A24’s Pillion, the Harry Lighton-directed BDSM romance starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgard, is the runaway top film on HBO Max nine days after its June 5 U.S. streaming debut, holding a 99 percent critical-reception score on Rotten Tomatoes and a viewing-hour lead over the platform’s existing acquisitions that would have looked unusual for an A24 indie of any vintage.
The film, adapted by Lighton from Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 Booker-shortlisted novel Box Hill, follows Colin, a timid London parking enforcement officer played by Melling, as he enters an intense, structured BDSM relationship with Ray, a charismatic biker played by Skarsgard. Lighton, whose previous credits run to Sundance short films and a New York Times Magazine essay on contemporary queer dating, makes his feature directorial debut with the project. Collider reported the film became HBO Max’s most-watched A24-distributed acquisition this calendar year within 72 hours of its streaming launch.
The streaming surge follows a deliberately staggered theatrical-to-streaming rollout that A24 used to extract two distinct critical-reception waves. After Pillion’s Cannes Film Festival premiere in May 2025 drew a six-minute standing ovation and the Camera d’Or jury’s runner-up nod, A24 opened the film February 6, 2026 on 88 screens in New York and Los Angeles, expanded nationwide February 20, and held off the streaming launch until the late-spring queer-cinema-discoverability window. Screen Rant reported an unrated cut is available alongside the theatrical-version stream, with HBO’s Sunday linear premiere having drawn 1.2 million live viewers on June 6.
For Melling, who Potter audiences remember as a child-actor Dudley Dursley, Pillion is the latest in a stretch of unusually-cast adult roles he has taken since The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and The Old Guard. The Mars-Jones source novel offers him an interior, slow-build first-act stretch the actor has called the closest he has been to the source material that originally drew him to the project. Skarsgard, fresh off his Big Little Lies run and the 2024 Murderbot HBO limited series, leans into a quieter, slower mode than his Northman-era physical work.
The film’s success on HBO Max also lands inside an unusually busy stretch for A24’s theatrical-and-streaming pipeline. The studio has spent 2026 quietly leveraging its Apple TV+ output deal for prestige drama while keeping queer-cinema and horror-leaning projects on HBO Max where Warner Bros. Discovery’s audience model has been more receptive. The Last of Us Season 3, which adds Patrick Wilson and Jason Ritter to Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby per our coverage of the casting, is the platform’s tentpole drama; Pillion sits as the indie counterprogramming.
The streaming surge also intersects with the broader Warner Bros. Discovery corporate moment. The cleared Paramount-Warner merger, which we covered when the DOJ green-lit the deal without conditions, has left HBO Max with a sharpened need to demonstrate distinctive curation as it heads into the consolidation cycle. Pillion’s reception, which has now extended to a streaming-weekend record for an unrated A24 release, gives the platform a story to tell about its 2026 acquisitions strategy.
Lighton has spent the week since the streaming debut on a UK and US press tour, with stops at NPR, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and a New York Film Festival co-sponsored conversation with Mars-Jones at Lincoln Center. He told Colbert his next project is an adaptation of the 2024 Andre Aciman novella The Gentleman from Peru, with Pillion’s casting agent Lucy Pardee attached. A24 has not yet confirmed.
Pillion is streaming on HBO Max in both its theatrical-version cut and the unrated version. Melling and Skarsgard are both attached to the project’s Q4 awards-season push, with A24 expected to make both performers a center of its Best Picture campaign. The film opens in additional international markets across Europe and Asia through July 2026.
