Much-Hated Horror Remake Is a Big Netflix Hit Right Now
It's not uncommon for movie remakes to face their share of scrutiny, but seeing an oft-criticized remake soaring to the top of streaming charts is a bit unusual. Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s 2011 The Thing remake, however, seems to have done just that, with the prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 horror film of the same name recently breaking into Netflix's Top 10 Movies chart and currently ranking among the Top 5 most-popular films currently streaming on the Netflix platform.
Serving as a direct prequel to the 1982 film of the same name, which itself was an adaptation of the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, 2011's The Thing follows a group of Norwegian researchers as they fight for survival after an organism discovered buried deep in the Arctic ice goes on the attack. The movie was written by Eric Heisserer and stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Eric Christian Olsen. It premiered in theaters in October 2011 and made its way to Netflix in the U.S. on Saturday, April 1, 2023.
Since joining the Netflix streaming library, The Thing has been enjoying plenty of success. As of this posting, the film ranks No. 3 in the U.S. behind the Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler-starring Netflix original film Murder Mystery and its recently-released sequel, Murder Mystery 2. Round out the Top 5, and falling just behind The Thing, is Shark Tale and The Bourne Legacy. The Thing's Netflix success is a bit surprising and a far cry from the reaction it is typically met with. The movie was considered a box office bomb, grossing $31.5 million against a $38 million budget, and has received mixed reviews from both critics and audience members.
On Rotten Tomatoes, The Thing is certified rotten in both audience score (42%) and critics score (34%), with its critics consensus reading, "It serves the bare serviceable minimum for a horror flick, but The Thing is all boo-scares and a slave to the far superior John Carpenter version." Writing for The Guardian, critic Phelim O'Neill said, "Whatever good intentions were behind this prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 classic, the sloppy execution renders them moot." Meanwhile, MovieFreak.com's Sara Michelle Fetters wrote that the 2011 movie "reduces things to nothing more than a highlight reel of terror, none of it particularly scary."
While April is half a year away from the official start of spooky season, it has proven to be a big one for horror lovers. Arriving alongside The Thing on April 1 were two Alfred Hitchcock classics, The Birds and Psycho. The films were joined by fellow horror titles like I, Frankenstein and Zombieland. Later in the month, the streamer is set to add David F. Sandberg's Lights Out, the limited series Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire, and 2023's Phenomena, among others. These titles will join the streamer's existing library of horror content.