2024 is going to be a big year for African streamer Showmax as it relaunches in February in partnership with Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Sky, and features a whole new product suite. This month, then, is the final month for the service as people have grown to love it, and as usual it’s offering a mix of series, movies, documentaries, specials and sports from across the globe.

Below you’ll find our highlights for January, but you can also read through a full rundown of the month’s schedule here – which includes animated series for the whole family, and a wide variety of award-winning local entertainment, including South African telenovelas, short films, and deep dives into the lives of local celebrities.

Series

The Good Doctor, wrestling drama Heels and Blindspotting all return in January, but of the new additions, we’re most excited for the following:

Pitch Perfect fans, listen up. As of 8 January, you can binge all six episodes of series spin-off Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin. In this musical comedy, Adam Devine returns as Bumper Allen, who has ended up working as a security guard at his alma mater. Then he discovers one of his songs has gone viral in Berlin, leading the former Treblemaker to relocate to Germany and pursue stardom there.

Five-part Canadian drama Essex County is based on the award-winning Essex County Trilogy of graphic short stories by Sweet Tooth’s Jeff Lemire. The series follows two interconnected families in a rural farming community of Canada. The cast includes Molly Parker as a country nurse caring for her dementia-afflicted uncle, Lou (Stephen McHattie), and child actor Finlay Wojtak-Hissong who is forced to live with his closeted uncle Ken (Brian J Smith) after the death of his mother.

Watch Essex County from 29 January.

Films

Showmax likes to add franchise bundles to its movie offerings, and in January that means the Mamma Mia! movies, plus Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron’s live-action Snow White films, are joining the library. Apart for that, check out these two mega 2023 blockbusters in January.

22 January marks the South African small-screen debut of superhero sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods. This time around, teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel), and his adult superhero alter-ego, Shazam (Zachary Levi), run afoul of the Daughters of Atlas, played by Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu. Also in the cast are Djimon Hounsou, Rachel Zegler and Adam Brody. Read our review of the family-friendly Fury of the Gods, which features a lot more Greek mythology flavour, here.

While we can’t say we enjoyed Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as much as Bumblebee, come 29 January you can check out one of the better Transformers movies at home. Both a prequel to 2007’s original Transformers and a standalone sequel to 2018’s Bumblebee, Rise of the Beasts is set in 1994 and centres on ex-military electronics expert Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and artifact research intern Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) as they work with the Autobots and Maximals to save the Earth from the Predacons and Terrorcons. In the voice cast are Ron Perlman, Michelle Yeoh and Peter Dinklage. Here’s our full Transformers: Rise of the Beasts review.

P.S. all the other Transformers films are streaming on Showmax too.