Heated Rivalry Is Packing Movie Theaters — and Two More Seasons May Already Be Filming

A streaming romance just did a movie-theater number. Heated Rivalry's first season — all six episodes, screened in pairs — is in the middle of a limited theatrical run at Regal, AMC and Cinemark locations, and Deadline reported that 880 theaters collected $420,000 on Friday alone, on the way to a projected $1.3 million opening weekend. The series premiered on Crave on November 28, 2025, streams on HBO Max in the United States, and within a year made stars of Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. Now it is selling cinema tickets.

What Deadline reported

That may only be the start of it. Deadline reported on Saturday, citing its sources, that the series is filming two six-episode seasons back-to-back — the confirmed second season and a third that has never been announced — with production wrapping at the end of November or the beginning of December. As the seasons wrap, Deadline reported, a standalone Heated Rivalry film will shoot in December: a Christmas special, planned for a theatrical release next December.

According to Deadline's sources, the film is not about the show's central couple. Storrie's Ilya Rozanov and Williams' Shane Hollander are not in it, Deadline reported; the story centers on the other Season 1 couple, Scott Hunter, played by François Arnaud, and Kip Grady, played by Robbie G.K., with additional characters from the series appearing. There is source material waiting: Rachel Reid, whose Game Changers novels the series adapts, wrote a short story called Merry Christmas, Scott and Kip! about the pair's first Christmas together — a detail Page Six noted has quietly disappeared from her website.

What Crave says: nothing

Here is what is not confirmed: any of that expansion. A Crave representative told Deadline there are “no projects to confirm,” and Crave told Page Six the same on Saturday evening — “We have no projects to confirm.” Neither Crave nor creator Jacob Tierney has acknowledged a third-season pickup. The back-to-back report does have a paper trail of its own: Dylan Walsh, who plays Shane's father, let slip in a leaked Cameo video that the show was shooting 12 episodes in Canada — a number fans immediately read as two seasons' worth.

What is actually confirmed

The confirmed floor is substantial enough. Crave renewed the series for a second season in December 2025, with HBO Max returning as its U.S. partner. Tierney confirmed to Andy Cohen on SiriusXM that Season 2 runs six episodes, like the first — his answer to the 12-episode speculation — and the season is set to premiere in spring 2027, with April looking likely, Deadline reported. It adapts Reid's The Long Game and brings in a new couple from her novel Role Model: Harris Drover and Troy Barrett, played by Justice Smith and Charlie Gillespie.

Studios usually announce expansions. This one's receipts are announcing themselves — a TV season doing seven figures in cinemas while its network confirms nothing. Whether or not the third season and the film are real, the leverage already is: Heated Rivalry's audience has outgrown the screen it started on.