New TV shows, movies on Netflix in 2025: Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein,' new Tina Fey show and Mae Martin's Canadian thriller

Yahoo

30-01-2025

This year Netflix is set to release an impressive number of new TV shows, movies, games, documentaries and live events on its platform. From the final season of Stranger Things and the return of Wednesday, to completely new content and its continued partnership with WWE, Bela Bajaria, chief content officer of Netflix, presented a full slate of 2025 releases to reporters around the world on Wednesday.
Speaking from Los Angeles, Bajaria stressed how important creativity is for Netflix, referencing a New York Times video opinion piece by Kirby Ferguson titled "Is Creativity Dead?" She highlighted Netflix's commitment to supporting projects "other people think are too specific, or too quirky, or too local."
"So I'm sorry to The New York Times reporters in the audience, but creativity is not dead — not on Netflix, and not for the creators we work with," Bajaria said. "They're always coming up with amazing, original ideas we can't stop thinking about."
"And they're the reason 2025 is going to be the most surprising, most unique, most entertaining year yet."
From films and TV, to games and live sports events, Netflix in 2025 is looking to reach every category of viewer, all over the world.
Throughout the years, Netflix has developed a robust catalogue of productions filmed in Canada, but continues to make additional investments in telling Canadian stories through its platform.
"We are looking for Canadian stories that can please our members here, and go on to light up the world," Tara Woodbury, director of content for Netflix Canada said at the event in Toronto on Wednesday.
That includes North of North, in partnership with CBC and APTN, created, executive produced and written by Inuit writers and producers Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril.
The comedy series stars Anna Lambe as Siaja, and Inuk woman in the Arctic town of Ice Cove. After a very pubic ending of her marriage, leading her to crashing on her mother Neevee's (Maika Harper) couch with her daughter Bun (Keira Belle Cooper), Siaja just wants to explore a new independent life for herself.
There will also be a new documentary this year that breaks down the controversial story of the Montreal Expos baseball team.
"The story of Expos leaving Montreal has everything you'd want, negotiations and backstabbing, athletes on the edge, and big big emotions from the fans," Woodbury teased. "The filmmakers have brought all the key people who were involved in the Expos move to Washington, from Guerrero, to the MLB to David Samson and audiences will get a true insider's perspective."
The hilarious Mae Martin moves to the thriller genre with the upcoming release of their series Wayard, starring Martin, Sarah Gadon, Patrick J. Adams, and Toni Collette, who plays the head of a school for troubled teens.
"It's a show that I wanted to make for years and years. I've always been obsessed with my teens and the visceral emotions of that time," Martin said. "I was a troubled teen myself. And my best friend actually, when we were 16, got sent to a rehab facility in the States. That was like a troubled teen school, like the kind that Paris Hilton went to."
"She was gone for two years and she escaped in the woods and she came back and had these crazy stories about it, and in researching those schools in the troubled teen industry it just seemed like the perfect framework to hang a thriller on and and it gets pretty crazy in the wider conspiracy of the town, and my character's, kind of trying to figure it all out."
Martin also took the time at the Toronto event to highlight how great it's been to work on a project back home.
"I left in my early 20s and lived in England for 12 years, and then L.A., and I've always come back whenever there's work here," Martin said. "And I really think if I had known that I would be able to make something of this scope and scale, and have the amazing freedom and everything, then I would never have left."
"It's the best and all the cliches about Toronto and Canadian crews and their warmth on set are all really true. Like, as of my first day, three crew members were like, 'Yeah, we partied together in high school.' ... It's such a small, small world."
While there are several Canadian projects to be excited about on Netflix in 2025, there are also highlights to Netflix's global programming that we are really looking forward to. In addition to the final season of Stranger Things and Squid Game, and the return of Wednesday, here are new projects to look out for.
Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro is one of the most prolific filmmakers in history, with one of his most exciting projects coming to Netflix in November, Frankenstein starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Charles Dance and Christoph Waltz.
Adapting Mary Shelley's classic tale, the story follows a "egotistical scientist," played by Isaac, who brings a monster to life.
"This film has been on my mind since I was a child — for fifty years," Del Toro said in a video message during the Netflix event. "And I've been trying to make it for 20-25 years."
"Over the decades, the character has fused with my soul in a way that it has become an autobiography. It doesn't get more personal than this."
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are once again working together, through their company Artists Equity, for their upcoming film Rip, a crime thriller set in Miami.
"Rip is not a horror movie. A rip is when cops keep whatever money they find at a crime scene, and this movie takes a look at the things people will do for money," Affleck said on Wednesday.
Inspired by true events, the film is written and directed by Joe Carnahan, starring Sasha Calle, Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Adkins, and Kyle Chandler.
Following the hit docuseries with Victoria and David Beckham, the Spice Girl is bringing the cameras into her fashion and beauty business, as a Creative Director of her own brand.
The legendary 30 Rock creator and star, Tina Fey, is coming back to the series world with an upcoming show called The Four Seasons, inspired by the 1981 Alan Alda movie. The show stars Fey, Steve Carell, Will Forte, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Colman Domingo, Marco Calvani and Erika Henningsen.
"If you've never seen the original movie, it has a very simple premise. It follows a group of old friends — three couples — over four vacations," Few said. "We never see them at home. We never see them at work — we just see how their lives change over a year by hanging out with them on vacation. No one is a vampire and — spoiler alert— there are zero murders."
"In the original, Alan Alda and Carol Burnett played husband and wife and I remember feeling, like, 'What?! My two favourite comedy people from other shows are pretending to be married?! What is this deep comfort I'm feeling?!' It was fan fiction before there was fan fiction. It was Nancy Meyers sweater porn before Nancy Meyers… found her career in porn."
Fey co-created the project with Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield.
Famed comedian and actor John Mulaney is taking his skills to a talk show titled Everybody's Live with John Mulaney, a live weekly show on Netflix, beginning March 12 at 7:00 p.m. PT/10:00 p.m. ET.
This comes after Mulaney's 2024 six-episode talk show John Mulaney's Everybody's in L.A., which was part of Netflix is a Joke Fest.
"We will be live globally with no delay. We will never be relevant. We will never be your source for news. We will always be reckless. Netflix will always provide us with data that we will ignore," Mulaney said. "This will be the one place where you could see Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting next to Nikki Glaser sitting next to a family therapist with music by Mannequin Pussy. That's just a brief sampling of guests. We don't know if we can lock in Mannequin Pussy, but we are in talks with them."
"This is a really fun experiment. Not since Harry and Meghan has Netflix given more money to someone without a specific plan."
Lena Dunham and her production company Good Thing Going (GTG) partnered with Netflix to develop future projects, including her first scripted comedy series with Netflix, Too Much.
"Jessica (Megan Stalter) is a New York workaholic in her mid-thirties, reeling from a broken relationship that she thought would last forever and slowly isolating everyone she knows," the synopsis of the show reads. "When every block in New York tells a story of her own bad behaviour, the only solution is to take a job in London, where she plans to live a life of solitude like a Bronte sister."
"But when she meets Felix (Will Sharpe) — a walking series of red flags — she finds that their unusual connection is impossible to ignore, even as it creates more problems than it solves. Now they have to ask themselves: do Americans and Brits actually speak the same language?"