What happens when you adapt a popular video game series for the big screen, only to see it widely panned by critics despite making decent money at the box office? Obviously, you reboot it and make it exponentially worse and watch it earn less.
Timothy Olyphant has been open in admitting that the only reason he signed on to 2007’s Hitman is because he’d just bought a house and Deadwood had been canceled, so he was open to anything. The painfully mediocre actioner managed to do a solid turn after bringing in $101 million during its theatrical run against a $24 million budget, but a 15% Rotten Tomatoes score killed any franchise potential.
Undeterred, Rupert Friend stepped in to shave his head and suit up for Hitman: Agent 47 almost a decade later, which struggled to an $82 million haul and a 9% rating on RT. It’s almost impressive that the studio managed to reboot a bad movie and make it that much more terrible, but the infamous assassin is rebounding in the most surprising fashion.
As per FlixPatrol, the 20th Century Fox title has crashed straight into the Disney Plus most-watched list in eighteenth position, so the awful reviews and general apathy that greeted Hitman: Agent 47 has evidently done nothing to dissuade subscribers from seeking it out.