HBO's Unfinished 4-Part Sci-Fi Thriller Is Officially A Streaming Hit Before Reboot

Published Oct 2, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Felipe Rangel is a Movie and TV Journalist ScreenRant. He has been writing about movies and TV since 2021. Felipe joined ScreenRant in 2022, working across different teams, covering everything from breaking news to features to reviews and more. Felipe is a writer who is an avid film and TV fan, with superhero movies and series being his biggest passion. He graduated from college in 2019, having studied Journalism. Before college, he spent a month studying at the Oxford English Centre. His superhero knowledge expands to the comics, with his undergraduate thesis being "Politics Reflected In American Comics." HBO's four-season sci-fi series that ended up being cut short has now been resurrected on digital before the franchise is set to return with a surprising reboot. HBO's library of TV shows featured a few exciting sci-fi offerings. More recently, a release from James Gunn's DC Universe gave HBO its biggest genre project of the year. That would be Lanterns, which mixes cosmic superhero action with a grounded crime thriller feel from shows like HBO's own True Detective. Before Lanterns, HBO found success with sci-fi shows like His Dark Materials, as well as many others on streaming. On HBO Max's slate of releases are shows like Ridley Scott's Raised by Wolves, the emotional Station Eleven, and the Dune franchise spin-off series Dune: Prophecy. It is safe to say that HBO has an interesting roster of sci-fi series, and as Lanterns shows, it will keep growing with every new year. Among HBO's library of sci-fi shows is Westworld, the four-season sci-fi series from the minds of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, that perfectly mixed Western with dystopian sci-fi. Now, four years after Westworld season 5 was canceled, the show has become a hit on digital. HBO's Westworld Is Riding Back Up Streaming's Charts At the time of writing, Westworld appears as the 19th most-watched TV show on the Apple TV store in the United States, as per data from FlixPatrol. The show just re-entered the chart after being absent for a good time. When put together with the HBO sci-fi series' previous runs in the Apple TV store's Top 20 TV shows charts in the US, Westworld has hit 20 total days trending on the list. Given how it currently sits close to the bottom, only ranking higher than the dramedy series Gilmore Girls, there are two possible fates for Westworld on the chart. On the one hand, the four-season HBO hit series could end up falling off the chart soon. On the other hand, this could only be the start of Westworld's resurgence on the list, as there is plenty of room for where the sci-fi series could go. Right now, there are many huge shows ahead of Westworld on the Apple TV store in the United States. Some of those include the horror series From, Seth MacFarlane's hilarious live-action ted series, the Taylor Sheridan Western shows Marshals and Yellowstone, the serial killer thriller series Dexter, and many more. Criminal Minds stands at 1st. The Michael Crichton Classic Is About To Get Reinvented Again Image via MovieStillsDB Westworld was canceled back in November 2022. In the years since, fans of the sci-fi series have asked HBO to bring it back, as Nolan and Joy had planned a fifth and final season that never came to be. Instead, the Westworld franchise will come back in movie format. Warner Bros. Discovery is moving forward with a Westworld movie being written by David Koepp, who knows Crichton's work well, as he has penned multiple Jurassic Park movies based on the author's iconic dinosaur franchise, including 2025's Jurassic World Rebirth. While that does not arrive, HBO's Westworld is thriving on VOD. Release Date 2016 - 2022-00-00 Network HBO Showrunner Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy Directors Fred Toye, Jennifer Getzinger, Stephen Williams, Vincenzo Natali, Craig William Macneill, Anna Foerster, Craig Zobel, Hanelle M. Culpepper, Helen Shaver, Jonny Campbell, Michelle MacLaren, Neil Marshall, Nicole Kassell, Tarik Saleh, Uta Briesewitz, Lisa Joy, Meera Menon Writers Roberto Patino, Carly Wray, Ron Fitzgerald, Daniel T. Thomsen, Karrie Crouse, Wes Humphrey