At the box office, and latterly on streaming, horror movies tend to be massively front-loaded and enjoy a bumper first weekend before fading into the cultural abyss. However, that hasn’t been the case with smash hit Netflix horror Blood Red Sky, which is on track to become the platform’s most successful German project by far after projections estimated the thriller at 30,000 feet is on track to reach 50 million subscribers in four weeks.
Positive buzz and strong word of mouth will have certainly helped, with Blood Red Sky reaching the top of the most-watched list just 24 hours after premiering on July 3rd, while a strong Rotten Tomatoes score of 81% will have convinced the skeptics that it wasn’t just another wild genre mashup with nothing to offer but gore, but a substantial story that does admittedly veer into some gonzo territory the further the story progresses.
A surprisingly heartwarming mother and son tlae bolted onto the framework of a hijacking actioner that additionally happens to feature a vampire on board a plane, Blood Red Sky was a perfect storm of B-tier genre madness burnished with A-list production values, the highest of high concepts and a couple of ferocious performances.
Almost every splashy Netflix original is guaranteed to at least put a small dent in the Top 10, but it takes a true phenomenon to stay there for any great amount of time, something Blood Red Sky managed and then some. Most titles would kill to make their way into 50 million homes, and you can probably bet pretty safely that a number of crazy pitches putting supernatural creatures in scenarios you’d never typically find them in will be getting made all over Hollywood.
