An obnoxious star-studded sci-fi deservedly savaged by critics and shunned by crowds staves off streaming extinction

Stacked casts and sky-high concepts aren’t necessarily a guarantee of quality, but there’s been enough occasions where it’s proven to be enough to drag an otherwise-mediocre movie across the finish line into something either serviceable or successful. Then there’s The Watch, which proved to be neither.

Tonally confused from the very beginning to the second the credits come up, marrying a story of street-level alien invasion to gross-out comedy – replete with some of the most relentlessly blatant product placement this side of I, Robot – ensured that the impressive sum of its parts were completely and utterly wasted.

Directed by The Lonely Island‘s Akiva Schaffer, co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, produced by Shawn Levy, and boasting Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, and Richard Ayoade as its quartet of leads who take matters into their own hands when extraterrestrial interlopers begin to mount an earthbound infiltration on their local patrol route, it’s almost impressive how terrible The Watch turned out.

A 16 percent Rotten Tomatoes approval rating, 39 percent audience score, and a substantial loss for 20th Century Fox after failing to clear its $68 million in ticket sales was probably what it deserved, but big names and broad conceits are irresistible to streaming subscribers, proven for the umpteenth time by The Watch overcoming its reputation as one of the worst and most entirely forgotten studio comedies of the modern era by securing itself a spot on the iTunes worldwide watch-list this week, per FlixPatrol.