An atrocious historical epic pulled from 5000 theaters 24 hours before release that flopped anyway seizes the throne on streaming

Hollywood stars pitching up in miscellaneous Chinese blockbusters has become increasingly common over the last decade, as anyone unfortunate enough to have played a part in launching Hidden Strike to the top of the Netflix charts will know, but few are more bizarre than 2014’s Outcast.

The mere suggestion that a historical epic directed by the person who trained Russell Crowe to become a master swordsman in Gladiator that stars Nicolas Cage and Hayden Christensen as a pair of mercenaries broken by the Crusades being drafted in to help a fugitive prince and his sister defeat their older brother and seize the throne even exists sounds insane enough, but it turned out to be even worse than anyone could have imagined.

Of course, a four percent Rotten Tomatoes approval rating hardly makes it the worst thing Cage lent his name to throughout the 2010s, but that says more about him than the quality of Outcast. Initially scheduled to hit Chinese cinemas in September 2014, the film was pulled without warning from over 5000 theaters the day before it was due to premiere, which proved to be little more than a stay of execution.

Eventually landing in April of the following year, Outcast promptly tanked catastrophically to barely cross $5 million in ticket sales, so maybe it would have been better off permanently shelved. Either way, subscribers to ad-supported streaming service Freevee have decided to give it the time of day, with FlixPatrol outing it as one of the platform’s top-viewed titles, but those are 99 minutes of their lives viewers will never get back.