On the surface, an uninhibited R-rated comedy that never saw the inside of a theater and could only scrape together a Rotten Tomatoes score of 57 percent doesn’t sound like the type of movie that would create a franchise, but here were are with Vacation Friends 2 having released this past Friday.
The opening installment wasn’t particularly inspired, or even remotely exciting, but it must have done a fair bit of viewership business on Hulu for Disney subsidiary 20th Century Studios to get the band back together and make another one, even if whatever magic the first one possessed – if there was any at all to begin with – appears to have evaporated second time around.
Faring over twice as worse on the aforementioned aggregation site by way of a 24 percent score, being measurably inferior to its already lackluster predecessor hasn’t done a thing to dissuade subscribers that seeing John Cena and the crew engage in more slapstick antics is the ideal way to whittle away 105 minutes of a lazy weekend.
Per FlixPatrol, Vacation Friends 2 bizarrely hasn’t cracked the Top 10 most-watched list on Hulu in the United States, but it has achieved the feat on Disney Plus after being made available to international subscribers both in Europe and and Asia, while it’s hit number one everywhere in South America thanks to the Star Plus expansion.
Does this mean we’re getting a third one? Hopefully not, but it can’t be ruled out after Vacation Friends and its sequel overcame critical apathy to become certified successes on-demand.