A star-studded treasure-hunting bomb better than anything ‘Indiana Jones’ has done in 30 years strikes gold on Netflix

With Kingdom of the Crystal Skull remaining one of the century’s most polarizing blockbusters and follow-up Dial of Destiny struggling to avoid a box office embarrassment that could lose Disney up to $200 million, it’s fair to say Indiana Jones has lost his luster. As a result, maybe it’s time to check out or revisit The Lost City of Z, a treasure-hunting archeological adventure that’s genuinely excellent.

Netflix subscribers seem to have taken the hint anyway, with FlixPatrol naming the overlooked and egregiously ignored bomb as one of the top-viewed features on the entire platform. Despite boasting a Certified Fresh critical approval rating of 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a star-studded cast full of recognizable names and faces, audiences ignored James Gray’s atmospheric biographical tale like the plague.

Even though it was made for a comparatively cheap $30 million, The Lost City of Z barely made it past $19 million in ticket sales in spite of Charlie Hunnam, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Harry Potter veteran Harry Melling, and Star Wars icon Ian McDiarmid all swinging by to say hello at one stage or another.

The riveting story finds Hunnam’s Percy Fawcett trekking deep into the Amazon to try and root out the bounty left behind by an ancient civilization that had gone undiscovered by history. Of course, his peers think it’s nothing more than a ridiculous flight of fancy, forcing him to go it alone in an effort to rewrite what the world knows about its own past.