It doesn’t matter how much they cost, or how big the names are that star in them, Netflix still has an awful lot of work to do in order to convince the skeptics that its capable of consistently churning out high quality blockbusters. Extraction 2 might be a rare exception, but when was the last time anybody even thought about Day Shift?
The $100 million action comedy did have a decent high concept premise that found Jamie Foxx’s everyman moonlighting as a vampire hunter, but a 57 percent Rotten Tomatoes score underlines that the execution was lacking. Director J.J. Perry did acquit himself well in the set pieces, but the first-time filmmaker’s debut didn’t hang around the most-watched charts for very long.
While Day Shift did make a splash upon first being added to the content library – as virtually every title of a similar ilk is wont to do – it ended up slipping down the ranks and vanishing altogether in no time at all. In fact, it seems ridiculous to believe that the movie only released in August of last year, such was the speed at which it came and went from memory.
Of course, Netflix is desperate for as many in-house brands as possible, with Perry revealing to Corridor Crew that “We are hopefully going to do Night Shift, we just put that pitch out there, we’re hoping to get the writer who did John Wick 4.” In fairness, the concept is ripe for further exploration, so we wouldn’t entirely be against the idea of another one, so long as it doesn’t fall into the same eminently forgettable traps as its predecessor did.
