Prime Video's New Star Wars Replacement Instantly Becomes The #1 Movie In The World

Published Sep 24, 2026, 12:06 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."

Prime Video just released the perfect Star Wars replacement for a variety of reasons, and the new movie has instantly come to lead streaming charts around the world. Star Wars is undoubtedly the biggest sci-fi franchise of all time. While it has mostly kept away from the big screen in the last few years, with Pedro Pascal's The Mandalorian and Grogu, which was released in 2026, being the first Star Wars movie since 2019's The Rise of Skywalker, the space opera franchise remained a streaming sensation. Disney+'s Star Wars TV shows carried the torch in the franchise's absence from theaters.

Ever since the first Star Wars movie by director George Lucas arrived on the big screen in 1977, the sci-fi franchise has inspired countless other sci-fi movies, TV shows, comics, and fan creations. The long list of projects directly inspired by Star Wars includes the comedic Spaceballs, James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy franchise for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ridley Scott's Alien, Keanu Reeves' The Matrix, Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon, and many more. Among the projects inspired by Star Wars is the Ali Hazelwood novel The Love Hypothesis, which was adapted as a Prime Video original movie leading global charts.

The Love Hypothesis Has Cracked Prime Video's #1 Formula

At the time of writing, The Love Hypothesis is the most-watched movie on Prime Video worldwide, according to data from FlixPatrol. The new rom-com was released on Prime Video on Wednesday, September 23. As such, by not only trending on the streaming service a day later, but also becoming Prime Video's most popular movie globally, The Love Hypothesis has cemented itself as an instant streaming sensation. The film's placement on the chart means that Prime Video's three most-watched movies around the world are all romances. The Love Hypothesis dethroned You+Me – Against the World, now in 2nd, with Ester Expósito's Drawn Together in 3rd.

The Love Hypothesis stars Riverdale's Lili Reinhart as Olive Smith, a biology PhD candidate, and a star from Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot movie franchise, Tom Bateman, as Dr. Adam Carlsen, a campus professor. The Love Hypothesis is currently trending on Prime Video as the streamer's #1 movie in a whopping 49 countries, as per FlixPatrol. Among those are Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and more. The Love Hypothesis is also the most-watched movie on Prime Video in the United States, where it leaves behind Jon Bernthal's The Amateur, 2026's Masters of the Universe, and more.

The Film Has Multiple Star Wars Connections

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The Love Hypothesis originally started out as a Star Wars fanfiction called Head Over Feet, also written by Hazelwood. The story followed the characters Rey Skywalker, played by Daisy Ridley in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and Kylo Ren, played by Adam Driver in the space opera franchise, in an alternate universe scenario. When the story was published in novel format as The Love Hypothesis, all Star Wars references were stripped and the characters renamed, though the book's cover features Olive and Adam designed after Ridley and Driver. Additionally, Ridley's real-life husband is Bateman, who plays Adam in the Prime Video movie, bringing The Love Hypothesis full-circle.