Gerard Butler is often pretty reliable as a leading man in the action genre, but unfortunately, nobody bought him as a satellite designer and retired astronaut in Geostorm, which tried to emulate some of the great disaster movies that Roland Emmerich has delivered to us over the years but instead turned out to be a poor imitation and wound up as a massive flop, both critically and commercially.
Meanwhile, Den of Thieves sees Butler in action territory as well and though it fared a bit better than the aforementioned movie, it was hardly what you’d call a hit. The pic sees a group of County Sheriff Deputies in LA taking on a gang trying to steal from the Federal Reserve. It earned about $80 million on a $30 million budget, but critics were pretty lukewarm on it and these days, it’s mostly forgotten about.
Oddly enough, however, both movies are now reaching a wider audience on streaming and seemingly go over much better than they did during their theatrical runs. Looper reports that Geostorm recently hit HBO Max and is now “finding new life,” while Den of Thieves has been troubling Netflix’s Top 10 chart lately.
Of course, despite their relatively poor performance when they hit theaters, both films are still perfectly enjoyable slices of action entertainment. Admittedly, Geostorm has a fair amount of issues – many of which are hard to overlook – but if you’re just seeking something that you can switch your brain off for, and generally enjoy the actor’s work, you’ll probably be mostly satisfied with these flicks.
In any case, it seems that Gerard Butler is proving to be a big draw no matter which platform he’s seen on, and you can bet that once his latest effort, Greenland, hits streaming, it’ll see similar success. Especially given that upon its initial release, it was pretty well received.
