Emma Stone’s Twisted Sci-Fi Masterpiece Bugonia Has Found a New Audience on HBO Max

Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos have built one of the most distinctive creative partnerships in modern cinema. Their latest collaboration, Bugonia, may have struggled at the box office, but the bizarre science-fiction satire is now enjoying a second life on HBO Max, where it has become one of the platform’s ten most-streamed movies worldwide.

Stone, a two-time Oscar winner with one of the strongest filmographies of the 21st century, first became a major star through mainstream successes such as The Amazing Spider-Man, Birdman, and La La Land. Her career later took an increasingly unconventional turn when she began working with Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, a five-time Oscar nominee known for his distinctive approach to dark comedy and surreal storytelling.

Their first collaboration was The Favourite, the acclaimed period comedy that received 10 Academy Award nominations. Olivia Colman won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, while the film established that Stone and Lanthimos were a particularly effective creative pairing.

Bugonia Takes Stone and Lanthimos Into Stranger Territory

The partnership continued with Poor Things, the visually extravagant adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. Stone’s performance earned her another Academy Award, further cementing her status as one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed leading actors.

Their next project, Kind of Kindness, was considerably more experimental. The anthology film reunited Stone with Lanthimos and Jesse Plemons, another frequent collaborator of the director. Although the movie received a more mixed response, it demonstrated the filmmaker’s continued willingness to take unconventional approaches to storytelling.

Then came Bugonia in 2025, the fourth collaboration between Stone and Lanthimos to date. The film proved to be one of the year’s most ambitious science-fiction projects.

A remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 South Korean comedy Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia stars Stone as Michelle Fuller, a powerful CEO who is abducted by Plemons’ character. He believes she is actually an alien sent to Earth with the intention of destroying humanity.

That bizarre premise gives Lanthimos plenty of room to explore some much larger ideas. The film examines truth, conspiracy theories, social class, and the increasingly distorted ways people understand the world around them.

The Twist Is One of Bugonia’s Biggest Strengths

For all of its unusual ideas, Bugonia ultimately builds toward a finale that takes its premise even further. Its final twist has been widely regarded as one of the film’s most effective elements and has helped the movie stand out among recent science-fiction releases.

Collider’s Ross Bonaime gave the film an 8/10 in his review, praising the way Lanthimos expanded on the original concept. He described Bugonia as an essential film about contemporary life and the ways the world can sometimes feel both insane and hopeless.

The film’s appeal has apparently lasted well beyond its theatrical run. Roughly a year after its release, Bugonia is finding a significant audience through streaming. At the time of writing, it ranks among the ten most-streamed movies on HBO Max worldwide.

Bugonia Was a Box-Office Disappointment

The streaming success is particularly notable because Bugonia had a difficult theatrical run.

Lanthimos has earned a reputation for making boundary-pushing films on relatively modest budgets. For Bugonia, however, he received his largest budget to date, with estimates placing the production cost between $45 million and $55 million.

Despite that increased investment, the movie failed to recover its reported budget in theaters. Bugonia ultimately earned approximately $43 million worldwide, including $17 million from the domestic market and another $26 million internationally.

Its theatrical performance therefore fell short of expectations, but the film’s reception on HBO Max offers a very different picture. What initially appeared to be a box-office disappointment is now reaching a much larger streaming audience, giving Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos’ strange, ambitious sci-fi collaboration another chance to find viewers.