A joyless video game reboot denounced by its owners that was still better than its catastrophic predecessor answers a streaming distress call

Rebooting a bad movie is always a lot safer than reinventing a classic for obvious reasons, with the team behind Doom: Annihilation presumably thankful the bar had been set so low almost a decade and a half previously by the iconic video game franchise’s first stab at live-action.

Starring Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, and Dwayne Johnson, 2005’s Doom was memorable only for its first person shooter sequence and nothing else, with an 18 percent Rotten Tomatoes approval rating and swift implosion at the box office about what it deserved, with The Rock’s Razzie nomination the icing on the cake.

However, writer and director Tony Giglio was always fighting an uphill battle to win over the skeptics after Doom creators and owners id Software actively distanced itself from his project with a succinct “we’re not involved in the movie,” which says it all. Regardless, Annihilation did at least turn out to be better than its forebear, but that’s hardly a mark of high praise when the first version sucked insurmountably hard.

That being said, a 43 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes may be over twice as high as the first Doom, but a 15 percent audience average is less than half of what its predecessor accrued, so there’s really one shoe on either foot when it comes to the film’s merits. Despite that, streaming subscribers have opted to give it a shot, with Annihilation currently one of Rakuten’s most-watched features, per FlixPatrol.

Two Doom movies is more than enough at this stage, unless of course Doom Guy himself wants to get in on the action one day.