Eric Goode's third documentary series, Monsters of God, premiered on HBO on 6 August 2026 — a Thursday night slot for a project that won the TV Premiere Audience Award at this year's SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin, Texas (Deadline).

Goode is the filmmaker behind Tiger King (2020) and Chimp Crazy (2024), two docuseries that turned exotic-animal trading into mainstream television events. Monsters of God is his first for HBO, produced by Goode Films and A24 in association with Central Pictures (The Hollywood Reporter).

The series traces the global reptile trade through four dealers — Anson Wong, Mike Van Nostrand, Tommy Crutchfield and Hank Molt — each of whom appears on screen. But the title, Goode told The Hollywood Reporter, is a bait-and-switch. "Monsters of God" sounds like it refers to the animals. It refers to the people.

Goode borrowed the phrase from David Quammen's 2003 book Monster of God, which examines four apex predators — lions, tigers, crocodiles and bears — and the humans who live alongside them. Goode and Quammen both sit on the board of directors of the Rainforest Trust, a conservation organisation (The Hollywood Reporter). In one moment in the series, reformed reptile trafficker Tommy Crutchfield calls the serpents "these Monsters of God" — a line Goode says he did not plant.

Jeremy McBride serves as showrunner and executive producer. The credit list also includes Josh Safdie among roughly a dozen executive producers, Ronnie Bronstein as an executive producer, and producers Tom Petersen, James Liu, Callie Barlow and Lissa Rivera (Deadline; SXSW).

McBride also surfaces on screen with a detail that connects the reptile world to a far bigger story. The venomous Gila monster's glands, he notes in the series, were extracted and used in the early development of GLP-1 drugs — the class of medications that includes Ozempic and Wegovy (The Hollywood Reporter).

Goode's previous work has crossed from observation into real-world consequence. In 2024, during the making of Chimp Crazy, Goode informed PETA that the subject Tonia Haddix was planning to euthanise the chimpanzee Tonka to avoid legal retribution. The primate was subsequently relocated (The Hollywood Reporter).

The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg reviewed Monsters of God on 5 August 2026, the day before premiere (The Hollywood Reporter). For audiences who found Tiger King through its cast of bigger-than-life characters, Goode's new series offers a familiar shape: people on the margins of a sprawling, unregulated trade, filmed with the access that has become his signature.