It’s been such a wild eighteen months or so that the idea of a Denzel Washington crime thriller being forgotten about almost completely in a matter of months sounds ridiculous, but that seems to be the fate to have befallen The Little Things, even if it did manage to open at the top of the domestic box office at the end of January.
The slow-burning mystery boasted plenty of talent, with Academy Award winners Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto starring as two cops and a potential murder suspect respectively. Leto did what he always does and fully immersed himself into his role, while Denzel went a little bit Method himself after revealing he would tail his co-star home without being noticed to prove to himself he was still capable of playing cop after all these years.
While Leto did manage to nab a surprise Golden Globe nomination for his performance, reviews for The Little Things were relatively muted across the board. It holds a middling 46% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the general consensus being that writer and director John Lee Hancock would have found much more success had he actually made the film in the mid-1990s when he first wrote the screenplay.
The Little Things came agonizingly close to recouping its $30 million production budget in theaters but fell short by less than $200,000, but it’s now rebounding on HBO Max more than five months after originally scoring a hybrid release on the big screen and streaming. At the time of writing, it’s currently the third most-watched movie on WarnerMedia’s platform, probably due to the well-known cinematic fact that people love watching Denzel Washington lend his talents to the crime genre.
