While The Fast and the Furious is regularly pinpointed as the breakout role that helped transform Vin Diesel into one of the modern era’s defining action heroes – which is entirely fair when you consider the 10th mainline installment (and 11th overall) is heading to theaters in a matter of weeks – David Twohy’s Pitch Black should never go unmentioned.
After all, the chrome-domed actor was hardly a household name when the cult favorite cosmic creature feature crash-landed in February of 2000, but his scene-stealing performance as the intergalactic convict displayed no shortage of screen presence, charisma, and indicators that we were witnessing a star-making performance in the flesh.
Dominic Toretto may have proven more lucrative, but Diesel has always given off the impression that he holds Richard B. Riddick closer to his heart, and that’s not just because the character headlined a bloated sequel that almost killed the franchise, a superior third installment, a pair of video games, a feature-length animation, and several other forms of tie-in media.
Nobody could have predicted at the time that an entire shared universe was on the cards, with fourth live-action chapter Furya finally gaining some real momentum after a decade of nothing but hearsay and wishful thinking, but it’s Pitch Black that’s been battling against alien interlopers on Netflix this week.
Per FlixPatrol, the B-tier escapade that finds a downed spacecraft dumped right into the middle of a hostile planet is one of the Top 10 most-watched flicks on Netflix in the United States, underlining that the Riddick renaissance is well and truly upon us.
