Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver has been released on Netflix this weekend. The good news? It has indeed landed on the top of the service’s most-watched movies list for the week. The bad news? This is a movie being panned and mocked mercilessly by both critics and fans, and it would have to do some serious numbers to warrant further investment in a universe that Zack Snyder says he wants to span 4-6 movies in total. That does not look likely.
Netflix can forgive bad reviews if something is popular enough. Ultimately, they care about viewership more than they do prestige, but they have their limits. Combine the high cost of a project (Rebel Moon Part 1 and 2 were reportedly around $166 million), with poor reception and just-okay viewership, that is not a recipe for further greenlighting. And again, there is poor reception, and there is whatever is going on with Rebel Moon.
Viewership of the first Rebel Moon did not break Netflix’s Top 10 list of all time, and I’m unsure of where it might sit within the top 20, if it does at all, as last we checked Snyder said it had between 80 and 90 million views (more people saw Rebel Moon than Barbie, he claimed). Being a sequel to an ill-received first installment, it stands to reason Part 2 will do worse. And then the R-rated cuts coming this summer of Part 1 and 2 will probably do a fraction of the originals, even if they were the versions that probably should have been released in the first place.
Looking at Netflix’s Top 10 list of its all-time most-watched original movies, we can see nothing has gotten scores anywhere close to this when you combine critic and audience numbers:
- Red Notice – 37% critics, 92% audience
- Don’t Look Up – 55% critics, 78% audience
- The Adam Project – 68% critics, 73% audience
- Bird Box – 64% critics, 58% audience
- Leave the World Behind – 74% critics, 35% audience
- The Gray Man – 45% critics, 90% audience
- We Can Be Heroes – 74% critics, 41% audience
- The Mother – 43% critics, 62% audience
- Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – 92% critics, 92% audiences
- Extraction – 67% critics, 71% audience
Compare that to:
- Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire – 21% critics, 57% audience
- Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver – 17% critics, 50% audience
With something like Red Notice and The Gray Man, critics can pan it, but if audiences love it and word of mouth spreads, that’s good enough (both movies are supposed to have sequels in the works). In this case, both Rebel Moons have a lower critic score than every movie on this list, and only two audience scores are lower (people are insane to rate Leave the World Behind that low, but I digress).
You may disagree with critics sometimes, but a consensus score that low is a pretty good indicator of general film quality. And without a higher audience score to encourage word of mouth, low viewership combined with high cost for a sci-fi blockbuster means Rebel Moon is probably dead in the water after its R-rated cuts are out, barring some sort of miracle.
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