, documentary elements, memory and family history, drawing from Romvari’s childhood experiences after her Hungarian family relocated to Vancouver Island.
This is the option for viewers who prefer their movie nights thoughtful, intimate and emotionally devastating in tasteful lighting. It explores the unstable nature of memory and the difficulty of understanding family experiences from childhood. Nobody is accidentally invited to a bachelor party, and the universe is not threatened by a comic-book-store owner, but emotional survival may still be uncertain.
At the opposite end of the tonal spectrum, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie begins streaming on Hulu on Friday, July 24. Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol play two determined slackers whose elaborate schemes are designed to secure a performance at Toronto’s Rivoli music venue. The movie continues the duo’s low-budget, high-energy comic style and includes an enthusiastic relationship with Back to the Future.
Together, the two releases demonstrate why streaming weeks are often more interesting than theatrical calendars suggest. One offers a meditative examination of memory and family; the other offers two men making catastrophically elaborate plans to book a concert. This is range.
Charli xcx Trades the Dance Floor for Distorted Guitars
Charli xcx will release her new album, Music, Fashion, Film, on Friday, July 24. Following the enormous cultural afterlife of BRAT, the project reportedly moves toward Charli’s version of rock music, incorporating distorted guitars and processed vocals without abandoning her instinct for pop hooks.
Trying to follow a phenomenon like BRAT is a nearly impossible assignment. Any straightforward sequel could seem repetitive, while a dramatic reinvention risks frustrating the audience that arrived during the previous era. The apparent solution is to make a turn toward rock, declare the dance floor dead and invite everyone to debate whether the statement is sincere, ironic or both. In other words, an extremely Charli xcx strategy.
The album’s sole credited feature is filmmaker David Cronenberg on the closing track, “No One Lasts Forever.” That combination of experimental pop and body-horror royalty is so unexpected that it becomes immediately logical. Some artists invite a rapper or another singer onto the final track. Charli invited the director of The Fly. Standards have now been raised.
Listeners should expect a project interested in testing the boundaries between pop, rock, performance and image-making. The title itself treats music, fashion and film as interconnected parts of a larger creative identity. It also sounds like the name of a university course attended exclusively by people wearing sunglasses indoors.
Tyla’s A*POP Continues Her Global Rise
Tyla will also release her second album, APOP*, on Friday, July 24. The South African singer achieved international success with “Water,” blending R&B, pop and amapiano into a sound that became instantly recognizable. Her sophomore album is expected to continue developing that mixture while incorporating dancehall and broader global-pop influences.
The project includes “She Did It Again,” a dancehall collaboration with Zara Larsson, as well as the amapiano-pop track “Chanel.” Tyla’s challenge is no longer proving that she can create an international hit. It is demonstrating the depth and staying power of her sound across a complete second album.
APOP* arrives at a moment when African music continues to play a central role in global popular culture. Tyla’s appeal comes partly from her ability to move between regional influences and mainstream pop structures without flattening the elements that make her music distinctive.
Putting Tyla and Charli xcx on the same release day also gives music fans two very different reasons to update their playlists. One album appears ready to distort guitars and reconsider the state of the dance floor. The other promises polished rhythms built for making that allegedly dead dance floor look suspiciously active.
Gamers Can Explore a New Side of the Splatoon Universe
The entertainment lineup also includes Splatoon Raiders, an adventure that moves Nintendo’s colorful ink-based franchise away from its traditional competitive arenas and toward treasure hunting across a dangerous archipelago. Players encounter hostile creatures known as Salmonids while collecting treasure and improving their equipment.
The game is designed to offer a substantial solo experience while also supporting cooperative play with as many as three friends. This makes it attractive to longtime Splatoon fans who enjoy the franchise’s visual style but want something beyond standard multiplayer competition.
The concept replaces the pressure of painting more territory than an opposing team with the calmer activity of exploring monster-filled islands where everything wants to attack you. Nintendo understands relaxation.
What Should You Watch First Next Week?
For sitcom fans, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is the most obvious curiosity because it transforms a supporting character from The Big Bang Theory into the unlikely center of a science-fiction crisis. Whether it becomes a clever expansion or an overextended spinoff, people will certainly be discussing it.
Viewers craving romantic drama should prioritize Ransom Canyon Season 2. It has ranches, family legacies and enough unresolved emotion to power several small Texas counties. Comedy fans have two strong mainstream options: The Dink for a sports-underdog story with an excellent ensemble, and 72 Hours for Kevin Hart-style generational chaos.
Music listeners face the most intriguing choice. Charli xcx’s post-BRAT reinvention will likely generate the louder online conversation, while Tyla’s APOP* may provide the smoother soundtrack for the actual weekend. Sensible listeners will simply play both and avoid inventing an unnecessary competition.
Anyone who follows blockbuster movies, television franchises, comics or gaming should also keep an eye on Comic-Con coverage from July 22 onward. The projects announced there may not arrive next week, next month or possibly within the next geological era, but the trailers and panel news will shape entertainment conversation throughout the weekend.
The sensible plan is to choose one or two priorities, save the rest for later and ignore the fact that “later” is already occupied by another collection of new releases. That is the modern entertainment economy... an endless supply of content accompanied by the quiet knowledge that you are still three seasons behind on something everybody stopped discussing last year.
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References
Associated Press, “What to Stream: Charli xcx, ‘The Dink,’ ‘Stuart Fails to Save the Universe’ and ‘72 Hours,’” published July 17, 2026.
Warner Bros. Discovery Pressroom, “Max Original Comedy Series Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Debuts July 23,” published May 13, 2026.
Netflix Tudum, “Ransom Canyon Season 2 Trailer Released,” published June 25, 2026.
Netflix Tudum, “Saddle Up for Season 2 of Ransom Canyon in July,” published April 29, 2026.
Apple TV, The Dink official program listing and release information.
Comic-Con International, official Comic-Con 2026 event information and dates.
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