Welcome to our first monthly highlights package for Disney+. The streamer’s immense, ever-growing library has been available in South Africa since mid-May, and while there have been many frustrations with the Hotstar underpinned version of the Disney+ app available locally (hell, it’s been unusable on our TV for the past two weeks!) there’s no question that the content is top notch. You just have to access it on a tablet or PC screen.
Anyway, July is a relatively quiet month for the streamer. No new Star Wars entertainment, and just two more episodes left of the six-episode Ms Marvel. In their place, 20th Century Fox (with Hulu and FX) are stepping up with offerings to keep lovers of action, fantasy, true crime and animated comedy entertained.
Film
Irreverent and very bloody fantasy adventure The Princess stars The Kissing Booth’s Joey King as the title character, a skilled and formidable young royal. When the princess refuses to wed the cruel sociopath (Dominic Cooper) to whom she is betrothed, she is kidnapped and locked in a remote tower of her father’s castle. With her scorned, vindictive suitor intent on taking her father’s throne, the princess must protect her family and save the kingdom. Also starring are Olga Kurylenko and Veronica Ngo.
Watch The Princess from tomorrow, 1 July.
Fans of animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers can look forward to The Bob’s Burgers Movie, a feature-length adventure, combining music, mystery and the series’ award-winning brand of comedy. The story begins when a ruptured water main creates an enormous sinkhole right in front of Bob’s Burgers, blocking the entrance indefinitely and ruining the Belchers’ plans for a successful summer. While Bob and Linda struggle to keep the business afloat, the kids try to solve a mystery that could save their family’s restaurant.
Watch The Bob’s Burger’s Movie from 13 July.
As a final note, if you missed it during lockdown, X-Men spin-off, the horror-flavoured The New Mutants, joins the Disney+ catalogue on 29 July.
Series
The endlessly versatile Andrew Garfield headlines Under the Banner of Heaven, a seven-episode true crime miniseries based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Jon Krakauer. As Detective Jeb Pyre (Garfield), a devout Mormon, investigates the 1984 murder of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her baby daughter in a suburb in the Salt Lake Valley, Utah, he uncovers buried truths about the origins of the Church of Latter Day Saints, and the violent consequences of unyielding faith. Also starring are Sam Worthington, and Daisy Edgar-Jones.
Under the Banner of Heaven is available to stream in its entirety from 27 July.