This Pixar Prequel Is Quietly Climbing Hulu’s Top 10 as Its Franchise Plots a Long-Awaited Return

October has a way of reshuffling streaming charts. Spooky favorites rise, comfort rewatches follow, and family-friendly fright fare tends to sit right alongside the genuine horror picks as viewers look for something seasonal that still works for movie night.

Hulu’s movies chart is a good example this week. ‘Coraline’ holds the top spot, ‘Hocus Pocus 2’ jumped 4 places to number 5, and ‘The Substance’ is hanging around at number 9, a lineup that swings from kid-friendly to body horror without much warning.

Tucked into the middle of all that is ‘Monsters University,’ which climbed 2 spots to land at number 4 after just 7 days on the chart. Pixar’s friendly take on monsters fits the season perfectly, and it arrives at a moment when the franchise is back in the headlines.

The 2013 prequel, directed by Dan Scanlon, rewinds to the college years of Mike Wazowski and James P. Sullivan, showing how the two went from rivals to best friends. It outperformed the original 2001 film at the box office, pulling in 743.5 million dollars worldwide compared with 528.7 million for the first movie. That result helped fuel a follow-up series, ‘Monsters at Work,’ which ran for 2 seasons.

The renewed attention comes courtesy of a major franchise update from earlier this year. Pixar is developing a third film in the ‘Monsters, Inc.’ series, a project first revealed in a lengthy Wall Street Journal profile of the studio. The news arrived as Pixar’s chief creative officer Pete Docter, who directed the first film, laid out the studio’s plans for the years ahead.

Details are thin for now. There are no directors, writers, or stars attached to the project yet, and it is not currently known whether the new film will follow the original directly or take a different route, as ‘Monsters University’ did. The timing also lines up neatly with the franchise’s 25th anniversary, a milestone that reportedly marks the first full-length film in the series in over a decade.

The announcement was part of a broader Pixar roadmap. ‘Toy Story 5’ was set for June, ‘The Incredibles 3’ is dated for 2028, and a second ‘Coco’ movie is expected in 2029, showing just how heavily the studio is leaning on its most beloved properties right now.

That context makes a seasonal bump for ‘Monsters University’ feel well timed. Fans who might be curious about where Mike and Sulley’s story goes next have an easy way to refresh their memory on Hulu, and with Halloween approaching, a movie about monsters trying to be scary, and mostly failing, is hard to beat.

Whether the third movie goes back to the scare floor or ventures somewhere new, this week’s chart suggests the audience is still very much there. For now, a campus comedy from 2013 is doing the franchise’s heavy lifting, and doing it surprisingly well.