Having successfully killed the Batman franchise with his disastrous second stint at the helm, Joel Schumacher’s next career move was always going to come under heavy scrutiny. Taking one of the least obvious routes imaginable, the filmmaker followed his abhorrent comic book blockbuster with sadistic serial killer thriller 8MM.
Penned by Seven scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, Nicolas Cage plays a private detective who gets drawn into a harrowing case when a widow discovers what appears to be a snuff film among her late husband’s belongings, with the PI tasked to discern whether the footage is genuine or not.
Partnering up with Joaquin Phoenix’s eccentric video store clerk, the unlikely pair enter the dark, disgusting, and depraved world of illegal pornography and on-camera murder. As you can imagine, a lot of critics were aghast at 8MM‘s harder edges, with many voicing their shock that it didn’t end up getting slapped with the dreaded NC-17 certificate.
If it had, then it probably would have flopped at the box office given that a 23 percent Rotten Tomatoes score didn’t exactly see it come highly recommended, so Schumacher must have been thanking his lucky stars 8MM ended up earning close to $100 million globally in spite of the pearl-clutching controversy.
Netflix subscribers seem to have uncovered a hidden penchant for watching Cage kick S&M enthusiasts square in the face, too, with the forgotten psychological chiller having become surprisingly dominant on the Netflix charts. Per FlixPatrol, 8MM has whipped its way back onto the platform’s worldwide rankings, and you’d never guess it was made by the same dude as Batman & Robin.
