Psychological thriller Deep Water has been such a long time coming that stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas were a real-life couple during the entirety of production.
It would be safe to say that since moving on and entering new relationships, the duo probably don’t have much interest in going out of their way to promote Adrian Lyne’s steamy tale. Which is just as well, when Disney subsidiary 20th Century Studios have effectively buried the movie.
Originally scheduled for a November 2020 release, Deep Water kept getting pushed along the calendar, before ultimately being pulled from theaters altogether. It’s now set to hit Hulu on Friday, with Prime Video handling international distribution, and critics have been savaging the tired tale of romance gone wrong.
As you can see from the reactions below, Deep Water is hardly going to go down as a career-best for either of the two leads.
Given that it’s an adult-skewing genre film that boasts two recognizable and popular names taking top billing, Deep Water is virtually guaranteed to find a much bigger audience on streaming than it would have done on the big screen. Mid budget pieces that focus on plot and character above scale and spectacle are still dying a death at the box office two years on from the first wave of the COVID crisis, so on-demand is arguably the best place for it.
Reviews be damned, we’d feel fairly confident in saying that Deep Water will probably end up as the number one title on Hulu before we reach the end of the weekend.