‘Yellowjackets’ Season 4 Officially Comes Home This Week
Rohan Naahar is a News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he'll watch anything once.
He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
Sign in to your Collider account
One of the pandemic era's biggest cult classics is all set to conclude its run with a fourth and final season. The series in question, Yellowjackets, premiered to excellent reviews and strong audience reception in 2024, and launched the careers of several young stars while featuring a handful of veterans. The show, often compared to the 2000s-era classic Lost, has maintained a high critical standard throughout its run, although fan reception has been uneven in recent years. Created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, Yellowjackets has an overall audience score of 65% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The critics' score for the series, on the other hand, is perched at 92%. The aggregator website's consensus for the third season, which aired in 2025, reads, "Still at its very best when lost in the wilderness, Yellowjackets' third season is inescapably uneven but carried along effortlessly by its stronger elements." Inspired by a real-life incident in which a group of children survived for several weeks in the wilderness before being rescued, Yellowjackets unfolds in dual timelines. The first follows the teenage protagonists as they learn to survive after a plane crash leaves them stranded in Canada, and the second unfolds decades later, tracking the survivors as adults.
Featuring Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis as the adult versions of the characters in the first season, the show added Hilary Swank to the cast in Season 3. Meanwhile, the younger versions of the characters were played by Ella Purnell, Samantha Hanratty, Jasmin Savoy Brown, and breakout star Sophie Thatcher. Elijah Wood joined the cast in Season 2, while Joel McHale appeared in Season 3. The upcoming fourth season will welcome new cast members June Squibb and Molly Ringwald.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Is Your Biggest Horror Nightmare? Elm Street · Chucky · Scream · The Conjuring
Four horror franchises. Four completely different ways of scaring you. One waits until you fall asleep. One makes sure nobody believes you. One is already in your group of friends. And one is in the house with your family. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually watch horror, and find out which nightmare was built for you.
😴Elm Street(Freddy Krueger)
🧸Chucky(Child's Play)
📞Scream(Ghostface)
🕯️The Conjuring(The Warren Files)
01
Which horror scene makes you cover your eyes? Four classic images. One of them is worse than the others for you.
02
You are home alone and you hear a noise. First thought? Everybody has one. It arrives before you have decided anything.
03
Which horror movie rule would you break first? Everybody thinks they would survive. Almost nobody actually does.
04
Something genuinely frightening happens. What do you do? Not in a film. In your actual living room, tonight.
05
How do you actually watch a horror film? Be honest about this one. Nobody is checking.
06
Somebody offers you serious money. Which do you still refuse? The amount does not matter. There is one on this list you are not doing.
07
Which feeling stays with you a week after the film? Good horror does not stop when the credits do.
08
Something wakes you at 3am. What is the worst possibility? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your nightmare.
The Lights Just Went Out Your Nightmare Is…
Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what it would leave behind.
Elm Street
Your nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever won that particular argument.
- Freddy is horror's cruellest idea: a threat that lives in the one place you cannot guard, cannot lock, and cannot avoid forever.
- You are the one who is fine during the film and wide awake at two in the morning. Your own head is where this does its damage.
- These films understood exhaustion as a horror engine. The kids on Elm Street do not lose because they are weak. They lose because they are tired.
- You can lock every door in the house. You still have to sleep.
Chucky
Your nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it.
- Chucky works precisely because he is absurd. That is the trap: the more accurately you describe him, the less anybody is going to believe you.
- You are the one shouting at the screen because the characters are not listening. You know that feeling from real life too.
- The franchise is at its best when the adults in the room are the real obstacle, and you have met those adults.
- By the time somebody finally believes you, you will have handled most of it on your own.
Scream
Your nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them.
- Scream is the only one of these where the killer takes the mask off and turns out to be somebody who was at the party.
- You are the person who calls the twist out loud before it lands. You watch people the same way you watch films.
- The franchise made the rules of horror part of the plot, which means the survivors are the ones paying attention. You would be paying attention.
- Everybody is a suspect, including the person who just offered to walk you home.
The Conjuring
Your nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving.
- The Conjuring films are domestic horror. The house, the family, the perfectly ordinary room that quietly stops feeling ordinary.
- Your instinct is to get everybody into one room. Your fear is protective rather than personal, which is rarer than it sounds.
- This is the one franchise where belief is the weapon. The people who come through it are the ones who are not alone and refuse to be.
- Whatever is here did not come for you. It came for the household, and you are the one standing in the hallway.
The Show Introduced the World to Sophie Thatcher's Talents
Thatcher is by far the biggest breakout from the show's sprawling young cast. She has gone on to establish herself as a Scream Queen, with roles in movies such as The Boogeyman, Heretic, Companion, and more recently, Her Private Hell.
The final season of Yellowjackets arrives only a few months after a new BBC One adaptation of Lord of the Flies, written by Adolescence's screenwriter, Jack Thorne. The classic novel serves as a direct inspiration for Yellowjackets, which was rejected by HBO because the network wanted to focus on another teen drama, Euphoria. The 10-episode final season of Yellowjackets will debut on Paramount+ on November 20, 2026, and will conclude on January 22, 2027. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
- Release Date
- 2021 - 2026-00-00
- Network
- Showtime, Paramount+ with Showtime
- Showrunner
- Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco
- Directors
- Benjamin Semanoff, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Deepa Mehta, Eduardo Sánchez, Jeffrey W. Byrd, Liz Garbus, Scott Winant, Eva Sørhaug, Jamie Travis
- Writers
- Liz Phang, Sarah L. Thompson, Ameni Rozsa
-
Shauna Sadecki
-
Tawny Cypress
Taissa Turner
A wildly talented high school girls' soccer team become the unlucky survivors of a plane crash deep in the Canadian wilderness.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.