When you spend $320m on a straight-to-streaming movie, you’d better not miss. Oops.
A week on from its Netflix debut, the Russo Brothers’ loose adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 novel doesn’t seem to be hitting the heights of the streamer’s biggest hits. The film’s been de-throned from the number one movie spot behind newcomer The Twister: Caught in the Storm – a feature-length documentary on the tornado which struck Joplin, Missouri in 2011.
That might seem like a harsh metric with which to judge a big budget, original sci-fi flick. But considering the streaming giant spent $320m on the Chris Pratt and Milly Bobby-Brown vehicle – making it by far the most-expensive streaming movie ever made – it’s a bar Netflix will presumably have been keen to clear.
Instead, despite rising to number one on the English-language film chart in 47 countries, The Electric State garnered just 25.2m views over its first week of release. The Russo’s previous headline-grabbing blockbuster – 2022’s $200m-budget The Gray Man – was watched an estimated 43.55m times in its first three days.
It’s not all bad news for the streamer’s original film department, though. The Twister is itself a Netflix original documentary, and something of a surprise success considering the complete absence of marketing budget thrown its way.
The bigger problem, though, is that neither film will do much to improve the streamer’s cinematic reputation. The Electric State has been near-universally panned by critics, currently standing at 15% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Twister, despite a healthy smattering of positive audience reviews, more closely resembles a middling Channel 5 doc (there’s a lot of talking heads saying things like ‘and then something terrible happened’ followed by dashcam shots of big clouds) than something likely to pick up an Academy award. Which is, y’know, fine – but it doesn’t make it good.
In a week where Apple TV+ is reportedly losing its parent company over $1bn a year in its pursuit of more thoughtful, high-quality TV and film output, it’s a grim reminder of what kind of “content” might provide streamers with the kind of numbers that lead to big bonuses for their accounts teams. Based on these figures alone, it would be a surprise to find the studio making a swing like The Electric State again any time soon.
