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A terrible movie that somehow spawned a TV show is a success on streaming

Remember that brief period of time when filmmaker Scott Stewart tried his damndest to turn mild-mannered English gent Paul Bettany into a badass action hero? Anyone? Well, it definitely happened, and the results weren't great.

legion

Remember that brief period of time when filmmaker Scott Stewart tried his damndest to turn mild-mannered English gent Paul Bettany into a badass action hero? Anyone? Well, it definitely happened, and the results weren’t great.

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The one-two punch of Legion and Priest were released just sixteen months apart, where they each did middling box office business and wound up with dismal Rotten Tomatoes scores of 19% and 16%. Despite being objectively awful, the former did manage to launch a TV series, with Dominion set 25 years after the events of the movie, where it managed to run for two seasons before being canned by Syfy.

Legion

Legion actually had a decent setup and a talented cast, with Bettany starring as archangel Michael, who arrives at a dusty roadside diner to try and protect a pregnant waitress from the monsters coming to claim her unborn child, who could turn out to be the last hope for a post-apocalyptic human race.

Tyrese Gibson, Adrianne Padalicki, Kevin Durand, Arrow‘s Willa Holland and Dennis Quaid all lend support in a mercifully brief fantasy actioner that fails to even make halfway decent use of an intriguing high concept premise. Clearly, Hulu subscribers are undeterred by the bad reviews, because Legion is currently one of the ten most-watched titles on the platform, as per FlixPatrol.