The Internet Is Hate-Watching Netflix’s Newest Original Movie

Michael M. Scott’s Dangerous Lies is #1 on all the Netflix charts, but a cursory glance at Twitter shows that most viewers are just hating on it. And they’re not being gentle, either.

The film was only released on April 30th, but already seems to be growing into the most watchable terrible movie phenomena of recent memory, which may come as a surprise given its less notably poor Metacritic score of 49% at the time of writing. Most viewers are finding it to be pretty unbearable, too, and you can see below for but a sample of what folks are saying about it over on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/durham_tarah/status/1257505942477910019

https://twitter.com/evalution_music/status/1257500405891837954

https://twitter.com/WKoewing/status/1257494984514625541

https://twitter.com/RoKnows/status/1257493233078132737

For those who haven’t seen it yet, the plot follows a caretaker struggling with steep bills played by Camila Mendes, whose wealthy elderly client dies and leaves all his worldly possessions to her, thrusting her into a tale of confrontation, manipulation and death, as she and her newfound fortune become targets. The setup may seem oddly familiar to those who’ve seen Rian Johnson’s Knives Out.

Yes, that means that despite the director’s name, it’s sadly probably not the sequel to Threat Level Midnight that some may have hoped for it to be. If nothing else, it at least deserves some kind of credit for supplanting political discussions as the most popular subject when searching Dangerous Lies on Twitter. And in a presidential election year, no less.

The film’s unorthodox success also raises questions about how enjoyably bad movies may have an unlikely home in the streaming age. Green-lighting a film to appeal to the small niche of people that ironically enjoy awful pics would probably seem like madness to traditional studios and distributors since most viewers would never pay upfront to see something they know they’re going to hate.

But if these movies are created for streaming services that many folks already subscribe to anyways, they may draw enough eyeballs to warrant creating more. Dangerous Lies may herald a new trend for Netflix originals, then. But if not, it’ll at least be something fun to laugh at.