Beware Boiúna (2026): Release Date, Where to Watch, and What a Boiúna Is

The Boiúna is a serpent from Amazonian Indigenous folklore in Brazil. It is also known as the Cobra Grande, meaning "large serpent," and as Mboiaçu.

In the folklore it is a nocturnal black snake and the most powerful creature of the Amazon's rivers. It is a shapeshifter, and the forms it is described as taking are mundane rather than monstrous: a canoe, a sailboat, a woman. The point of those forms is that they lure or frighten fishermen who enter its stretch of water. It functions as a territorial guardian of the rivers and as a cautionary figure about where people should not go.

The film's own logline refers to the creature as "her," which is consistent with the folklore rather than a departure from it.

This is worth stating clearly because the film is not a Brazilian production. The legend is Brazilian and the story is set in Brazil, but Beware Boiúna is a German, American and Colombian co-production from Constantin Film and JB Pictures, and it was shot in Colombia. That does not make the film illegitimate. It does mean that if you are looking for Brazilian horror specifically, this is not that, and it is better to know before buying a ticket.

The film went into production as Titan. Lionsgate then retitled it Boiúna: Legend of the Amazon, and later retitled it again to Beware Boiúna, confirming the October 2 date at the same time.

The practical consequence is that searching for this film is unusually messy. Moviefone still hosts it under a /movie/titan/ URL. Coverage from earlier in 2026 refers to it as Boiúna: Legend of the Amazon. Anyone who read about a Lionsgate giant snake film called Titan and went looking for it later would have a hard time confirming they had found the same movie.

They are the same film: Titan, Boiúna: Legend of the Amazon and Beware Boiúna are one Mike P. Nelson creature feature releasing October 2, 2026.

Beware Boiúna is in US theaters from October 2, 2026. Rotten Tomatoes lists the release as limited rather than wide, so screen count is likely to be modest and availability will vary by market. Checking a local listing before travelling is sensible.

There is no announced streaming date, no announced digital rental date, and no announced streaming partner. Lionsgate titles have historically reached digital rental within a couple of months of a theatrical run, but the company has not committed to anything for this film and we are not going to publish a guess as though it were a date.

This page and the film page will be updated the day a digital or streaming date is announced.

The MPA rated it R for bloody violent content, some grisly images and language, so the film is not withholding blood. What that rating does not tell you is whether it is frightening, and those are separate questions.

Creature features sit at the widest point of that gap. A film can be gory and tense without ever being scary, and a giant-animal premise can play as an adventure, a survival thriller or genuine horror depending entirely on execution. TMDB classifies this one as action, horror and thriller at once, which reflects the ambiguity rather than resolving it.

Our five axes exist to separate those measurements. We have not scored Beware Boiúna, because we score only after watching. Once we have, the Fear, Gore, Atmosphere and Intensity values will be published on the film page, so the "is it actually scary or just bloody" question gets a number rather than an adjective.

No runtime has been announced, and no trailer has been released.

Mike P. Nelson directed The Domestics, the 2021 Wrong Turn reboot, and a Silent Night, Deadly Night remake in 2025. He co-wrote Beware Boiúna with Alan B. McElroy, and that pairing is the most informative credit on the film.

McElroy wrote the original Wrong Turn in 2003 and returned to write Nelson's 2021 reboot. His screenwriting debut was Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, which he completed in under eleven days ahead of a Writers Guild strike. Nelson and McElroy are therefore a team with a track record in exactly this register: people who go somewhere remote and are hunted there.

Production ran in Leticia, Colombia, the country's gateway city to the Amazon, from late October to December 2024. Roughly half the cast is Colombian, with Juan Pablo Shuk of Narcos and Jaime Newball among the local leads. Constantin Film, the German studio behind the Resident Evil film series, produced alongside Jeremy Bolt and Robert Kulzer.

For the two horror-native leads: Kiana Madeira played Deena across Netflix's Fear Street trilogy, and Jessica Rothe played Tree Gelbman in Happy Death Day and its sequel.