Netflix has been desperate to build as many in-house franchises as possible, and while the streaming service has definitely found success in terms of viewership figures, the quality hasn’t exactly been too great. That could be about to change in the near future when Heart of Stone premieres on August 11, especially when director Tom Harper is taking thinly-veiled shots at the greats.
Red Notice – the platform’s most-watched original movie ever – didn’t fare particularly well with critics, and neither did the eye-wateringly expensive The Gray Man. Nobody even remembers The Red Sea Diving Resort, so it’s not as if there’s a massively high bar that the Gal Gadot-fronted blockbuster needs to clear.
Harper certainly talks a good game, though, after voicing his opinion to Entertainment Weekly that there’s room at the top table for his would-be multi-film saga on account of the biggest brands in the business getting a touch long in the tooth.
“There were a couple of things that immediately jumped out at me, the first was that it was an original movie in a genre that is full of great franchises, but things that have been around for a long time — the Mission: Impossibles or the Bonds or the Bournes, I love those films, but they’ve all been around for decades, so working on something that was an addition to that genre but an original piece of material felt really exciting and was a real opportunity. And I also just loved the fact that it had a female protagonist at the heart of it.”
In even more galling news for trolls and basement-dwellers, it’s even got a woman in the lead role, a development that the unsavory side of the internet always seems to have an issue with. Of course, all sins will be forgiven if Heart of Stone proves to be anything other than the latest in a never-ending line of identikit Netflix epics with big stars and unconvincing visual effects, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
