Hulu has added two movies this week that land on opposite ends of the tone scale: Catch Me If You Can and Never Change! Both are now streaming, giving subscribers a familiar star-driven thriller and a new comedy in the same window.
The timing matters because Hulu keeps drawing viewers who want something immediate from a service that blends new releases with older favorites. This week’s additions fit that pattern neatly. Catch Me If You Can stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, while Never Change! brings a newer ensemble comedy to the lineup after premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival at the beginning of the month.
Catch Me If You Can, released in 2002, is still the bigger marquee title. It is based on Frank Abagnale Jr.'s 1980 autobiography and follows the fast-talking teen who claimed to be a pilot and a doctor in the 1960s while Carl Hanratty, an FBI agent, stayed on his trail. Christopher Walken plays Frank's small-time criminal father, and John Williams wrote the score, all of which helped make the film one of the most polished studio thrillers of its era.
But the movie's true-story label has always carried a catch. The real-life version of Abagnale's exploits has been widely questioned by experts over the years, leaving the film to sit in a familiar Hollywood space where fact and folklore overlap. That does not make it less watchable. It does make it a little more complicated than a simple biographical caper.
Never Change! shifts the focus to a very different kind of disruption. Set in 2008, it follows Sunny, Katie and the rest of their small class after a tornado shuts down North Meadows High School during the final weeks of senior year. Almost 20 years later, the former students learn they must finish the last two weeks of high school or lose their diplomas, a premise that gives the film its comic engine. Topher Grace appears in the movie wearing a deliberately hideous wig, which fits the broad, offbeat style viewers may recognize from Wet Hot American Summer.
For Hulu, the pair is a useful reminder of how the service uses film additions to keep the menu moving. One title is a classic '90s-era crowd-pleaser in the way The Remains of the Day is still treated as a benchmark drama; the other is a fresh comedy that only just moved from festival play to streaming. For John Reynolds, who plays Sunny, the hook is plain enough: a class that was forced to stop, then called back nearly 20 years later to finish what was left undone.
