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The Mysterious ‘Path to Discovery’
Netflix has kicked the week off by announcing that their vaguely conceived, and poorly received, original title Red Notice has recorded ‘the biggest opening day’ in the streaming service’s history. What exactly this means is obscured slightly by Netflix’s notorious opacity about their own data, but it’s clear that, in its own terms, it’s had a strong start to life.
Red Notice stars Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, so you might be inclined towards an almost comical lack of surprise at its success. But despite its fire-power, I think there were a few things going against Red Notice. Firstly, it had top drawer and bankable stars, but ones who haven’t necessarily had a great pandemic era (by which I mean ‘stay at home, don’t go to the movies’ era) performance: Gadot’s Wonder Woman 1984 has grossed $166.5m from a $200m budget, Johnson’s Jungle Cruise took just $213.8m from $200m, and Reynolds managed just $70.3m from $70m with The Hitman’s Bodyguard’s Wife. There have also been some successes: F9, a fairly low-performing entry in an insanely financially reliable franchise, and Free Guy, which was a late-pandemic hit. But anyway, these are super expensive performers who are very saturated right now.
Secondly, Red Notice just feels very generic and, like a lot of streaming only content, arrived with next to no hype. I know that I saw the…
