Also coming to streaming
Wedding Season (Disney+, from September 8) September 8 is this year’s Disney+ Day, when the channel offers deals on subscriptions and merchandise, premieres new series, launches new features, and backs other such promotions. This time around one of the biggest launches is the streaming service’s first-ever UK original series, Wedding Season, an action-romance with a comedic twist, starring Rosa Salazar and Gavin Drea as Katie and Stefan, two people who meet and fall for one another at a wedding. The problem is, she already has a fiancé. A solution of sorts appears when, two months later, her fiancé and his entire family are killed on the couple’s wedding day. No prizes for guessing what the police think – they’re convinced it was Stefan. Surely it can’t be so simple?
Pinocchio (Disney+, from September 8)
Whether directing actors or animators, Robert Zemeckis has a knack for the fantastical. He’s a safe pair of hands for this live-action version of Pinocchio, then, casting frequent collaborator Tom Hanks (whom Zemeckis directed in Forrest Gump, Cast Away and The Polar Express) as Geppetto, the wood carver who builds Pinocchio and cares for him as if he were a real boy. And then something miraculous happens… Live-action is an odd choice for a fairytale such as this, yet Zemeckis has a paradoxical way of making animation look more real than life and making real life seem utterly fanciful. This – along with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jiminy Cricket and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (Bly Manor) as Pinocchio – feels like a winning combination.
Gutsy (Apple TV+, from September 9)
In 2019, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter Chelsea published The Book of Gutsy Women: Favourite Stories of Courage and Resilience, which profiles a variety of influential and inspirational women who faced numerous battles. This new eight-part series is a continuation of that tome, and sees the duo touring the US to meet pioneering female artists, activists, community leaders and everyday heroes, who reveal what it is to be ‘gutsy’. While some of those featured are not famous, others most certainly are – watch out for the likes of Kim Kardashian, Megan Thee Stallion, Dr Jane Goodall, Gloria Steinem, Amy Schumer and another motherand-daughter team, Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson, among the participants.