Netflix’s Red Notice has turned the ‘event movie’ into a non-event

In March 2020, director Rawson Marshall Thurber found himself between the Rock and a hard place. Filming had started on Red Notice, a $200 million action-heist vehicle for Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot which Netflix had acquired in a heated bidding war. The plan was to hopscotch around the globe, shooting lavish set-pieces in Rome and South America, with the rest of the production assembled on a sound-stage in Atlanta.

But then Covid struck and the production was paused. For filmmakers everywhere the pandemic represented a once-in-a-generation complication. However, for an Indiana Jones-style international romp with a groaning budget, a world-wide shut down posed an existential challenge. Was Red Notice about to fade to black? 

Eighteen months later, we have our answer. Having persevered in the face of Covid, Red Notice was released on Netflix on November 12 and quickly became a sensation. According to the streaming giant, it is Netflix’s most watched original movie ever.

More than that, it is apparently shaping up to be one of the biggest blockbusters of the era. Red Notice is said to rival Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame in viewership, accounting for 277.9 million hours viewed across 93 territories – a figure on a par with Endgame over the same time-frame (though Endgame’s “hours watched” would eventually eclipse one billion). 

“Hours watched” feels like a curious metric by which to rate a film’s popularity. Netflix has of course in the past been criticised for the opacity of its reporting on viewing numbers. It was in response to just that complaint that it dropped its previous method of measuring viewership by counting the number of subscribers who had watched the first two minutes of a film or series in favour of ranking total hours. 

Either way Red Notice is an indisputable a hit. At least with audiences. Critics have dismissed it as clunking, overwrought and hobbled by terrible use of “green screen” CGI (a consequence of having to film the entire thing in Atlanta). 

True, The Telegraph's Tim Robey praised its “clomping, smart-alecky entertainment value, wedded to the meta appeal of watching three A-listers juggle all the twists with ease”. Others were less forgiving. “Limp and dull, and does more to showcase the shortcomings of each of its marquee idols than it does to highlight their bankable charisma,” said Vanity Fair. “Incredibly deflating,” proclaimed Rolling Stone. 

And yet surely the real surprise about Red Notice is that it should have ended up on Netflix in the first place. Until just a few years ago, this sort of film would have represented the ultimate Hollywood no-brainer. In Johnson, Reynolds and Gadot it unites three of the most charismatic stars of the age in a caper full of thrills, spills and in-jokes. It brims with explosions, sparkling banter and an Ed Sheeran cameo. 

There’s a breathless dash through a museum in Rome, high-jinks at a masquerade ball in Spain and a third act with buried treasure and a chase featuring a 1931 Mercedes-Benz Grosser 770 straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

So if the stellar performance of Red Notice says a lot about Netflix, it tells us even more about how establishment Hollywood has become so reliant on franchises that it is reluctant to green-light even a can’t-fail buddy pic fronted by the triple threat of Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot – all riffing on their screening personas at maximum velocity. 

Red Notice was actually originally supposed to be a studio picture. In 2018, Universal outbid Netflix to win the rights to the script by Thurber, who had directed Johnson in Central Intelligence and Skyscraper. 

“It’s not surprising the town went wild when [Thurber] pitched this week,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s viable new IP with global appeal at a time when branded franchises are harder and harder to come by.”

Twelve months later, though, Universal’s ardour had cooled, allowing Netflix step in. This bout of cold feet is presumably down to the fact Red Notice was not part of a pre-existing “intellectual property” or IP. The days when Universal and rivals would think nothing of kickstarting a new franchise are apparently long over. Without a recognisable brand attached, and with a budget north of $100 million, “Old Hollywood” was out. 

This speaks to the contortions of logic currently wracking Hollywood. The industry is in a place where a fun escapade starring the Rock, Deadpool and Wonder Woman is perceived as riskier than, for instance, an art-house adaptation of the cult sci-fi novel Dune. And you can appreciate the reasoning. When franchises are the ultimate currency, bringing to the screen an obscure-ish science fiction epic– as Denis Villeneuve did with his $165 million take on Dune – is perceived as a safer bet than having Johnson and Reynolds trade zingers while crashing helicopters and driving Nazi runabouts. 

Yet entertainment abhors a vacuum. And so Netflix has stepped into this breach and become the home for films which, in previous generations, would have lit up the box office. In the past several it has struck big with Chris Hemsworth in Extraction, Sandra Bullock in Bird Box, Reynolds again in Michael Bay’s Six Underground and Charlize Theron in Old Guard. 

All are thoroughly old fashioned popcorn fare – full of wham-bam action, sparkling dialogue and anchored by a big name or three (Netflix paid the stars of Red Notice $20 million a piece for their efforts). And there was a time – roughly dated to the age before Marvel – when these guilty pleasure flicks would have constituted standard-size cuts from the Hollywood sausage factory. 

Netflix’s breakthrough as a de facto Hollywood studio is often talked about in the context of its Oscar-bait features. These include Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and Roma by Alfonso Cuarón, who won the Academy Award for Best Director for his meditative rumination on his childhood. This year Netflix is once again cranking up its awards seasons slate with fare such as Rebecca Hall’s Passing, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog and the forthcoming The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh and directed by Chilean wunderkind Sebastian Lelio. 

But it is with Red Notice, Extraction, etc, that it may have found its true purpose. Studios are running scared of old fashioned crowd-pleasers. And that gap is being exploited by Netflix to huge success. 

The other question raised by Red Notice, however, is what a blockbuster looks like in 2021. Had Red Notice come out in 1985 – potentially starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer –it would have dominated the summer. 

Red Notice billboards and TV spots would have been ubiquitous. Kids would have gone to school with Red Notice lunch-boxes and to sleep in Red Notice PJs. Bookshops would have been piled high with the official tie-in novel. The theme song – in 1985 this would have been a collaboration between Lionel Richie and Giorgio Moroder – would have been on Top of the Pops every week. Even if you hadn’t actually seen Red Notice you would have experienced it as a cultural moment. 

In 2021, tens of millions of people have enjoyed Red Notice (and it really is great, leave-your-brain-at-the-door fun). And yet it is as if it never existed. Netflix doesn’t need to market a film when it can instead give it pride of place on its homepage. And with no presence in the outside world, Red Notice stands before us as Schrodinger's blockbuster – a rollercoaster we’ve all enjoyed but which erases itself from our memory the moment the final credits roll. 

“When something truly goes viral on a streaming service - Squid Game, or Tiger King, for example - it’s unavoidable,” wrote one commentator on a Hollywood Reporter story about Red Notice. “Everyone’s talking about it, sharing memes, recommending it to friends and family. Marvel’s best stuff is immediately quoted, requoted, meme-ified and quoted again…Is any of that happening with Red Notice? Am I just out of the loop and missing it? Hard to believe this is anything more than a flash-in-the-pan action flick.”

This is arguably Netflix's most significant contribution to modern cinema: the big "event movie" has somehow become a non-event.