Sydney Sweeney’s R-Rated Thriller Officially Becomes a U.S. Streaming Sensation

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Published Oct 18, 2026, 5:41 AM EDT

In over three years at Collider, senior author Jake has now penned over 3000 articles covering a wide range of TV and film for the resources, lists, utilities, news, and interview teams. Alongside interviewing stars such as Selin Hizli, Rose Ayling-Ellis, Harlan Coben, and Chelsea Peretti, Jake was lucky enough to visit the set of Aardman and Netflix's Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl in 2024, getting the chance to chat with four-time Academy Award winner Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham. Jake has also worked for other publications, including Agents of Fandom. You can also hear Jake every week as the resident film and TV journalist on Track Radio.

On the global Netflix charts, the popularity of Sydney Sweeney is evident. Her 2023 romantic comedy Anyone But You, based on the classic Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing, is currently one of the ten most-watched movies on Netflix globally. Sweeney stars in the movie opposite Glen Powell, with their partnership going viral during its theatrical run, eventually helping the film become the highest-grossing live-action Shakespeare adaptation of all time and the first rom-com since 2016 to cross both the $100 million and $200 million marks.

But such is the widespread popularity of Sweeney — for better or worse — this isn't the only one of her box office smash hits now proving a success on streaming. The Housemaid, an adaptation of Freida McFadden’s novel of the same name, made the move to HBO Max on October 9 and has immediately made its mark. The viral phenomenon, which also stars Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar, earned $400 million in global box office revenue against a reported production budget of just $35 million, despite going up against Avatar: Fire and Ash, Zootopia 2, and Wicked: For Good in theaters.

Less than a year on from the film's huge box office success, The Housemaid is now the most-watched movie on HBO Max in the U.S. In debuting in first place on the HBO Max top ten, The Housemaid dropped Kane Parsons’ directorial debut Backrooms into second. Other notable names currently in the HBO Max top ten are the 2026 horror gem Evil Dead Burn, the stop-motion classic Coraline, the beloved horror adaptation The Shining, the disastrous 2026 summer box office flop Supergirl, and more.

Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic

Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.

🍂Harry & Sally(1989)

🏀Love & Basketball(2000)

🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)

🚢Titanic(1997)

FIND YOUR ROMANCE →

How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.

AWe are friends for years before either of us says anything. BWe want the same thing and neither of us backs down. CNobody can know, including our closest friends. DOne look across a room and everything changes.

NEXT QUESTION →

What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.

AWhether this is actually happening, and what to call it. BWhose career comes first this year. CWhether we will ever be honest about this in public. DNothing small. When we fight, it is about everything.

NEXT QUESTION →

How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.

AI remember every single thing they have told me. BI show up to the things that matter to them. CI keep their secrets like they are my own. DI would give up something enormous for them.

NEXT QUESTION →

What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.

ATiming. We keep finding each other at the wrong moment. BAmbition. We both want big lives and they do not match. CThe world. It is not safe to be open about this yet. DEverybody around us has decided this cannot happen.

NEXT QUESTION →

Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.

ASomebody running across a city to say it before midnight. BSomebody in the stands who stayed until the very end. CA look across a crowded room that nobody else catches. DSomebody promising to hold on, and meaning it.

NEXT QUESTION →

What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.

AA friendship I could never get back. BThe plan I have had for my life since I was a kid. CMy privacy. All of it would become public. DEverything. I would not think about it for long.

NEXT QUESTION →

Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.

AStill talking. We have never run out of things to say. BBuilding something together, both of us still ambitious. CFinally open about it, after years of being careful. DApart, and I still think about it constantly.

NEXT QUESTION →

Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.

AI would rather talk to you than anybody else, forever. BI am not giving up either of us. We find a way to have both. CThis is mine, and I am not explaining it to anyone. DI would do the whole thing again, even knowing how it ends.

REVEAL MY ROMANCE →

Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…

Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.

Harry & Sally

You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.

When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.

Love & Basketball

You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.

This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.

Heated Rivalry

The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.

Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.

Titanic

You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.

Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

'The Housemaid' Will Return Next Year

Following the success of the first film, the green light was given to adapt McFadden's sequel novel, The Housemaid's Secret. Scheduled to hit theaters on December 17, 2027, the sequel will be directed by Paul Feig and written by Rebecca Sonnenshine, with an exciting lineup of new faces joining a returning Sweeney and Michele Morrone. This includes Paul Anthony Kelly, Stephen Kalyn, Kirsten Dunst, and The Hunting Wives star Brittany Snow.

The Housemaid is now the most-watched movie on HBO Max in the U.S. Make sure to stay tuned to Collider for all the latest streaming stories.