Jason Statham's Biggest Sci-Fi Double Feature Officially Swims Onto HBO Max

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Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor in The Meg, sitting in a submersible with a confused expression.

Published Nov 2, 2026, 6:00 AM EST

Lacey encapsulates her own brand of weird. She is an avid horror fan, as well as a musical theater and karaoke enthusiast. She can make Pterodactyl sounds, and once participated in an axe-throwing league.

Lacey is a reliable source of entertainment news, trivia and insights. Her first job was at Hollywood Video before switching to Blockbuster (when those existed). She continued to study her interest in film/TV at UC Santa Barbara, where she majored in Film Studies. While in Santa Barbara, Lacey was cast in the SAG- and Oscar-winning film Sideways.

After college, Lacey moved to Los Angeles, where she continued to act and worked as a proofreader and manager for a QC company that handled several large studios' retail product (i.e., DVDs and Blu-rays for sale). There, she gained extensive knowledge on film classics and on current independent and mainstream releases.

Lacey continues to act in various projects, including a video performance for a horror escape room and working with Tom Six (of The Human Centipede fame) on The Onania Club. She also has a YouTube channel for recaps and reviews.

2026 hasn't been too kind to Jason Statham at the box office, with Mutiny grossing approximately $30 million worldwide on a budget of roughly $40 million, and Shelter raking in only $56 million after a $50 million budget. However, Statham is sure to return to box office glory when The Beekeeper 2 lands in January 2027; the original made a whopping $126 million on a $40 million budget. Additionally, Statham has always found massive success on streaming, with underdogs including Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre and A Working Man finding plenty of viewers at home. Now, a classic Statham double feature is swimming back onto streaming, and sure to take a bite out of the competition.

In 2018, Statham wet-suited up as Jonas Taylor to face off against a giant prehistoric shark in The Meg. After a submersible goes down in the Mariana Trench, Taylor must return to the scene of a previous tragedy to save the day. Along for the ride are Li Bingbing as Suyin, Rainn Wilson as Morris, and Cliff Curtis as Mac. While the creature feature earned middling reviews — 47% from critics and 44% from the audience on Rotten Tomatoes — it grossed $530 million worldwide on a budget of $175 million, earning most of its box office from international markets. It also earned enough to warrant a sequel, which has joined The Meg on HBO Max, as of November 1.

A few years later, in 2023, Statham returned to shark-infested waters for the sequel, Meg 2: The Trench, which attempted to up the ante with even bigger threats. The sequel leaned further into the campy B-movie action of the first, adding dinosaurs and an even bigger shark into the mix. Meg 2 brought Wu Jing, Page Kennedy, and director Ben Wheatley into the fold, but failed to impress critics who were lackluster on the premise to begin with. While its dismal 27% critics' score might spell disaster for some films, this Statham vehicle saw the audience vastly disagree, awarding it a 72% on the Popcornmeter. Meg 2 knows what it is — Statham vs. giant monsters — and fans were more than happy to come along for the ride.

Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard

Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.

🐕Wick

🏁Fast

🧨Mission

🎄Die Hard

FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →

How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.

ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said. BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we're already laughing about something. CI'm the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived. DBy accident. I wasn't supposed to be here, and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it.

NEXT QUESTION →

It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.

AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started. BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I'm not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup. CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving. DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don't go down.

NEXT QUESTION →

Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.

ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone. BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I'd trade the whole mission for any one of them. CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I'd still take the worst part of the job myself. DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don't know I exist.

NEXT QUESTION →

It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.

AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction. BThe people counting on me. I don't appear to have a limit when it's family on the line. CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it's going to be me. DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.

NEXT QUESTION →

There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.

AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it. BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion. CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff. DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.

NEXT QUESTION →

How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.

AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me. BI don't take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out. CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second. DThey're in a van outside telling me what I'm doing wrong while I'm the one bleeding on broken glass.

NEXT QUESTION →

Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.

ASomething was taken from me that can't be replaced, and I've been settling that account ever since. BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I'll defend it with everything. CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don't know how to hand that to anyone else. DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.

NEXT QUESTION →

When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.

AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to. BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table. CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me. DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.

REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →

Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.

John Wick

You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.

The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.

Fast & Furious

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.

This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

Mission: Impossible

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

Die Hard

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

Will There Be a 'Meg 3'?

Meg 2 fell short of its predecessor's box office haul, but it still earned an impressive $398 million worldwide against a $130 million budget, proving that audiences loved the over-the-top premise. Despite the franchise's combined $930 million success, The Meg 3 has yet to be confirmed. Director Ben Wheatley has previously expressed interest in returning for another installment, joking that the next shark would grow legs and attack people on land. Until such a terrifying day, Statham has plenty on his plate, including The Beekeeper 2, Jason Statham Sole My Bike, and his reunion project with Guy Ritchie, Viva La Madness. He's also expected to return for Fast Forever, although his involvement has yet to be confirmed.

The Meg and Meg 2: The Trench are both streaming on HBO Max now.