A career-killing dystopian disaster that recouped 2% of its budget braces for the end times on streaming

Few promising careers in modern Hollywood have fizzled out quite as quickly or spectacularly as that of Richard Kelly, who exploded onto the scene with Donnie Darko, only to deliver absolutely nothing of note ever since. His follow-up thriller Domino was a misstep, but dystopian disaster Southland Tales was virtually a career-killer.

Despite boasting an intriguing multilayered premise that saw the lives of several disparate personalities converge in Los Angeles in the face of an ever-growing nuclear threat, to say the end result lived to disappoint would be selling things exponentially short given the critical and commercial reception that greeted the film.

On a budget of $17 million, Southland Tales earned the princely sum of $374,743 from theaters, while critics and audiences were convinced that Kelly’s ambitiousness had quickly devolved into outright pretension. Incredibly, though, the filmmaker is still toying with the idea of a sequel, even if we’d wager there isn’t going to be any major studio willing to even entertain a pitch meeting.

And yet, perhaps due to its star-studded roster that features Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Kevin Smith, Justin Timberlake and many more, Southland Tales has embarked on a new adventure on streaming.

Per FlixPatrol, the legendary flop is currently one of the most-watched features on Starz, and it’s lasting legacy might just be the fact it marked one of the last times The Rock genuinely sought to challenge himself as an actor, which speaks volumes when it was released 17 years ago.