Even the most forgiving of horror fans have become numb to the concept of seeing anything and everything getting a remake, reboot, or slapdash coat of new cinematic paint, so nobody was particularly surprised when 2017’s Rings ended up turning a tidy profit at the box office in spite of the fact it was both completely unnecessary and irredeemably awful.
There was barely a soul clamoring for F. Javier Gutiérrez’s supernatural slice of would-be terror to exist, and yet it still managed to haul in $83 million at the box office on a $25 million budget, with the studio pointing and laughing directly in the faces of the reviewers and audiences who had only deemed it worthy of respective eight and 23 percent scores on Rotten Tomatoes.
Neatly summing up how badly horror scrapes the bottom of every barrel, Rings acted as a hybrid of soft reboot and continuation of The Ring and its sequel, by virtue of releasing a dozen years after the latter. Even if we ignore the Hollywood trilogy, the expanded franchise already covered Koji Suzuki’s novel series, eight Japanese features, a pair of TV shows, six manga adaptations, a Korean remake, and even two video games, so no stone was left unturned.
Despite running the well so dry that a national emergency should have been declared, the abhorrent Rings has nonetheless managed to secure undeserved streaming success, as per FlixPatrol. We’ll put it down to Halloween being in the air, because even the most diehard of Ring fanatics would surely be able to admit that watching essentially the exact same narrative unfold all over again isn’t really worth spending 102 minutes of your time on.