A Mindlessly Mediocre Action Flop Somehow Ends up as Netflix’s #1 Movie

Jan 03, 2024

On the surface, teaming up a star and director both equally familiar with the action genre and then handing them a $65 million budget to weave a web of political intrigue as the bullets fly sounds like the perfect fit of talent and material, but 2007's Shooter was barely above passable at best.

Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg have both proven themselves as talented individuals, but it's ironic that their weakest work often tends to come within the arena of running and gunning given how often they return to it. In the case of Shooter, there were plans afoot for sequels at one stage, only for a box office haul of just over $91 million cutting those ideas of at the knees.

Instead, the property was rebooted as TV series starring Ryan Phillippe which remarkably landed a critical reception that was even more mediocre, even if it did manage to last three whole seasons before being canceled. There must be something in the water among Netflix subscribers, though, because Shooter has inexplicably emerged as the single most popular movie on the platform.

Per FlixPatrol, the monotonously mundane shoot ’em up has cracked the Top 10 in 67 countries around the world, which has cumulatively moved it past Danish romantic drama A Beautiful Life and into the overall number one spot on a worldwide scale. Could we have foreseen a 16 year-old Mark Wahlberg dud emerging as Netflix's single most in-demand offering? Absolutely not, but that's the mayhem of streaming in a nutshell.

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