A Surprising Sci-Fi-Action Movie is Taking Over Netflix's Top 10
Another new month and another new crop of fresh content has arrived on Netflix, and with it some surprising movies making their way onto the streaming service's Top 10. The latest of these is a real head-scratcher, the 2012 sci-fi action movie Battleship, yes, the one based on the classic board game. Directed by Friday Night Lights and Hancock filmmaker Peter Berg, Battleship featured a surprisingly huge ensemble cast (perhaps leading to its popularity on Netflix) including Taylor Kitsch, Rihanna, Alexander Skarsgård, Hamish Linklater, Jesse Plemons, Rami Malek, and Liam Neeson. The biggest surprise for the film however is that at no point does Neeson utter the line "You sunk my Battleship."
As of this writing Battleship is the #3 movie on Netflix within the United States, a position it leaped to yesterday when it first arrived on the service, and is the #7 piece of content on the entire site. Right now only Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming, itself a Netflix original, and Shrek 2 are above Battleship on the Top 10. The film is sitting ahead of Netflix original The Tinder Swindler and the two Despicable Me movies, which have found new life on the service in recent weeks, plus the Steven Soderbergh thriller Contagion, which was a major hit on streaming when the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread globally in 2020.
Released just two weeks after Marvel's The Avengers, Battleship arrived on shore to mixed reviews which combined with its competition resulted in bad box office returns. Battleship also arrived at a time when Hasbro had found major success with its Transformers feature films, resulting in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Battleship, and later, Ouija. Despite this, and the fact that everyone knew it was based on the board game, Berg himself went out of his way to distance the movie from its....source material, while noting that some Easter eggs do exist.
Speaking at WonderCon two months before the movie's release, Berg said during a panel: "Battleship's a unique experience. It certainly doesn't have any direct correlation to the game. That being said, it was a lot of fun to try to find way to reference the game. If you look at the ordinance that the enemies use, it looks a bit like pegs. Both of our ships' radar systems have trouble seeing each other, so they gotta try and predict where the enemy is so that they can go after them. And there were some other things that were kind of fun. They were certainly never mandated, but anybody that's of a certain age that knows the game will look at it and probably kind of smile to themselves. I guess they could say, 'This is preposterous!' and storm out of the theater. I don't think they will, but hopefully they'll say it's kind of a clever reference to the game."
Should your morbid curiosity get the better of you, Battleship is now streaming on Netflix.