Ryan Reynolds’ ‘Adam Project’ Represents The Conundrum Of Netflix Blockbusters

Netflix is reporting that The Adam Project, Shawn Levy’s original sci-fi action dramedy, debuted this weekend with 92.43 million hours viewed. That’s not quite a record, Don’t Look Up debuted on Christmas weekend with a 111 million-hour opening weekend and Red Notice nabbed 149 million hours in weekend one in mid-November 2021. The only caveat is that the film’s much-hyped debut was only a little bigger than the launch of Sandra Bullock’s The Unforgivable. The dark, poorly-reviewed, action-free drama/thriller about a woman returning to society after twenty years in prison nabbed 84 million hours in the first three days, incredibly impressive since it frankly had nothing to offer beyond an against-type Bullock in a leading role. The Kissing Booth 3, the third entry in the Joey King/Jacob Elordi teen-targeted rom-com franchise, nabbed a 90 million-hour debut last August. The weekly Netflix ratings site only goes back to June of last summer.

Granted, The Kissing Booth 3 dropped 71% in its first full week and then had under ten million hours viewed by its second full week/third frame on the charts. I expect The Adam Project to increase in viewership (or modestly decline) in its first full week. The much-buzzed-about Shawn Levy-directed flick is the very definition, in ways good and bad, of a Netflix mockbuster. It’s a nostalgic throwback to 80’s and 90’s Amblin adventure flicks, complete with an angry young kid (Walker Scobell) from a broken home who finds a fantastical friend and has to hide it from his family. The twist is that the new friend isn’t a homesick alien, a malfunctioning murder robot or even a transformer (also, I suppose, a malfunctioning murder robot), but rather the future version of himself, played by Ryan Reynolds. It’s the kind of movie we all say we miss yet never actually see when Hollywood makes it.

Sure, Michael Bay’s first Transformers was a smash in summer 2007, but Travis Knight’s 80’s-set prequel Bumblebee (which starred Haylee Steinfeld in an even more explicit appropriation of the E.T. formula than even the first Steven Spielberg-produced Transformers movie) was barely a hit in 2018. It earned $128 million domestic and $471 million worldwide on a $130 million budget, with $171 million of that coming from China. For all the talk about how Transformers depended on China and China was why Hollywood couldn’t make diverse/inclusive blockbusters, this female-led, kindler-and-gentler Transformers film was the only one that needed a rescue from the Chinese box office. Age of Extinction would have been fine with $805 million worldwide without that $300 million Chinese box office. Meanwhile, The Adam Project may bring to mind the likes of A.X.L., a nobody-saw-it flick released theatrically in summer 2018 about an angry kid from a broken home who stumbles upon a malfunctioning military robot dog.

I’m not arguing the Oliver Daly film, starring Alex Neustaedter and Becky G., was a new classic, or that we should be surprised that Josh and Jonathan Baker’s Kin, an original, $30 million sci-fi flick about two brothers who stumbled upon alien weaponry, bombed in August of 2018. However, The Goonies, Flight of the Navigator or any number of films loosely homaged by The Adam Project weren’t necessarily critically-acclaimed classics in their day. The Monster Squad bombed in 1987 and Labyrinth flopped in 1987, just like Earth to Echo tanked in 2014 and even the pretty good Power Rangers reboot (also co-starring Becky G.) earned just $185 million on a $100 million budget in March 2017. Franchise and marquee character-specific tentpoles that merely approximate the stuff you loved as a kid are now prioritized by moviegoers over the genuine article. And, yeah, star+high concept flicks like The Adam Project have a chance when nobody has to buy a ticket.

When I say the $175 million (!!) budget isn’t remotely on the screen that’s partially because it’s a Netflix film. With no backend, residuals or related sweeteners, I imagine Reynolds, Levy and co-stars Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo (as Adam’s late father) and Jennifer Garner (as Adam’s widowed mother) got a hefty upfront check. That’s a big reason why something like Red Notice costs $160-$200 million or why Project Power costs $85 million despite looking like a decently-entertaining straight-to-VHS action fantasy from a bygone era. The big question, and this applies to both expensive Netflix mockbusters and the big-budget Disney animated films that weren’t intended for streaming, is whether these films can be commercially justified when they aren’t trying to offer “theater quality movies available at home.” It’s one thing for the $150 million Encanto to bomb in theaters and take off on Disney+, it’s another when it comes time to budget a Disney toon that’s intended for Disney+.

The Adam Project is being pulled in three opposing directions. On one hand, I want to give it quarter as an original “rip-off don’t remake” sci-fi fantasy, not unlike what Levy and the Duffer brothers pulled off with Stranger Things. On the other, it looks small in scale and scope, both because it was shot during Covid and because most Netlflix originals don’t quite approximate the genuine article both in terms of size and visual polish. If it were an under-the-radar flick like Freaks (an original sci-fi horror flick about a girl with terrifying powers that came and went theatrically and was briefly popular on Netflix), I’d be inclined to cut it a little slack. The “available at home” curve doesn’t apply when it cost about as much as The Batman and is intended to essentially replace big-budget Hollywood theatricals while offering less onscreen value and being at its weakest when offering up special effects and action sequences.

In a vacuum, The Adam Project is a halfway decent afternoon watch with the kids, featuring terrific work from a stacked cast (including Scobell doing a dead-on performance as a young Ryan Reynolds). The emotional beats, especially in the character-focused first act, mostly click. Reynolds’ usual self-mocking snark is a self-pitying defense mechanism, which is effective as character-specific drama even if you’re not laughing at his jokes. There’s at least one wonderful sequence, featuring Reynolds interacting with Garner and trying to subtly reassure her that she’s doing her best, and it’s a reminder that A) Reynolds is a fine dramatic actor and B) Garner is obscenely overqualified for the various long-suffering mom roles which she has fallen into. The film gives us at least one past-tense scene between Ruffalo and Garner so we can see what was lost. Like a lot of would-be tentpoles, a cheaper, less action-packed Adam Project probably would have been a better movie.

It makes Red Notice look like Free Guy (that’s a compliment), while the comparison between the two Levy/Reynolds high-concept originals shows a clear delineation between streaming-intended and theatrical-bound. The Adam Project is, in the end, “just a movie” and will certainly make you nostalgic for a time when that was enough to merit some level of theatrical/commercial success. I wish it were better only because of the direct competition it poses to (budget aside) bigger and better theatrical releases. However, I will not pretend that it’s not pretty good by the standards of a Netflix mockbuster, or that it doesn’t have several superlative elements before it mostly descends into generic action/effects-driven nonsense. At least it, slight spoilers, does not exist to set up a franchise, existing as a single complete story with an actual ending. It’s sad, ten years after The Avengers, what we’ve had to become thankful for in terms of taken-for-granted elements of the feature film.