It may very well be a coincidence, but it can’t be overlooked that both the biggest box office hit on the planet and one of the most popular movies on the planet’s market-leading streaming service both share the same DNA, although there’s much more that Shark Bait has in common with Meg 2: The Trench.
Obviously, both of them revolve around a predatory shark circling ominously below the water to turn a raft of disposable humans into garbled remains, but we can’t overlook the fact that neither of them fared very well with critics. Shark Bait did fare marginally better than Jason Statham’s sequel, though, edging out its spiritual contemporary with a still-poor 30-to-27 Rotten Tomatoes score, but that doesn’t really matter when each of them has taken a sizeable bite out of audiences everywhere.
Per FlixPatrol, the former has smelled blood in the water and devoured its prey to become the seventh most-watched feature on Netflix’s global charts, another win from the shark specialists who made a point of noting that director James Nunn’s hybrid of horror and thriller hailed from “the executive producers of Great White and the 47 Meters Down series,” just to reinforce their credentials.
As the title implies, Shark Bait does in fact focus on a group of friends who become bait for sharks, with the rebellious youths stealing a couple of jet skis and heading out onto the open water, before a head-on collision leaves them injured, isolated, stranded, and in desperate need of medical assistance. A hungry killer will have to do instead, with the bespoke subgenre enjoying quite a moment in the sun.