Like in the Movies

Gaya sa Pelikula, released internationally as Like in the Movies, is an eight-episode Philippine boys' love web series produced by Globe Studios and directed by Jaime 'JP' Habac Jr. Episodes went up weekly on YouTube between 25 September and 20 November 2020, running between twenty-one and thirty-six minutes each, with dialogue moving freely between Filipino and English. Netflix added the series across Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan on 7 January 2021.

Karl Frederick Almasen, known as Archi, is an architecture student living alone in a flat his family pays for on the understanding that he lives alone. When freelance work dries up and the rent becomes a problem, he lets the room next door to Vlad Austria, a neighbour who is louder, blunter and considerably less concerned with what other people think. The arrangement is a fiction from the start: Vlad is introduced to Karl's parents as a cousin, then as a girlfriend's stand-in, and the lie keeps having to be extended. Adelaida and Mario Almasen visit more often than their son would like and ask questions he has no prepared answer for, Judit Austria watches her younger brother make decisions she cannot protect him from, and the neighbour Anna sees more than she says. What begins as an economic arrangement between two badly matched flatmates becomes something both of them have to decide whether to defend.

The series is unusual in its origins. It is presented as a prequel to a set of Wattpad teleplays of the same name that were never produced, so the version that reached screens is the earlier chapter of a story whose later chapters exist only as text. The run was structured as a straightforward weekly release with no paywall, and the Netflix pickup three months later brought it to viewers who had not followed the YouTube uploads as they went up.