Whether you’re looking for a teen comedy, action epic or bloody horror fest, Hulu has something for everyone in August. The streaming service added a number of hit movies and series to its library this month, including an all-time classic rom com and one of 2025’s best horror movies.
Here are the seven best new movies on Hulu in August.
“10 Things I Hate About You”
only Adapting William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” in a 1990s schoolyard setting, the Julia Stiles/Heath Ledger-starring “10 Things I Hate About You” is a gold standard for teenage rom coms. Only four years in the wake of “Clueless” — a megahit modern-day update of Jane Austen’s “Emma” — it would be easy for a movie like this to feel like derivative old news.
Yet the film carries an infectious energy from moment one, mixing bursts of Shakespeare-like language with more modern parlance (“The mewling, rampalian wretch herself. Stay cool, bro” comes to mind). From director Gil Junger and writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, “10 Things I Hate About You” holds up 26 years later as a thoroughly enjoyable and well-crafted teen movie that frequently feels like lightning in a bottle.
“District 9”
“District 9” being a feature directorial debut feels impossible. Former VFX artist Neill Blomkamp smashed onto the scene in 2009 with his science fiction phenomenon, a much longer adaptation of his own six-minute short film “Alive in Joburg.” Blomkamp expands upon the already interesting ideas presented in this short, fleshing them out into a full-length feature unencumbered by the same temporal or monetary limitations. The documentary techniques and cinema verite style employed by Blomkamp and cinematographer Trent Opaloch further immerses viewers in the world of “District 9,” one that feels fully realized wherever the extraterrestrial Prawns are concerned.
“John Wick: Chapter 4”
Every movie in the “John Wick” series (sans “Ballerina”) joined Hulu on Aug. 15, allowing fans to stream one of the defining action stories of the 21st century. Each of the films, starring Keanu Reeves as the titular Boogeyman-like assassin, carry their weight, showing a franchise evolution from a nearly straight-to-DVD revenge story to a sprawling, set piece-heavy epic of a finale (for now). You won’t make a mistake by queuing up any of these movies.
But “John Wick: Chapter 4” stands far ahead of the rest of the pack. The film boasts some of the finest action sequences of all time, playing up the physical comedy found across the franchise (the last act in particular plays like a bloody, hour-long dance). Chad Stahelski fine tunes every already admirable aspect of the series to create a stunning conclusion, one where Reeves delivers his best performance as the character to date. A brief scene involving John Wick in a church is one of the actor’s finest moments.
“John Wick: Chapter 4” widens the aperture in an already sprawling underworld, introducing a new cast of characters that feels both enormous and focused. One of the film’s strongest aspects is the introduction of Donnie Yen as Caine, a blind assassin and friend of Wick’s who is sent to kill his former ally. Caine provides a strong foil to Wick, someone who has yet to escape the underworld and struggles to avoid the death of a loved one — essentially, he’s playing a version of John from before the franchise started. In this dichotomy, Stahelski and writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch find a way to layer a compelling narrative about friendship and loyalty without sacrificing a beat in their massive action epic.
“The Monkey”
Less than a year after the release of “Longlegs,” Osgood Perkins followed his dark and dreary serial killer film with a horror movie with a strikingly more comic tone. “The Monkey” adapts Stephen King’s short story of the same name about a wind-up primate whose cymbals clash as a warning of impending doom (in Perkins’ movie, copyright issues caused the monkey to become a drummer instead). Perkins and star actor Theo James, who plays twin brothers in the film, steer hard into the silliness and absurdity of the story while playing it entirely straight.
What results is an uproarious horror flick both handsomely directed and frequently hilarious. With each progressive death, the gimmick of the monkey only gets funnier, with James’ dual characters treating the wind-up simian as death incarnate. It’s a film both gory and goofy, boasting the same craft as “Longlegs” while seeing Perkins operate in a different register. 2025 is packed with King adaptations, and “The Monkey” started them off on the right paw.
“Pretty Woman”
In August, Hulu added Garry Marshall’s romantic comedy “Pretty Woman,” starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. Roberts received a much-deserved Oscar nomination for the role, delivering a performance that wholly elevates the material. Her chemistry with Gere is off the charts, making them an iconic pair in the ’90s rom-com landscape. These two hold the film afloat with unimpeachable performances that help elevate “Pretty Woman” into one of the most recognizable entries in the genre.
“Raising Arizona”
In the Coen brothers’ second feature, Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter play an odd couple. H.I. McDunnough is a former criminal (they’ve got a name for people like him, a parole board chairman tells Hi, and that name is called “recidivism”). His wife, Ed, is a former police officer. The pair falls in love through a series of meet cute bookings and endeavors to have a child; however, they soon learn that Ed can’t have children, and Hi’s criminal past makes adoption an uphill battle (Ed’s police service, it turns out, does not overrule Hi’s offenses). When the couple learns of wealthy furniture magnate Nathan Arizona’s surprise quintuplets, they decide to do his family a favor by taking a baby off their hands.
If “Raising Arizona” aspired only to be a broad comedy, it would likely work fine, fueled by cartoony set pieces and beyond over-the-top accents. Yet the Coen brothers inject the film with the same patience and cinematic artistry as can be found in any of their character-driven dramas. The central conflict between Hi and Ed is a compelling one, depicting two people who want desperately to be parents and do the right thing, but who are not fully prepared for either. They want to do “everything decent and normal from here on out.”
But Hi, a recidivist in Reagan’s America, can’t quite figure out how to make that happen. He wants to be a father without passing too much of himself onto his son. “I fear that if I stay, I would only bring bad trouble on the heads of you and Nathan Jr.” he writes to Ed late in the film. “I feel the thunder gathering even now. If I leave, hopefully it will leave with me.” It’s both an emotional and a hilarious performance from Cage, building to a gut punch of a final scene.
“Ready or Not”
“Ready or Not” is one of the surprise horror films of the 2010s, making a meal out of what sounds like a truly forgettable premise: what if there was a horror movie about hide and seek? Radio Silence filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (the team behind 2022’s “Scream” and “Scream VI”) somehow find gold in this premise, delivering a hilarious thrill ride about a new bride (Samara Weaving) trying to survive a children’s game with her cultish in-laws on her wedding night. Weaving makes a meal out of this intensely physical performance, immediately crowning herself as a scream queen for a new generation — literally. Her guttural, vibrato-heavy yell in the film’s final act needs to be heard to be believed.
