As Netflix‘s sizzle reel hyping the sheer volume of original movies coming to the platform this year highlighted, there’s going to be no shortage of high profile content being devoured by over 200 million subscribers worldwide, but that’s no guarantee that they’re all going to be good, never mind great.
A case in point is superhero comedy Thunder Force, which sees Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer suit up for action after an experiment gives them newfound abilities. It’s got a high concept and two popular stars in the lead roles, but the execution left a lot to be desired. Ben Falcone’s latest currently holds a weak Rotten Tomatoes score of just 25%, and viewers have been roasting the movie online, but that hasn’t stopped it from dominating the most-watched list.
Thunder Force nabbed the top spot less than 24 hours after it was added to the library last Friday, and it’s still holding steady in second position having since been overtaken by family fantasy Love and Monsters. It’ll be interesting to see how long it hangs around the Top 10, too, because there’ve been plenty of splashy original films to have debuted to much fanfare, only to fade completely from memory in no time at all.
The next major in-house movie to hit Netflix is Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, by which time Thunder Force will have probably long been forgotten. McCarthy and Spencer are two hugely talented actresses that clearly had a ball working together, but they definitely deserved something better than the latest directorial misfire from Falcone, who unfortunately has yet to see any of his six features score higher than a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes.