The Best Movies to Stream This Month (July 2026)

When Senra CEO Jordan Black was a SpaceX engineer, he took on the job of scaling up the company’s wire harnesses to support production of Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket. Wire harnesses are what they sound like: the internal electrical cabling that runs through a rocketship, car, plane, or tractor and becomes increasingly important the smarter those vehicles get. They’re bespoke, put together by technicians who are, functionally, experienced craftspeople. “I traveled all over the world to go visit wire harness companies,” Black told TechCrunch last month. “It really hasn’t changed since the Cold War era of wooden tables [and] manual processes.” Black and co-founder Benjamin Shanahan started Senra in 2023 to offer a more modern solution to vehicle manufacturers. Today, the startup is announcing a $65 million Series B round, co-led by Lowercarbon and Interlagos with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund, among others. Serna isn’t looking to take humans out of the handmaking process—at least not while robots find manipulating wires a challenge and relevant training data remains scarce. Instead, it’s turning to software tools and other forms of automation to modernize aspects of the traditional manual work. The company is benefiting from the surge of money into U.S. manufacturing, particularly the defense industrial base. While Black couldn’t disclose customers, he said they include builders of “anything from submarines and maritime vehicles, to defense vehicle systems on land, to launch vehicles, to satellites.” If it doesn’t sound immediately important, consider a recent wire harness disaster. In 2023, Boeing discovered that its Starliner spacecraft’s wiring was held together with flammable tape, forcing an expensive delay while the entire wiring system was redone. Black points to that experience as a reason to raise the standards for wire harnessing, using automated systems to track materials and engineering changes. “Having it all in the same software is probably the most important thing, because it’s all the little inputs that happen that can make a catastrophic change down the road,” he said. Senra uses Amp, a proprietary software platform, to standardize the inputs throughout the wiring process and produce a digital twin to guide its technicians, who are trained by the company in what Black says is the only federally certified wire harness training program. The company is also, as it scales, finding ways to automate more of the process. “It goes back to the Elon principle of, ‘automation is last,’” Black told TechCrunch. “We’re working on it now, but a lot of it the standardization and the foundation building that made SpaceX be able to scale something like rockets, which you could only build one a year if you were lucky, and now they do hundreds a year.” Senra — which, by the way, is “harness” spelled backwards, minus the “h” and “s,” because Black says the company takes the “horsesh*t” out of harnesses — produces 1,000 each month across two different factories and plans to increae production to 10,000 a month in 2027. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C. You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal. View Bio

Summer is firmly here and the temperatures are feeling borderline apocalyptic in much of the northern hemisphere. Why not avoid the angry sun and stay inside where it’s (hopefully) cooler and distract yourself with some of the best movies on streaming right now?Your choices are notably rich too. The spring hit sci-fi movie Project Hail Mary, about the global freeze threatening Earth as a result of the sun mysteriously going out, is now on Prime Video, after winning theater audiences over with the help of an adorable pile of pebbles. If, however, you want to embrace the flames, you’ll find some like minds in Avatar: Fire and Ash on Disney+, where a violent new tribe of Na’vi just want to see the world (well, a semi-sentient living moon) burn.If you instead find the heat hellish, then a double bill of Satanic panic might be more fitting. Both Ready or Not 2, also on Disney+, and They Will Kill You on Hulu tap into a previously unexplored yet surprisingly rich subgenre of “estranged sisters with melee weaponry killing murderous cultists”—insert the “weird it happened twice” meme here, but just go with it. Or if you prefer not to switch your brain entirely off for entertainment, there’s also the far more cerebral Archive or the dark dystopia of The Long Walk to take your mind off the unbearable heat.Here are WIRED’s picks of the best movies to watch right now.Project Hail MaryWaking up aboard a spaceship to find himself the only crew member still alive, amnesiac middle school science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) makes for an unlikely astronaut. Even worse, he’s Earth’s last hope for survival, sent out into space in search of a way to stop a strange phenomenon devouring the sun itself—and almost every other star in the sky. It’d be an impossible task solo, but luckily Ryland has back-up in the form of Rocky (James Ortiz), the first alien humanity has ever met, a five-legged stone creature who communicates in song.Adapted from the book of the same name by Andy Weir (author of The Martian), Project Hail Mary is a fantastic slice of survival drama and hard science fiction, but the real heart of the movie is Ryland’s and Rocky’s growing friendship. Prepare to fall in love with an excitable rock spider-thing—fist my bump, friends.Avatar: Fire and AshPicking up from 2022’s The Way of Water, human-soldier-in-a-Na’vi-body Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family are in mourning following the death of their eldest son Neteyam, leading wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) down a dark path. As the family struggles to stay together, the colonialist human forces led by Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) forge a deadly alliance with a warmongering tribe of fire-worshipping Na’vi ruled by the nihilistic Varang (Oona Chaplin)—who aims for destruction to spite the Na’vi’s god, Eywa. James Cameron’s almost inconceivably ambitious saga returns with a visually spectacular outing taking viewers through striking new regions of the lush jungle moon Pandora. Fire and Ash is no jumping on point, but thankfully you can binge the entire trilogy (for now; Avatar 4 and 5 are planned) on Disney+.Ready or Not 2: Here I ComeThe first Ready or Not from 2019 was something of a sleeper hit. A gory slasher with a sense of humor, it played with the fears and uncertainties of marriage and joining a new family, with bride-to-be Grace (Samara Weaving) caught in the murderous traditions of her fiance’s clan. This sequel, helmed by returning codirectors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, picks up right after that first film’s credit roll, leading to Grace’s reunion with her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton)—just in time to be swept into another murder game against a cabal of billionaires and aristocrats looking to fill a power vacuum left by Grace’s almost-inlaws. Schlocky, campy comedy horror, elevated by the presence of Sarah Michelle Gellar in an almost anti-Buffy role, Ready or Not 2 isn’t high art but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.They Will Kill YouIf Ready or No