10 overlooked straight-to-streaming movies that deserved a cinema release
When Netflix released its first original movie in 2015, the entire landscape of Hollywood shifted, even if industry insiders and audiences didn’t know it yet.
It was initially slow, with the streaming giant releasing 12 more original movies over the next year, many of which failed to make much of an impact. Over the next nine years, though, as the streaming wars erupted and other players entered the market, so many films began going the streaming route that it was strikingly easy to put together a list of the ten most overlooked straight-to-streaming efforts.
These days, movies originally intended for streaming aren’t the only ones that take that route, though. When the Covid pandemic threatened the very existence of cinemas, many Hollywood studios began selling some films they intended to be theatrical releases to streamers like Netflix, HBO Max, AppleTV+, Disney+, and Hulu. Many movies are also released theatrically in some territories but direct-to-streaming in others.
Therefore, we’ve created some ground rules to put together this list. The entries are all films that debuted as originals on their respective streaming services and were never intended for wide cinema releases. If they did have theatrical releases, though, they were only the token week-long engagements that streamers like Netflix give certain films they want to be considered for awards. Similarly, if a movie debuted on streaming and a scant handful of cinemas on the same day, it was also eligible for the list.
So, with all that boring red tape out of the way, allow us to present ten of the most overlooked straight-to-streaming movies that deserved a wide cinema release.
Overlooked streaming movies that deserved a cinema release:
Reptile (Grant Singer, 2023)
Reptile was released on Netflix in September 2023, and even though the streaming giant touted that it remained the top movie on the platform for three weeks in a row, it barely left any impression on the public consciousness. Anecdotally, for instance, we’ve never spoken to a single soul in real life who has seen it. This is a bummer because, while it’s not perfect, Reptile is an intensely moody crime thriller that practically drips with atmosphere and low-key menace.
The film stars Benicio Del Toro as a detective trying to solve the brutal murder of an estate agent. His prime suspect is the victim’s boyfriend, played with glassy-eyed unknowability by Justin Timberlake. The plot unfolds leisurely, but it holds a few surprises. Naturally, Del Toro uncovers corruption all around him, as tends to happen in these things. The film’s sense of style is its real selling point, though, and first-time feature director Grant Singer exhibits a great eye for striking, noir-inflected images.
The Harder They Fall (Jeymes Samuel, 2021)
Speaking of style, Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall is practically overflowing with it. A riotous powder keg of a film, Samuel’s all-Black western is a jolt of off-kilter adrenaline to the genre and a wonderful showcase for the director’s visual flair. He shows a real gift for injecting a sense of fun and unpredictability into a well-worn genre, and his action scenes simply beg to be shown on a big screen instead of an iPad on someone’s lap.
The cast is uniformly excellent in the film, with Samuel being one of the few directors who seems to understand Idris Elba’s movie star qualities. Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Lakeith Stanfield, and Delroy Lindo all lend charismatic support, and the chemistry they foster is genuinely delightful to watch. There is one elephant in the room, though: Jonathan Majors is the lead of the film. His performance is great, which can’t be denied, but the movie may prove a tough watch for some, given the unsavoury things he has since been accused of in his private life. Perhaps it is best to approach this one with caution.
Triple Frontier (JC Chandor, 2019)
If you were going to cast a film made up entirely of “internet boyfriends”, it might look something like JC Chandor’s underrated 2019 actioner Triple Frontier. Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac play Tom ‘Redfly’ Davis and Santiago ‘Pope’ Garcia, two ex-Delta Force badasses who gather a team to steal $75million from a Colombian drug cartel. Their team also includes Pedro Pascal as Francisco ‘Catfish’ Morales, Charlie Hunnam as William ‘Ironhead’ Miller, and Garrett Hedlund as Benjamin ‘Benny’ Miller. We can’t remember why Hedlund’s character doesn’t have a cool codename, but it’s probably unimportant.
At its core, Triple Frontier is one of the most overlooked action movies of recent years. It beggars belief that this $115m production, shot in Hawaii and Colombia and looking like a million bucks, was just shuffled onto Netflix in March 2019 with minimal fanfare. Hell, the movie opens with the characters in a military chopper flying over the jungle while Metallica’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ plays and another scene is soundtracked by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Run Through the Jungle’. Obvious music choices? Maybe – but they’re damn effective when you’re watching the movie.
Kimi (Steven Soderbergh, 2022)
In February 2022, Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi was unceremoniously released on HBO Max in America and Sky Cinema in the UK. The startlingly prescient film is actually set during the Covid pandemic, and it follows an agoraphobic tech worker, played by Zoë Kravitz, who witnesses the sexual assault and murder of a woman in the data from her ‘Kimi’ smart speaker device. When she tries to bring this to the attention of her superiors, she finds herself embroiled in a modern-day conspiracy thriller akin to Rear Window or Three Days of the Condor.
Soderbergh expertly ratchets up the tension throughout Kimi, and he understands that the movie holds an extra frisson of horrifying reality for an audience barely removed from being trapped in their own homes. The script by David Koepp is clever, and Kravitz brings a unique vulnerability to her role while hiding a steely determination. This likely wouldn’t have set the box office on fire if it had been released in cinemas, but it was well-crafted enough that it deserved a shot.
Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020)
Palm Springs was released on Hulu in America on the same day it debuted in a few drive-in cinemas, but in Europe, it went straight to Prime Video. The charming and unexpectedly moving comedy starred Andy Samberg and The Penguin’s Cristin Milioti as two strangers stuck in a time loop while attending a wedding in Palm Springs. Oh, and they soon find themselves being hunted and killed, over and over again in hilarious fashion, by JK Simmons. You see, he was a fellow wedding guest who Samberg accidentally trapped in the time loop with them. Whoops.
The film is simultaneously absurd, violent, caustic, sweet, and ultimately emotionally devastating. This is no mean feat for something that could have been a forgettable laugh-free zone in less capable hands than director Max Barbakow and writer Andy Siara. Even though Variety reported that the movie was the 26th most-watched streaming film of the year 2020, that was at the height of the Covid pandemic. Therefore, it probably fell into a memory hole for most people and deserves to be rediscovered.
Fancy Dance (Erica Tremblay, 2024)
AppleTV’s track record with movies isn’t a great one, it must be said. For every Killers of the Flower Moon or The Tragedy of Macbeth that received a limited theatrical release, countless films debuted on the service and promptly disappeared. Does anyone remember Palmer, Greyhound, Sharper, The Beanie Bubble, or The Family Plan? Nope, us neither. However, one movie that came and went on Apple that deserved a whole lot more was Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance, which hit the service on June 28th, 2024.
Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone took the lead in this poignant drama, which tells the story of a Native American woman who kidnaps her 13-year-old niece from her white grandparents. She wants to take her back to the Seneca–Cayuga reservation to live with her, but her criminal record makes things difficult with child protective services. Gladstone is a powerhouse in the film, which is slow-moving yet never dull and heartbreaking in its commentary on the institutional racism and oppression Native Americans face every day from the US government.
Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022)
In a move that still baffles us, a Predator movie was released on Hulu in the States and Disney+ in the UK in 2022. This wasn’t just any old Predator sequel, though. Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey was a thrilling reminder of everything that can be achieved if creators and studios take some chances with their established franchises. Instead of giving audiences more of the same military dudes or space convicts getting skinned alive in the jungle by the classic mandible-faced alien hunters, Prey took the concept to a completely different time and place: the Great Plains of North America in 1719.
As Naru, the young Comanche woman who becomes the hero of the film, Amber Midthunder gives what should have been a true star-making performance. Since the movie’s release, she has starred in a few films and in Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series, but it’s hard not to think that she would have made a bigger splash if audiences had seen her battling the bloodthirsty aliens on the big screen. Thankfully, 20th Century Studios seems to have realised the error of its ways because Trachtenberg is making another Predator movie – subtitled Badlands – and is planned for a cinema release.
The Devil All the Time (Antonio Campos, 2020)
In the last few years, Tom Holland’s cinematic endeavours outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been dicey. AppleTV+ crime drama Cherry wasn’t reviewed particularly well, Chaos Walking was a disaster, and the Uncharted movie was a commercial hit, if not a critical one. It’s a shame, then, that Holland’s best movie – and arguably his greatest performance – came in a Southern Gothic thriller that hit Netflix in 2020 and seems to have been largely forgotten.
Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time was a dark, foreboding sojourn into the festering soul of an ensemble group of characters in two small towns in Ohio and West Virginia from the end of World War II up until the ’60s. Many critics felt the movie was too oppressively dark for its own good, with nary a hint of sunshine breaking through the abuse, violence, and over-the-top religious terror. It’s a hell of a vibe if you give yourself over to it, though, and the incredible cast makes that easy. After all, alongside Holland are Robert Pattinson, Sebastian Stan, Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keogh, Mia Wasikowska, and Harry Melling as a truly skin-crawling evangelical preacher.
Wheelman (Jeremy Rush, 2017)
Frank Grillo is an iconic name to a certain brand of action fan, yet a practically unknown entity to people who don’t watch films with names like Werewolves, Boss Level, Body Brokers, and Copshop. Luckily, we’re very much the audience who watches Grillo’s adrenaline-fuelled, gritty oeuvre, and for our money, Wheelman is one of his best. It’s also one of Netflix’s most overlooked gems of the last ten years and is more innovative than it may appear at first glance.
Grillo plays an unnamed getaway driver who is set up during a botched robbery and must spend the movie’s 82-minute runtime trying to figure out who wants him dead. The innovation is that the film resembles something like Phone Booth more than a standard action movie. Director Jeremy Rush’s camera never leaves Grillo’s car, which means everything that happens – all the chases and shootouts and shouty conversations with various criminal passengers – is all from his claustrophobic perspective. Grillo is brilliant, as are grizzled character actors Shea Whigham and Garrett Dillahunt, whose presence in these kinds of films is always welcome.
No One Will Save You (Brian Duffield, 2023)
Not unlike Wheelman, No One Will Save You is also a fascinating experiment in cinematic form and function. Naturally, we don’t want that in this economy, so it was dumped directly onto Hulu/Disney+. It’s a sad indictment of the modern cinematic landscape that a sci-fi horror film like this, which would do good business at the box office, was deemed too much of a risk for a wide theatrical release. Instead, it proved an interesting curio for Friday night viewers and received great streaming numbers for a week or so but then disappeared without a trace.
Brian Duffield’s inspired film asked a fascinating question: What if you told the story of a home invasion by terrifying aliens but removed almost all the dialogue? The result is a film that lives and dies on the performance of its lead, so it’s a relief that Kaitlyn Dever is so superb as the small-town woman silently manoeuvring around the invading extraterrestrials. Can you imagine how extraordinary it would have been to see this film in an eerily quiet cinema with other horror fans?
