UPDATE: According to Amazon Prime, 50 million viewers watched “Road House” since it debuted March 21 on the platform.
EARLIER: Doug Liman’s “Road House,” Amazon Prime Video’s remake of the 1989 film, easily topped the streaming charts for the week of March 18 to 24.
The film, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a small-town bouncer, drew 2.3 million households between March 21, which is when it was added to Amazon’s library, and March 24. That’s what you call a major streaming hit.
One look at its IMDb page and it’s already ammassed 66k votes. Just to put things into perspective, “Godzilla X Kong,” a film that is easily going to top the box-office this weekend, with an $80 million opening, only has 13k votes.
There’s been a lot of reporting on the behind-the-scenes drama with “Road House” — it all culminated with Liman, vehemently unhappy over Amazon’s release strategy, going scorched earth on the streamer and publishing an op-ed about how they betrayed him by not giving the film a theatrical release.
However, later sources clarified that Liman knew all along that “Road House” was going to be a streaming movie. Amazon had given him the option of making the film for $60 million with a theatrical release or taking $85 million and going streaming only. He opted for the latter.
It turns out, “Road House” fits perfectly on streaming, where it has amassed a larger audience than it ever could otherwise in theaters. It’s low-IQ filmmaking, and the best way to watch such a film is on a platform. It’s not worth the $20 one would have to pay up for a movie ticket. It’s a big, dumb, fun movie. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you just give in to the fact that “Road House” is a hyper masculine fantasy, driven by a charismatically tongue-in-cheek performance from Jake Gyllenhaal, then you could do a lot worse than spending two hours watching this one on your couch. Gyllenhaal’s co-star, Connor McGregor, got the memo as well — his villainous turn as Knox is ridiculously over-the-top, as if he was doing lines of coke and chugging down red bulls before every take.
Then again, Liman previously stating ”Road House” might be his best movie is a preposterous statement. Some of the films Liman’s made that are miles better than this one include “The Bourne Identity,” “Go,” “Swingers,” “The Edge of Tomorrow,” “The Wall,” and “American Made,”
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.