There aren’t many movies that can say they owe a debt of gratitude to John Travolta’s infamous Battlefield Earth, but blockbuster sci-fi calamity The 6th Day is one of them.
The $82 million sci-fi spectacular may have boasted Tomorrow Never Dies director Roger Spottiswoode and action icon Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the former’s handiwork harked back to his Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot days, while the Terminator star was coming off Batman & Robin and End of Days, so there were always question marks over the production’s chances of success.
In the end, The 6th Day made less than $100 million at the box office to post a substantial financial loss, and it didn’t fare much better with critics, either. Schwarzenegger suffered the ignominy of being nominated for three Razzie Awards for two different performances, with his dual role as Adam Gibson and clone finding him shortlisted for Worst Actor, Worst Supporting Actor, and Worst Screen Couple.
The big Austrian would have breathed a sigh of relief when Travolta’s legendary critical and commercial catastrophe that bankrupted an entire production company snagged all three of the aforementioned trophies, and a handful more to boot. 22 years on from its underwhelming introduction, though, The 6th Day has been surging on the Netflix charts.
Per FlixPatrol, the near-future tale of illicit cloning operations has been seeing double on the platform’s viewership rankings, ironically at roughly the same time Stephen King brought Battlefield Earth kicking and screaming back into the conversation.