With the exception of niche services like the horror-centric Shudder or DC Universe, the latter of which looks like it could be on its way out anyway, all of the major streaming services pride themselves on offering a wide array of content from almost every genre, which is pretty understandable when the name of the game is to scoop up as many paying customers as possible.
The streaming wars have only started to really heat up over the last couple of years and it seems the idea is to give subscribers a buffet of options that tick every conceivable box depending what they’re in the mood for at any given time. Of course, Netflix is still the leader in this regard and they’ve added three movies today that perfectly exemplify this approach, as they couldn’t be any more different.
Tom Hooper’s 2012 adaptation of Les Miserables was precision-engineered as a crowd-pleasing awards season contender, and on that front it succeeded after raking in over $441 million at the box office and landing eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, while managing to walk away with wins in the Best Supporting Actress, Best Makeup and Hairstyling and Best Sound Mixing categories.
2003 British comedy Johnny English also arrived today, with Mr. Bean‘s Rowan Atkinson playing the hopelessly inept title character in a spoof of the spy genre. The movie would go on to spawn two sequels over the next fifteen years and while neither of them fared particularly well with critics, the franchise nonetheless managed to earn almost half a billion dollars globally.
Today’s final addition, meanwhile, is forgotten YA blockbuster Seventh Son, which boasts a star-studded cast including Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Ben Barnes, Kit Harington and Djimon Honsou. The $95 million fantasy epic sat on the shelf for two years before being dumped into theaters in February 2015, where it promptly bombed after bringing in just $114 million.
It seems unlikely that any of these three will be troubling Netflix‘s Top 10 given how much other exciting new content has been on the platform lately, but it does at least reaffirm their commitment to gathering up a huge array of diverse titles to appeal to almost every taste.
