This Week in WCIW #51

Welcome to the January 10, 2022 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, updates on SEAL Team and Monarch, plus new ways to watch some HBO Max programs on regular cable in Canada. But first, a recap of a few of the changes (and non-changes) affecting theatrical releases.

Here we go again

With the rise of the Omicron variant and the resulting closures of movie theatres in several provinces including Ontario and Quebec – we'll leave discussion of the wisdom of such closures to others – some studios have adjusted their theatrical or at-home release plans for their movies.

This past Monday, Sony announced that Morbius, the next film in its MCU-adjacent universe of Spider-Man characters, had been pushed back from January 28 to April 1, although indications are that this change was intended mainly to keep screens available for Spider-Man: No Way Home rather than as a direct reaction to Omicron cases.

Then on Friday, Warner Bros. announced that it would be accelerating the premium video-on-demand (PVOD) release of The Matrix Resurrections to this coming Friday, January 14 in Canada. As has been typical for recent WB PVOD titles here, it will have a suggested purchase price of $29.99, or $24.99 to rent, through digital retailers like Apple TV / iTunes and the Prime Video Store.

Later that day, Disney said that Turning Red, the upcoming Toronto-set Pixar film, would now premiere exclusively on Disney+ in all available markets, including Canada, on its previous theatrical release date of Friday, March 11.

On the other hand, Paramount is reportedly standing firm on January 14 as the release date for the next Scream film, even if that means audiences in the two biggest Canadian provinces will have to wait for cinemas to re-open to be able to see it.

It's hard to tell right now whether this will just be a short-term blip or the beginning of something that could extend a few more weeks or months. But clearly some studios are keeping their options open when it comes to how to best make these new movies available.

Programming news

• Paramount+ seems to have finally sorted out the issues surrounding SEAL Team in Canada. As first noted by Bill Brioux (and as we've since confirmed ourselves), all episodes released in the U.S. have now been made available on Paramount+ in Canada. Brioux's post suggests that the people in charge of the Canadian side of Paramount+ were not anticipating the move from CBS (and Global) when it happened in November. On the surface, this seems hard to square with the announcement of that move having come six months earlier, but it's possible there was some sort of internal broken telephone as to how the rights had to be handled in Canada.
   
  We still don't see season 2 of Evil on Paramount+ Canada – and season 1 has disappeared – so it's unclear if there's any movement on that front.
   
  Update (January 11): A reader, Tish, has notified us that both seasons of Evil are now available on Paramount+ in Canada as of Monday, and we've been able to similarly confirm this.
   
• Bell Media has been quietly adding more HBO Max original series – including relatively recent programs/seasons like Gossip Girl, Love Life, The Sex Lives of College Girls, and (starting this coming Wednesday) Station Eleven – on its basic cable specialty channels, primarily E! and CTV Drama, with most available on demand (at least for a limited time after linear broadcast) on CTV.ca and the CTV app, and likely through TV provider set-top boxes as well. This mirrors, to an extent, the secondary windows for Max Original series on TBS and TNT stateside.
  
  So if you have a cable subscription but not Crave, and have been looking for a way to access these shows, keep an eye on your TV listings (and CTV's digital platforms).
   
• Global has picked up Canadian rights to Fox's new country music drama Monarch, but will air it after its U.S. simulcast, at least for now, due to other programming commitments. The premiere episode will air Monday, January 31, with subsequent episodes on Wednesdays starting February 2 (Fox is airing the premiere on January 30, with a regular timeslot on Tuesdays).
   
• Love Nature will premiere a new original documentary special, Osprey: Sea Raptor, narrated by Sean Bean, this Wednesday, January 12 at 8:00 p.m. ET.

Recent updates on WCIW

We've made some minor updates to our January streaming guide to add a few notable programs we missed during initial publication, which are summarized at the bottom of that page.

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