Your Weekend Watchlist: Flanagan's Carrie, Netflix's Below, and 10 More Things Worth Watching

LOS ANGELES

Mike Flanagan's Carrie is here, Netflix's Below dropped last night, and Friday through Sunday brings a genuinely stacked slate of things worth watching: Ben Affleck directing a kidnapping thriller, John Cena in a Matchbox movie, V/H/S back on Shudder, and a new Avatar series. We went through the whole weekend calendar — verified against TheWrap's weekend guide and DIRECTV's premiere dates — and pulled out everything actually worth your time.

The two big binge drops: Carrie and Below

Start here, because these are the two that arrived all at once and everyone's going to be talking about them Monday.

Carrie (Prime Video, all 8 episodes streaming) is the one with the most upside. Flanagan — the filmmaker behind The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck — has made a career out of treating Stephen King like sacred text while finding something new in it, and his eight-episode take on the 1974 novel that made King a household name is his most unexpected adaptation yet. Summer H. Howell plays the telepathic teenager pushed to the breaking point by relentless high-school bullying, and the hook is that Flanagan isn't setting this in the 1970s: it's our world, with social media and mandatory metal detectors at every school entrance. Per TheWrap's weekend guide, the series is aiming at the genre thrills the source material demands while asking some genuinely uncomfortable questions about a collective lack of empathy right now. Every episode premiered Wednesday, so you can mainline the whole thing tonight if you're feeling brave. Flanagan hasn't made a bad King adaptation yet. There's no reason to think this breaks the streak.

Below (Netflix, all 6 episodes streaming) is the quieter drop with breakout potential. Created by Jesse McKeown, it's built around a hard-edged fisherman played by Josh Hartnett who has to fight for his family, his community, and his way of life when his remote Newfoundland harbor town comes under siege by a mysterious sea creature of unknown origin. The cast stacks up nicely: Mackenzie Davis (Station Eleven) and Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things) co-star. Early word has been quiet, but the setup — working-class people, an isolated town, something in the water — is the kind of premise that eats a weekend alive. All six episodes dropped Thursday.

Friday's movie lineup: Affleck, Cena, and a mixtape

Friday is doing a lot of work. Animals (Netflix) marks Ben Affleck's return to directing — his first time behind the camera since 2023's Air — and he stars in it too, alongside Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, and Steven Yeun. The setup is a pressure-cooker crime thriller: a Los Angeles mayoral candidate (Affleck) and his wife (Washington) get their son kidnapped and have hours to come up with the ransom, which forces them to expose a darker side of their lives they'd hoped to keep buried. We covered this one earlier today — catch up here — but for the weekend calculus: Affleck is a better director than actor, and that's an excellent sign for Friday night.

Matchbox: The Movie (Apple TV+) is the wild card. Extraction director Sam Hargrave takes on the Mattel toy brand — yes, the little die-cast cars — and turns it into an action movie about a former soldier and spy (John Cena) whose reunion with childhood friends goes sideways when he's drugged and kidnapped by a crew after a nuclear warhead. The cast is genuinely deep: Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Teyonah Parris, Arturo Castro, Kristofer Hivju, Danai Gurira, Corey Stoll, and Golshifteh Farahani. Is a movie based on Matchbox cars going to be good? Probably not the point. The point is John Cena stealing a nuke back from terrorists with Sam Hargrave shooting the action. That's a Friday night.

V/H/S/MIXTAPE (Shudder) is the ninth installment in the found-footage anthology franchise, and it's the one this column is most curious about. The gimmick this time: every segment is built around music, rhythm, and audio as the source of the horror. The directing lineup is genuinely eclectic — Ernest Dickerson (Tales from the Hood), RZA, Flying Lotus, Swedish musician Tobias Forge, Renee Zhan, and David Moreau — and it made its world premiere at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles on Sept. 30 to mostly positive reactions. Streaming debut is Friday on Shudder. If you've watched any of the previous V/H/S entries, you know the drill: wildly uneven, always at least one segment that haunts you for a week.

Also Friday on the movie side: R.L. Stine's Pumpkinhead 2 lands on Tubi — free, horror, Stine's name on it, exactly the kind of thing that hits different at 11 p.m. with the lights off. And if you're looking to catch the year's biggest theatrical hit from the couch, Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit video-on-demand this week — it went to No. 1 on digital — with Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, and Sadie Sink.

Friday TV: CBS wants your whole evening

Broadcast isn't sitting this one out. CBS has Sheriff Country season 2 at 8 p.m. Friday, Fire Country season 5 at 9, and Boston Blue season 2 at 10 — a full three-hour block if you're still doing appointment television. Netflix also adds Haunted Hotel (animation/comedy) and the reality competition Is It Cake? Halloween on Friday, which is exactly the kind of low-effort, high-reward programming that exists to fill the gaps between the horror binges.

The biggest streaming-series premiere of Friday might actually be Avatar: Seven Havens (Paramount+). This is the new chapter of the Avatar franchise, created by The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, following Avatar Pavi — Korra's successor — and her long-lost twin sister Nisha as they try to save the Seven Havens, the last pillars of civilization. The first three episodes premiere Friday; the season's other ten episodes roll out in three-chapter batches weekly through Oct. 30, and a second season has already been ordered. For the animation crowd, this is the weekend's event.

Sunday's closer and the plan

Sunday brings Treasure Island (MGM+), creator Robert Murphy's swashbuckling take on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. The series follows a young man (Tom Sweet) and his mother (Hayley Atwell) who come into possession of an old treasure map and set off to find the loot — while a British spy (Jack Huston) and an older pirate (David Oyelowo) hunt the same prize. It's premiering as a limited series, and it's the palate cleanser: after a weekend of King adaptations, sea monsters, and found-footage anthologies, a pirate adventure with Hayley Atwell is the perfect Sunday come-down.

So here's the plan. Friday: start with Below on Netflix — six episodes, the perfect length for one night. Saturday: work through Carrie on Prime, and slot V/H/S/MIXTAPE or Animals in when you need a break from the slow burn. Sunday: Treasure Island on MGM+, and if you're still standing, the first three episodes of Avatar: Seven Havens on Paramount+. That's eleven titles across the weekend. The couch earned its medal. Sleep when you're dead — which, given the lineup, might be the literal theme of the weekend.

Shudder · premieres Friday · 9th installment, music-themed segments. Paramount+ · first 3 episodes Friday · Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. Tubi · premieres Friday · R.L. Stine fantasy/horror.