Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures spent an extended period on bestseller lists largely through word of mouth — the kind of book readers press on other readers with an insistence that can be off-putting until you actually read it. The premise involves a widow working at an aquarium who forms an unlikely bond with an octopus named Marcellus. It is also a missing-persons mystery and a story about grief and the ways humans project emotional intelligence onto creatures who may or may not share it.

There is a version of this show that fails spectacularly. Ghost Rider failed. The Superman Lives project never even got off the ground. Nicolas Cage has spent two decades being the punchline of every conversation about actors and comic book movies. Spider-Noir, premiering May 27 on Prime Video after a May 25 MGM+ debut, is his chance to close that file. The premise is legitimately interesting. Ben Reilly is a 1930s private investigator in Depression-era New York, aging and burned out, who once operated as the city’s only superhero.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the first Hunger Games prequel, had the difficult task of making audiences care about a young Coriolanus Snow — the series’ established villain — without either redeeming him or making the film’s emotional investment incoherent. It largely succeeded, though it polarized readers of Suzanne Collins’s novel who felt the adaptation simplified the political argument the book was making. Sunrise on the Reaping, releasing November 2026, follows Haymitch Abernathy at sixteen during the 50th Hunger Games — the Second Quarter Quell, which is mentioned briefly in the original trilogy as the Games where twice the usual number of tributes were sent.

Lessons in Chemistry was one of those novels that accumulated readers over time rather than arriving already famous. It became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, then an Apple TV+ series with Brie Larson, and Bonnie Garmus turned into one of the more closely watched debut authors of recent years. The pressure on her second novel is considerable. The follow-up is centered on a young man hired by Peck & Peck, described as the most prestigious, secretive, and dysfunctional poetry journal in New York.

The pitch for The Boroughs is exactly what the cast suggests: Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, and Bill Pullman live in a retirement community that gets invaded by an otherworldly threat, and they do something about it. Netflix premieres it May 21. The premise requires a tonal balance that is difficult to sustain — too much genre earnestness and the comedy collapses, too much winking at the audience and the suspense disappears — but the cast is experienced enough with tonal complexity that the possibility of something genuinely good is real.

The first season of The Four Seasons on Netflix worked because Tina Fey understood what the Alan Alda source film understood — that a dramedy about middle-aged people in long-term relationships has to actually believe in the relationships to generate any comedy worth having. The show was warmer than expected and funnier than its premise suggested. The second season arrives May 28 with the same structural premise: six friends, four vacations in a single year, and the annual reckoning that time-based stories impose on characters who are trying not to notice how much is changing.

HBO’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights is being described, without apparent embarrassment, as the version that leans into what the novel was actually doing. Brontë’s 1847 text has always been more violent and erotic and structurally strange than its reputation as a tragic romance suggests — the relationship at its center is obsessive and destructive and explicitly includes class warfare, generational revenge, and a ghost. The sanitized versions have historically missed the point.

The Midnight Library sold millions of copies and became the kind of book that appeared in airport bookshops and recovery centers simultaneously. It reached a readership that does not usually track literary fiction releases. Matt Haig’s follow-up to that novel, The Midnight Train, publishing May 26, is described as a sibling work to that book — not a sequel, but set in the same metaphysical territory. The premise trades the infinite library of alternate lives for something more linear: a single train journey between the life someone is living and the life they abandoned, with stops at each significant decision point along the way.

Before there was a European Union, before there was a concept of Europe as a political project, there was European art making arguments that crossed borders without needing passports. Bach was played in Italy. Italian opera colonized every European capital. Spanish painters shaped French modernism. Dostoevsky was read in Berlin the year he was published. The cultural circulation that preceded political integration by centuries is the deepest evidence that European identity exists at a level below institutional design.

Spend enough time inside the worlds built by Taylor Sheridan and a pattern starts to press in from the edges—at first it feels like grit, then like fatalism, and eventually like something closer to ritual. His protagonists don’t just risk death; they orbit it. They lean into it. They behave as if survival is incidental, almost inconvenient, compared to the clarity that comes from stepping right up to the edge. It’s not quite a death wish in the melodramatic sense.