Tom Hanks on the red carpetImage via Abaca/INSTARimages/Cover Images
With the sleeper hit drama-thriller film Pressure debuting on the PVOD market this week, fans of WWII-era storytelling are spoiled for choice. Pressure entered its home video era after having overtaken the 2025 movie Nuremberg at the domestic box office. It will now compete for attention with an epic new documentary series that’s nearing the halfway mark of its 20-episode run. The show is executive-produced by arguably the most popular WWII aficionado in the world, the Oscar-winning movie star Tom Hanks, who has headlined popular WWII movies such as Saving Private Ryan and Greyhound over the course of his career. Along with director Steven Spielberg, Hanks has also executive-produced three landmark narrative series centered on the conflict.
The most recent of these three series, Masters of the Air, had a reported price tag of $250 million and was released on Apple TV in 2024. It was released over a decade after The Pacific, which was released on HBO in 2010. The first, and arguably most acclaimed series that Hanks and Spielberg produced was Band of Brothers, which was also released on HBO. It served as a companion piece to Saving Private Ryan, which had swept the Oscars only a few years prior. Hanks’ latest WWII project is unlike anything he has ever done in the genre. We’re talking, of course, about World War II with Tom Hanks, the documentary series on the History Channel.
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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
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🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
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01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
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02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
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03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
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04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
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05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
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06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
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07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
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08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
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09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
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10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
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The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
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Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
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Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
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Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
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No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
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Here’s What Fans Can Expect from the 9th Episode of Tom Hanks’ Documentary Series
It premiered with three episodes on Memorial Day, and released episodes 7 and 8 on June 15. The show will return with its ninth episode on June 22. The episode will focus on Adolf Hitler‘s continued expansion into Joseph Stalin‘s Soviet territory after Operation Barbarossa, which was documented in the third episode. The official logline for the upcoming episode on the History Channel website reads, “The German Army fights to take Soviet oil fields and the city of Stalingrad.” New episodes of World War II with Tom Hanks are made available on the PVOD market a day after their premiere on the History Channel. According to FlixPatrol, the series is among the most popular titles right now on the domestic iTunes chart. Hanks is also working on the long-awaited sequel to Greyhound, while his son, Colin Hanks, is set to star in the WWII movie Lucky Strike later this month. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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