Taye Diggs romance 'His, Hers & Ours' leads a two-title Netflix Friday

A Taye Diggs Lifetime romance and a weekly Japanese seaside drama are all that's new today, but tonight is the last full day to watch roughly 50 licensed films, including Ex Machina, Hacksaw Ridge, and Pretty Woman, before a massive August 1 catalog drop lands tomorrow.

The pick of the day: Terry McMillan Presents: His, Hers & Ours

Terry McMillan Presents: His, Hers & Ours lands on Netflix today as the headliner of a quiet Friday, and it is the most recognizable name in the drop. The 2025 Lifetime romantic drama is a licensed catalog add rather than a Netflix Original, having already aired on Lifetime last November and circulated on Prime Video and hoopla, so this is a streaming-window expansion rather than a premiere. It is the latest entry in the "Terry McMillan Presents" strand that extends the author's Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back legacy into a run of Lifetime TV movies (Essence, Netflix Tudum).

What it is: A 1h28m, TV-14 romance directed by Patricia Cuffie-Jones, starring Taye Diggs as Darius, a widowed single father, and Lesley-Ann Brandt as Kelly, a chef and restaurant-owning single mother, with Aimee Garcia co-starring. When Darius catches his teenage daughter with Kelly's son, the two fiercely protective parents clash, then slowly fall into a secret romance of their own while their kids keep dating (Rotten Tomatoes, Lifetime Uncorked).
The reception: There is no critic consensus to cite, with zero professional reviews logged on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences are warm, though: Prime Video viewers give it 4.6 out of 5 and hoopla readers 4.4, against an IMDb of 6.3, and the dedicated Lifetime-recap site Lifetime Uncorked calls it a step above McMillan's earlier Forever, praising the leads' chemistry. This is comfort food that critics have ignored and fans have embraced.
Who it's for: McMillan fans after a Sunday-afternoon, wine-on-the-couch romance about messy, complicated Black professionals. The recaps flag several steamy scenes, so despite the TV-14 it is not family-movie-night material; it is a guilty-pleasure pick for anyone who wants Diggs and Brandt generating heat while their teenagers recoil in horror.

Also new today

The Vacation Principle

The Vacation Principle is a Japanese seaside romance premiering on Netflix globally today, with new episodes arriving weekly. Produced by Japan's ABEMA and originally titled Bakansu no Hosoku, it is a short-form series of 18 episodes running about 15 minutes each, following Midori (Kanna Hashimoto), who loses her job at a cosmetic surgery clinic and retreats to her late grandmother's seaside villa, where she meets Nishigami, a mysterious caretaker with a quiet sadness behind his gentle gaze (whats-on-netflix, MyDramaList). The hook is the cross-cultural pairing: Nishigami is played by South Korean actor Chae Jong-hyeop, who crossed over into Japanese drama with the hit Eye Love You, and fans of that J-drama and K-drama crossover lane are already buzzing about the match (Soompi). TV-14, breezy, and uncriticized so far, it is a light, low-commitment binge for romance viewers who want something gentle and pretty between bigger titles.

New episodes today

25 Years of You drops a new episode today, continuing its Friday weekly run on Netflix. The Japanese romantic thriller stars Hokuto Matsumura as a man who has secretly fixated on one woman for 25 years, a fixation tied to a brutal incident from their childhood, and it sits on the line between pure love and obsession. NTV airs it Saturdays in Japan and Netflix follows globally on Fridays; episode three, in which Matsumura's Sota becomes a murder suspect and infiltrates a birthday party to uncover a family's darkness, aired in Japan last Saturday and reaches Netflix subscribers today (Mantan Web). Ten episodes total, about 54 minutes each.

Leaving soon: today is the last full day for roughly 50 films

Today is your last full day to watch a large batch of licensed titles before they exit Netflix on August 1, and this is the moment to prioritize anything on the list you have been meaning to finish. The departures are confirmed on Netflix's own leaving calendar and tracked in full by whats-on-netflix and PCMag, and the August 1 cull is the biggest of the month.

The marquee films leaving tonight include Ex Machina (Alex Garland's Oscar-winning AI thriller), Hacksaw Ridge, Atonement, Pretty Woman, There's Something About Mary, Tootsie, Borat, Kindergarten Cop, the Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers duo plus Little Fockers, Chef, Everest, Lucy, American Gangster, Smokey and the Bandit, Splash, The Proposal, R.I.P.D., 27 Dresses, The Age of Adaline, A Million Ways to Die in the West, and Pixels. Whole seasons are going too: Home Improvement (all eight seasons), Hunter x Hunter 2011 (seasons one through six), and Midnight Diner (seasons one through three).

A separate heads-up for next week: the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy (Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3) leaves August 5, and Labyrinth departs August 7, so those are not urgent today but are worth a bookmark.

Weekend-watch pick: the August 1 catalog drop lands tomorrow

The thin Friday is a setup for a fat Saturday. Tomorrow, August 1, Netflix drops its customary first-of-the-month tidal wave of licensed films, and the quality bench is deeper than the addition list suggests (whats-on-netflix, Tom's Guide, Variety).

The prestige picks are the two critics' darlings in the batch. Nightcrawler (95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) is Dan Gilroy's tense Los Angeles thriller about a sociopathic freelance crime journalist, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, and Riz Ahmed, with an Oscar-nominated screenplay. Selma (99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) is Ava DuVernay's 1965 voting-rights drama with David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr., a Best Picture Oscar nominee. Both are the kind of acclaimed, library-essential films that justify a subscription check on their own.

For a marathon, the Fast and Furious collection lands all at once, covering the first seven films from 2001's The Fast and the Furious through 2015's Furious 7, and the Chucky horror collection arrives as a block, including Bride of Chucky, Child's Play 2 and 3, Curse of Chucky, Cult of Chucky, and Seed of Chucky. The wider drop also brings Clueless, Field of Dreams, Zero Dark Thirty, Speed and Speed 2, Marie Antoinette, Minions, Anaconda, and Elysium.

One more for Sunday: Best Medicine, a new series based on the long-running British show Doc Martin, arrives August 2 with Josh Charles as a brilliant Boston surgeon who develops a blood phobia and relocates to a quirky Maine fishing village, co-starring Abigail Spencer and Annie Potts.