This Week in WCIW #38

Welcome to the September 27, 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 week, some early word on upcoming programming in October including news about Wakefield and Slasher, an update about the Clifford the Big Red Dog movie, an unexpected development to the Canadian streaming situation for Kevin Can F**k Himself, and more.

Please note: as we're still waiting on programming information from some major outlets, and due to some other commitments this coming week, we may not be able to publish our usual monthly "What's New" guide for October until next Monday, October 4. We apologize in advance to those of you that rely on this guide.

Programming news

• Paramount Pictures has announced that the movie adaptation of Clifford the Big Red Dog, which was previously scheduled for a September 17 release, will now instead be released on Wednesday, November 10 – in theatres and on Paramount+. At least, that is the plan for U.S. audiences.
   
  However, like the recent Paw Patrol: The Movie – also a Paramount release in the U.S. – Clifford has a different distributor in Canada, in this case Entertainment One, which co-produced the film. While eOne has yet to confirm it will match the American release date (as seems likely), the difference in distributors means it is very unlikely that the Clifford movie will be available on Paramount+ in Canada.
   
  At best, there might be some sort of simultaneous premium digital rental (PVOD) release, or an earlier-than-usual release to eOne's current pay-1 partner, which appears to have switched back to Crave as of earlier this year after a stint with Prime Video. But a day-and-date streaming release for Clifford in Canada seems very unlikely at this stage.
   
• A few services have released their programming additions for October. Netflix will of course have plenty of originals including new seasons of You, Another Life, and Locke & Key, plus Seinfeld (moving from Crave) on October 1, and new seasons of licensed broadcast series like The Blacklist and This is Us.
   
  Over on Crave, in addition to previously-announced or otherwise expected programs like Succession, Insecure, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Canada's Drag Race, there are confirmations of HBO Max documentary 15 Minutes of Shame, ABC Australia series Wakefield (via Showtime and BBC Studios), and recent Warner Bros. film The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. And the previously-mentioned series The Unusual Suspects will in fact be available to stream on October 1, not the October 6 linear broadcast date mentioned last week.
   
• BritBox has acquired North American rights to the upcoming documentary The Beatles and India from distributor Abacus Rights Media. The service has also announced it will be releasing a 4K remastered version of the 1981 ITV serial Brideshead Revisited on October 12 (an HD version is already available on BritBox).
   
• Hollywood Suite will have the Canadian broadcast premiere of Slasher: Flesh & Blood, the fourth season of the anthology horror series, Mondays starting October 4. Although co-produced by Toronto-based Shaftesbury Films, Slasher has bounced around a few different Canadian homes – the first season premiered on Super Channel and is now available on Netflix, which premiered seasons 2 and 3; this new season, which stars David Cronenberg, was released over the past month on the U.S. version of Shudder.

Other notes

• Probably not worth reading too much into at this point, but Comcast's CEO Brian Roberts told a recent investor conference, regarding its SkyShowtime joint venture with ViacomCBS that will offer Peacock programming in some European markets, "We’re looking at other partnerships like that around the world." (For the moment, Corus and its services like Showcase, W and StackTV remain the home of most Peacock originals in Canada.)

Mailbag

From James G.: What’s the scoop with Kevin Can F**k Himself in Canada? Was streaming on AMC+ up until this Sunday [September 19], now it’s vanished. Help solve the mystery!

We have no idea, frankly. It seems very odd, since Kevin is an AMC Studios production so there's no obvious reason for it to be pulled, and on top of that it seems to remain available on the U.S. version of AMC+. The only thing we can speculate is that AMC got some kind of good offer for second-window Canadian streaming rights that hasn't been announced yet; a few relatively recent AMC Networks programs have had second runs on CBC Gem, but it's not clear if this will be the case here.

From Derek M.: Any news or word on Canadian access to The Premise from B. J. Novak? It's FX on Hulu in the US but not airing on FX Canada which I assume means it will at some point go to Disney+'s Star silo up here?

We agree, it seems like Star will be the most likely Canadian home for The Premise... eventually, maybe as soon as October but nothing's been announced yet. For some reason it seems like there’s been a delay for the FX on Hulu shows on Star in Canada, as was the case with American Horror Stories.

Recent updates on WCIW

We've added new posts about The Other Two (season 2 remains unavailable in Canada; we've gone into a little bit more depth on why, but there's no significant news not previously covered) and Foundation (which just debuted worldwide on Apple TV+).

We also made an update to the web version of last week's newsletter to reflect some minor adjustments to BritBox's upcoming programming plans that we were informed of post-publication.

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