An underseen remake of a Jean-Claude Van Damme thriller has found new life on Netflix. Van Damme is a Belgian actor who is best known for action movies after his breakout role in the 1988 martial arts movie Bloodsport, which grossed $50 million against its scant reported budget of roughly $2 million.

Other Jean-Claude Van Damme movies have become even bigger hits since then. This includes Street Fighter ($99.4 million), Maximum Risk ($51.7 million), Timecop ($102 million), The Expendables 2 ($312 million), Kung Fu Panda 2 ($664.8 million), Minions: The Rise of Gru ($937.7 million), and a 1995 movie that got a recent remake.

Welcome To Sudden Death Is Surging On Streaming

2020’s Welcome to Sudden Death is connecting with audiences on Netflix five years after its premiere. The movie is a remake of the 1995 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Sudden Death.

In the original movie, Van Damme played former firefighter Darren McCord, whose job as a security guard puts him in the path of a group of terrorists who have kidnapped the Vice President during the Stanley Cup Finals and are threatening to blow up the building.

The remake saw martial arts movie star Michael Jai White stepping into the lead role as new character Jesse Freeman, whose daughter is taken hostage during a basketball game. Netflix partnered with Universal 1440 to produce the movie, which became the fourth most-watched movie on the streaming platform the week it premiered.

Although Welcome to Sudden Death is no longer available on subscription streaming in the U.S., the movie has made a sudden resurgence on the weekly Netflix chart of the 10 most-watched English-language movies worldwide. For the week of August 18 through August 24, it landed at No. 3 with 6.2 million views accumulating a total of 8.3 million viewing hours.

This marks the highest chart position it has ever taken on Netflix globally. It has fallen behind only the Vanessa Kirby thriller Night Always Comes (No. 2) and the record-smashing hit KPop Demon Hunters (No. 1), taking a position above other contemporary Netflix hits including My Oxford Year (No. 4) and Happy Gilmore 2 (No. 6).

Additionally, Welcome to Sudden Death is in the Netflix Top 10 in 63 individual regions and No. 1 in three, namely Guadeloupe, Réunion, and Martinique.

What This Means For Welcome To Sudden Death

While Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, which is now their most-watched movie of all time, will likely keep Welcome to Sudden Death from ever topping the chart, it remains to be seen how long it can hold its position and if it can potentially climb to No. 2.

It may not have a long tenure if viewership is accurately reflected by the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter score. Audiences have given it a thoroughly Rotten 24%, which is even worse than the original movie’s 40% score.

If it drops off the chart soon, this resurgence may not result in a revival of the dormant Sudden Death franchise. However, the fact that the remake of the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie has reached this high so many years after its original release is still a remarkable achievement.