Rebel Moon
If you work in content production at Netflix right now, you are looking at a DEFCON 1 level event when it comes to initial reception of the massively expensive blockbuster, Rebel Moon.
Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Part 1 – A Child of Fire has critic reviews rolling in, and they are extremely bad. While more keep amassing, with 24 in so far, the movie has a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, a truly dismal score (Update: now 26% with 38 reviews). I just read a review that called it “the cinematic equivalent of an NFT” a surface-of-the-sun level burn.
Before Snyder defenders leap to his defense, Snyder is generally not “hated” by critics. The majority of his films, from Dawn of the Dead to 300 to Watchmen to Justice League, score somewhere between a 60-70%. There are a few low ones, Batman V Superman at 29%, Sucker Punch at 22%, but as it stands, Rebel Moon is the lowest. And this is one that really, really needed not to flop.
Netflix has invested a huge amount of money and hype in Rebel Moon, which was branded as Zack Snyder’s Star Wars (it is based on an actual rejected Star Wars pitch). This is just part 1 of 2, where a second film will arrive in April 2024, and it’s hard to imagine these scores suddenly rocketing up for that. There’s also at least one Rebel Moon video game coming out, and Snyder has previously talked about a massive AAA RPG at “ridiculous scale.”
Bad reviews
Netflix has wild hits and misses with its original films. It can release Oscar contenders or deeply bad blockbusters, of which Rebel Moon would not be the first. But it may be the most prominent, and its budget is supposed to be around $166 million for both films. Not bad in like, borderline money-laundering superhero land, but high for most films, certainly.
Of course, what Netflix cares the most about is people watching the movie, not what critics think. Something could scores a zero percent and if it gets a billion viewing hours, they couldn’t care less. Critics hated a movie like Red Notice (37%) but fans seemed to love it (92%) and it got greenlit for a sequel no problem.
Rebel Moon? We’ll have to see it released to tell. Snyder’s fanbase is one of the most vocal on the internet and I have little doubt many of them will love the film no matter what and score it high. But as loud as they are, they alone would not be enough to make this a hit, and it would have to appeal to a much wider sci-fi-interested audience. While critics say not to waste your time (and it will be a lot of time, at 4+ hours between the two films), it will be up to audiences to make up their own minds. It’s not like you have to pay for a ticket, after all.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
