This Week in WCIW #18

Welcome to the April 19, 2021 edition of This Week in WCIW, the weekly newsletter from Where Can I Watch – covering the latest news on where TV shows and movies will be available in Canada.

This has been a fairly quiet week on the programming front – we expect most major streaming services will announce May availabilities this coming week – but we do have a few updates to share, including about upcoming streaming availabilty of Tenet, WW84 and more.

Programming news

• Crave has now confirmed specific timing for Tenet and Wonder Woman 1984, which they'd previously said would be available in May. Crave's website now says that Tenet will be available to stream for Movies + HBO and Super Écran subscribers on Friday, May 7. An on-air promo has also indicated that Wonder Woman 1984 will premiere on the Crave 1 linear channel on Saturday, May 22, likely pointing to streaming availability on Friday the 21st – in other words, about five months after its theatrical release. The latter might bode well for similarly accelerated Crave releases for other recent Warner Bros. films in the months to come.
  
  More immediately, Crave has confirmed it will carry Cinema Toast, a recently-announced Showtime series from Duplass Brothers Productions, which seems to consist of public domain film footage remixed and re-dubbed by the likes of Aubrey Plaza and Nick Offerman to tell new stories. Showtime U.S. will be debuting all ten episodes via streaming and on-demand on Tuesday, April 20, with no linear broadcasts scheduled; it appears Crave will be doing the same for the moment.
  
  We did notice that there is one new "HBO Original" program from the mainline HBO U.S. service that Crave is not carrying: the subtitled Swedish docuseries Pray, Obey, Kill, which was originally produced by Warner Bros. International TV for HBO Europe, and debuted last Monday on the American HBO channel. It's not clear in this case whether Crave is being more selective on international programming (after carrying HBO Europe dramas 30 Coins and Beartown earlier this year), or if this program was just unavailable in Canada for some reason.
   
• After the confusion with Godzilla vs. Kong, Warner Bros. Canada's website has confirmed that its next two theatrical releases – Mortal Kombat (this Friday), and Those Who Wish Me Dead (May 14) – will be available both in theatres and as premium VOD rentals. WB releases after that, like In the Heights (June 11), are currently marked "In Theatres" – but not "Only in Theatres" (yet) – so plans will likely be firmed up a bit closer to the respective dates.
   
• Hollywood Suite has picked up The Pembrokeshire Murders, a British drama miniseries from ITV Studios which premiered on ITV in the UK in January, as well as an associated documentary, Catching the Game Show Killer. This will be the miniseries' linear premiere in Canada, but it's already available for streaming in Canada on BritBox. Hollywood Suite will air the series beginning on May 20, with on-demand availability the next day.
   
• Both BBC Earth Canada and PBS will debut the three-part documentary series Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World – produced by BBC Studios in association with PBS – in its entirety on Thursday, April 22 starting at 8:00 p.m. EDT. Note that times may vary on some PBS stations; in particular, the schedule for WNED Buffalo, the main PBS station serving much of southern Ontario, currently shows it declining to air the premiere on the 22nd, instead picking it up for weekly broadcasts over three Wednesdays starting April 28.

Other notes

• Filed under "things we've noticed recently on linear TV": after a couple of years of the former Outdoor Life Network trying to emulate TruTV with little more than Storage Wars reruns and Impractical Jokers, Rogers seems to be trying something new with OLN: re-running recent Citytv programs. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights are now filled with programs like The Great North, Mixed-ish, Kenan, Law & Order: Organized Crime, and the three (One) Chicago series. It's not yet clear if this is a sign of more to come, or just Rogers throwing spaghetti from its programming rights to see what sticks.

Recent updates on WCIW

• We've added a post about Mortal Kombat, and updated a few posts for other recent Warner Bros. films like Judas and the Black Messiah to note that, based on the Crave release timing for WW84, the Crave releases for other recent WB films might be moved up.
   
• We've also updated our post about Made for Love to note that's now arrived in Canada on Prime Video (as we noted would be the case a few weeks back).
   
• Finally, we've updated our overall post about HBO Max to reflect the update on Made for Love, as well as to note that The Great Pottery Throw Down, a reality show that Max has U.S. rights to (and which has been recently picking up interest), is available in Canada on a channel called Makeful.

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