‘Lupin’ Creator Officially Returns With New HBO Legal Thriller

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Published Sep 17, 2026, 11:21 AM EDT

Adam Blevins began working in the entertainment industry in 2022 as a Staff Writer for Agents of Fandom, where he progressed to Senior Editor and interviewed talent from Marvel Studios, House of the Dragon, and Planet of the Apes. He joined Collider as a News Author in April 2024, was promoted to a Senior position in December 2024, and has written over 3,000 articles for the site, including exclusives relating to Avengers: Doomsday, The Penguin, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, and more. He primarily writes about the latest box office numbers and the hottest movies and TV shows on streaming, while also covering superhero and sci-fi news. He has completed a set visit for The Chosen and even has several months of experience writing Gaming Features at ScreenRant. You can find him on X, LinkedIn, and Muckrack.

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HBO has had a monster of a year in 2026, with several new fantasy releases out of the Game of Thrones franchise earning millions of viewers week after week. The first Game of Thrones spin-off to win the hearts of fans around the world was A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, starring the gargantuan Peter Claffey as Ser Duncan the Tall and the young Dexter Sol Ansell as his inquisitive squire, Egg. The show has already been renewed for Season 2, and while it’s expected to premiere in the first half of next year, this has yet to be officially confirmed. The other Game of Thrones show that came back later in the year was the third season of House of the Dragon. The show will shoot its fourth and final season next year before it premieres in 2028.

Just because HBO has been heavy-handed with fantasy projects this year doesn’t mean the streamer isn’t still always looking to expand its arsenal. HBO is doing exactly that with its new Lincoln Lawyer replacement series, War, which arrives on October 1. This morning, HBO released the first official trailer for War, which hails from George McKay, the creator of the popular Netflix series, Lupin. Dominic West, who can be seen starring in both seasons of The Agency on Paramount Plus, also has a key role in HBO’s new legal thriller, along with Sienna Miller. The show will consist of eight episodes, and after the first episode premieres on October 1, new episodes will follow weekly every Thursday. Phoebe Fox and James McArdle also star in the show as Serena Byrne and Nicholas Taylor.

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 →

01

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 →

02

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 →

03

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 →

04

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 →

05

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 →

06

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 →

07

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 →

08

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

What Is ‘War’ About?

HBO has also released an official synopsis for the first season of War to go along with the new trailer. It reads as follows: “War is a high-stakes legal drama following the lives of London’s most powerful lawyers as firms Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne clash over a headline-grabbing legal battle, drawing ambitious young lawyer Jonathan “Johnny” Warren (Archie Renaux) into a ruthless world where ambition is currency, betrayal is strategy, and winning is everything. Season one follows the explosive divorce of British tech entrepreneur Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and international film star Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), as Cathcarts & Sons and Taylor & Byrne stop at nothing to secure victory for their clients.” The fate of the show beyond Season 1 has yet to be decided.

Check out the new trailer for War and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of the new HBO legal thriller.

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Release Date October 1, 2026

Network HBO

Directors Ben Taylor

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  • Cast Placeholder Image
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    James McArdle

    Nicholas Taylor

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