2026 has been huge for HBO so far, and it can all be traced back to January, when the studio dropped two of its biggest projects of the year. The first big HBO show to hit screens this year was the highly anticipated second season of The Pitt, the Noah Wyle-led medical drama that has not-so-quietly become one of the biggest shows on TV. Following The Pitt Season 2 was the debut season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is based on the series of short stories by George R.R. Martin. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes place between the events of House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones, and there was such little doubt that the show was going to be a hit that HBO renewed it for Season 2 months before a single episode was ever on the air. When it comes to prestige dramas, no streaming service is operating at as high a level as HBO, which consistently releases some of the most prestigious shows in the world year after year. One of the first series that comes to mind is Succession, which wrapped up its four-season run in 2023 as one of the most successful shows ever made. However, poised to take Succession’s crown as HBO’s most popular prestige drama is The White Lotus, which has aired three seasons after premiering in 2021. It’s now been over a year since the last season of The White Lotus aired its finale, but creator Mike White is hard at work on Season 4. The show has also surged back into the HBO global top 10 in a few countries before its return. Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works. You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it's ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image. You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn't want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it's about. You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort. You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it's about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn't be possible. Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all. You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be. The fourth season of The White Lotus is shooting right now in France, which will also be the setting for the series on-screen. Helena Bonham Carter was originally cast in a key role in The White Lotus Season 4, but after only a few days on set, it was clear that she would not be able to fit the role Mike White wrote for her, and she was recast with Laura Dern. Steve Coogan, Kumail Nanjiani, Chris Messina, Ben Kingsley, and more will all star in The White Lotus Season 4. Check out the first three seasons of The White Lotus on HBO Max, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of Season 4.