Though he has a romantic comedy side as well, Gerard Butler’s career has been defined by action movies. He has been making installments in the genre for almost as long as he has been a working actor, making his action film debut in 1997 with a supporting role in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. From there, Butler’s other early work in the genre included Tale of the Mummy and Fast Food. More recently, Butler acted in the action sequel Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. While the movie’s box office performance was mixed, it has done well on streaming.
In addition to his more traditional installments, Gerard Butler action movies have recently begun to embrace a new subgenre: the disaster thriller. In 2020, he led the cast of Greenland, a Ric Roman Waugh-directed movie about a family struggling to survive after a natural disaster. In addition to Butler, the movie also starred Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn, and Randal Gonzalez. Though it had a modest gross due to its pandemic release, Greenland was popular enough to be awarded a sequel, which is currently in development. Now, another one of Butler’s disaster films is trending on streaming.
Geostorm Has Hit The Streaming Charts
The Movie Did Not Get Good Reviews
Geostorm has now made it into the Netflix global Top 10. Coming out three years before Greenland, this sci-fi-inflected disaster movie imagines a story wherein satellites designed to protect the Earth’s climate instead start attacking the planet, wreaking worldwide chaos. In the movie, Butler’s character Jake Lawson and his collaborators must race against time to stop it before the world is destroyed. Geostorm got pretty terrible reviews, managing just an 18% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It was also a commercial flop, grossing $221.6 million against its roughly $120 million budget and losing Warner Bros. $71.6 million.
The star-studded cast of Geostorm also included Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Andy García, Abbie Cornish, Daniel Wu, and Eugenio Derbez.
Eight years after its initial disappointing release, Geostorm has now become a streaming success. As per Netflix, the film made it to No. 4 onto the streamer’s global chart of the Top 10 English-language movies for the week of March 31 through April 6, amᴀssing 4.9 million views totaling 8.9 million viewing hours. In addition to Geostorm, the global top 10 included The Life List, One of Them Days, Alpha, Sniper: Rogue Mission, The Core, Kraven the Hunter, Con Mum, The Electric State, and Robinson Crusoe.
The biggest boost to this total was the United States, which is the only country in which the movie landed in the Top 10 for the week.
What This Means For Geostorm
Gerard Butler Likely Helped It Succeed
A big reason for Geostorm‘s reinvigorated popularity is most likely the heightened interest in Butler that has taken place since the movie’s original debut. When it hit theaters in 2017, it came toward the tail end of a devastating 11-film run of Rotten Tomatoes splats for his live-action movies. It earned his ninth splat in a row, coming after a string of failures including 2012’s Playing for Keeps (6%) and 2016’s Gods of Egypt (14%) and London Has Fallen (28%). It was then followed by Hunter Killer (38%) and the original Den of Thieves (41%) in 2018.
The only Gerard Butler movie released between 2012 and 2018 that earned a Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score was the 2014 animated feature How to Train Your Dragon 2 (92%).
While he has had his share of Rotten Tomatoes splats in recent years, including 2022’s Last Seen Alive (14%) and 2023’s Kandahar (45%), Gerard Butler’s career has been on a general upswing since the release of Geostorm. While the Den of Thieves 2: Pantera release has reignited interest in the actor, an awareness that has only increased since the movie hit streaming, his movies have already been on the rise throughout the 2020s, with the Greenland premiere kicking off a run of better-received тιтles including 2021’s Copshop (83%) and the 2023 box office hit Plane (79%).
Our Take On Geostorm’s Streaming Success
It Could Be A Portent Of Things To Come
Another potential proof of Gerard Butler’s rising star being the major reason for the Netflix success of Geostorm is the fact that the disaster movie still has a dismal audience score on the Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter. While viewers gave it a slightly more positive score than critics did, landing at 35%, this hardly reflects the possibility that the movie itself is becoming a streaming hit on its own merits. Ultimately, this could compound with the critical and commercial success of some of his recent movies to pave the way for even more hits for the star in the coming years.
The upcoming projects to which Gerard Butler is attached already seem poised to keep his career on the rise. This particularly includes the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, the remake of the popular animated movie that launched the franchise that has most helped to propel the star’s critical and commercial success. However, he has other potential successes in development following the streaming success of Geostorm, including the sequels Greenland: Migration and Den of Thieves 3.
Source: Netflix
