A career-making sci-fi spectacular that ended up doing more harm than good mounts a streaming rebellion

Looking back, it wouldn’t be too harsh to say that District 9 was both the best and worst thing that ever happened to Neill Blomkamp.

The filmmaker exploded onto the scene with one of the most memorable feature-length debuts of the modern era, one that scored rave reviews from critics and a hugely enthusiastic response from audiences, culminating in a box office haul of $210 million on a $30 million budget that eventually parlayed into four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

However, the downside is that Blomkamp failed to recapture the magic while weaponizing the exact same themes and genre through Elysium and Chappie, before his ill-fated detour into horror with Demonic was savaged by critics, and it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of imagination to say the hype for his upcoming Gran Turismo is basically non-existent.

There’s still a sequel bubbling away on the back-burner, though, which felt increasingly inevitably looking at its creator’s flagging career, and there’s evidently an audience for the universe after District 9 re-emerged as one of the top-viewed titles on Paramount Plus, per FlixPatrol.

Once heralded as cinema’s newest wunderkind, Blomkamp never managed to realize that potential, but there’s still plenty of time for the undoubtedly innovative and inspired South African to remind everyone why he was such a big deal in the first place before he’d even turned 30, with District 10 standing out as the obvious candidate with which to prove himself all over again to the doubters and skeptics.