Quick TakeArticle at a glance
- This City of Blood review covers Hulu and Disney+'s new eight-episode vampire thriller, which dropped all at once on September 16, 2026.
- Spoiler warning: this review discusses plot details through the Season 1 finale of City of Blood, including how the season ends.
- Disclosure: we haven't watched City of Blood first-hand — this desk doesn't have a video pipeline for a straight-to-streaming foreign-language drop like this one.
This City of Blood review covers Hulu and Disney+’s new eight-episode vampire thriller, which dropped all at once on September 16, 2026. The verdict: it trades the alternate-history, fascist-vampire Berlin of its source graphic novel for a vaguer climate-collapse future — a real loss of specificity — but lands a genuinely sharp idea late in the season: Berliners voting for their own exploitation.
Spoiler warning: this review discusses plot details through the Season 1 finale of City of Blood, including how the season ends. It also separately flags spoilers for readers of the Berlinoir graphic novel the show is adapted from — those are marked on their own, since book readers already know things show-only viewers don’t.
Disclosure: we haven’t watched City of Blood first-hand — this desk doesn’t have a video pipeline for a straight-to-streaming foreign-language drop like this one. The plot facts below are cross-checked across multiple critics’ published accounts of the season; the thesis and analysis are ours.
What City of Blood Is Actually About
Sisters Bea Hoffmann (Lea Drinda) and Phoebe Kaya (Soma Pysall) were separated as children. Bea grew up privileged and chronically ill inside Berlin’s climate-controlled dome; Phoebe survived on the streets outside it, in a city cooking under climate change. Their reunion lands during a pivotal election, and drags them into the discovery that vampires already run Berlin’s organized crime — and are maneuvering for outright political power, with blood as the city’s real currency. All 8 episodes, each roughly 45 minutes, dropped together on September 16, 2026 — just 23 days after Disney released the official trailer on August 24, 2026.
What the Show Changed From Berlinoir
City of Blood is adapted from Berlinoir, the graphic novel trilogy Reinhard Kleist drew and Tobias O. Meißner wrote across three volumes between 2003 and 2008. The show keeps the vampires and the power-through-blood premise, but swaps the comic’s specific, haunted Berlin history for a generic climate-dystopia frame — and that trade costs the story something real.
Source-material spoiler note: the rest of this section compares the show to the graphic novel in detail. If you only care about the show, skip to the next section.
The comic’s Berlin isn’t a future city at all: it’s an alternate-history Berlin ruled by fascist vampires, built out of specific references to Weimar-era politics, the Cold War division of the city, and the real property speculation that reshaped Berlin after reunification. The show’s climate-collapse frame — heat, a domed enclave for the privileged, corruption outside it — travels to a global streaming audience more easily than an alternate-fascism premise would. But it does cost the story the thing that made Berlinoir specifically about Berlin, rather than about a vampire city that happens to be named Berlin. Coverage of the German premiere made the same point: the source’s dense web of historical reference doesn’t fully survive the trip to 2026.
More on Kleist and Meißner’s original trilogy is on Kleist’s own site.
The Performances Are Fighting a Fragmented Script
Critics who’ve sat through all eight episodes are split, and the split has a consistent shape: the two leads land, the show around them doesn’t always. Reviewing for Heaven of Horror, Karina “ScreamQueen” Adelgaard gave the season a 2/5 rating and put her finger on the structural problem directly.
“The vampire element is just one part of the plot… it all feels very fragmented,” she wrote, adding that the show spreads its attention across so many subplots that individual characters stop landing. That’s a real risk with an eight-episode, all-at-once drop adapted from a three-volume comic — there’s a lot of source material fighting for screen time, and not every thread earns its runtime. Where the reviews agree more is on Drinda and Pysall as the emotional center: giving Bea a chronic illness and Phoebe a survival instinct sharpened by the streets outside the dome gives both actors something to actually play against each other, rather than just standing in for “rich” and “poor.”
The Twist That Almost Saves It: the Blood Tax
The season’s smartest choice arrives in its back half. The vampires stop hiding in Berlin’s criminal underworld and start running for legitimacy — not through force, but through what the finale calls the “blood tax”: a legally enforced, publicly voted arrangement where citizens get protection from the climate collapse outside the dome, and vampires get a guaranteed, legal blood supply in return. By the finale, Berlin is closer to handing vampires the city through an election than losing it in a fight.
That’s a genuinely good idea, and a better one than most vampire shows bother with: it reframes the season’s political-thriller half as being about how citizens choose their own capture when it’s dressed up as safety, which is a sturdier hook than “the vampires are bad and must be stopped.” It’s also the one place the climate-dystopia rewrite pays off — a fear-driven democracy handing power to its own predators reads as more plausible in a heat-ravaged future than it would in Berlinoir’s alternate-history frame. The problem is how much fragmented plot a viewer has to sit through, by Adelgaard’s account and others, to get there. Fans of shows built the same way should also see our Preacher reading order, another dark, politically-charged graphic novel that made the jump to television.
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Where to watch | Hulu (US), Disney+ (international) |
| Premiere | September 16, 2026 (all 8 episodes at once) |
| Episodes | 8, roughly 45 minutes each |
| Based on | Berlinoir graphic novel trilogy by Reinhard Kleist & Tobias O. Meißner |
| Director | Philipp Kadelbach |
| Language | German, with English dub/subtitles |
| Leads | Lea Drinda, Soma Pysall |
Should You Watch It?
City of Blood is worth it for the political idea it lands on, even though it takes a fragmented eight episodes to get there and never fully replaces the specific, history-soaked Berlin that made Berlinoir sharp. If you want a vampire show trying to say something about how power gets handed over rather than seized, the blood tax twist is worth the wait.
If you go in expecting the comic’s alternate-fascist-history Berlin beat for beat, adjust your expectations first — this is a different, more generic city wearing the same premise. Genre readers who want more of that specific mature-horror-comics lane the source trilogy came from should also look at our best Vertigo comics ranking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is City of Blood based on a true story?
No. City of Blood is adapted from Berlinoir, a graphic novel trilogy by Reinhard Kleist and Tobias O. Meißner about a vampire-controlled alternate Berlin. The show moves that premise into a climate-collapse future rather than the comic’s alternate history.
How many episodes does City of Blood have?
City of Blood’s first season has 8 episodes, each roughly 45 minutes long, and all 8 were released at once on September 16, 2026.
Where can I watch City of Blood?
City of Blood streams on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ internationally, including the UK and Germany.
Is City of Blood in English?
No, City of Blood is a German-language production. It streams with English dubbing and subtitle options outside Germany.
Will there be a City of Blood season 2?
Disney and Hulu haven’t announced a Season 2 renewal for City of Blood as of this review. The Season 1 finale leaves the vampires’ political takeover of Berlin unresolved, which leaves room for a second season if the show is renewed.
