‘The Bubble’ Bombs As Ryan Reynolds And Sandra Bullock Rule Netflix

The Adam Project notched another 17.72 million hours in its fourth frame. The $116 million-budgeted, Shawn Levy-directed time travel adventure stars Ryan Reynolds as a future soldier who teams up with his pre-teen self to save the proverbial day. It entered the top five among all-timers (for English-language movies) with 227.2 million hours over those key first 28 days. That means Ryan Reynolds has three movies (along with Red Notice and Michael Bay’s Six Underground which returned to the top five last week possibly due to Bay’s Ambulance opening theatrically) in the all-time top ten.

Sandra Bullock has two wildly different films, the dystopian fantasy Bird Box and the grimdark (and poorly reviewed) crime drama The Unforgivable, in the top six. I remain impressed that The Unforgivable, which has almost nothing to sell beyond “Sandra Bullock in a lead role,” notched more global hours in the first 28 days than Martin Scorsese’s much-publicized, 3.5-hour-long The Irishman. If I were Seven Buck Productions (Dwayne Johnson’s company) and/or Maximum Effort (Reynolds’ company), I would be begging Ms. Bullock to join the cast of Red Notice 2 and possibly Red Notice 3.

Meanwhile, Bullock (whose The Lost City helped save the old-school theatrical programmer) had her “new to Netflix” debut of The Blind Side earning 9.8 million hours. It’s currently the most-viewed movie on Netflix in North America for the day. The number two movie for last week was the mere 12.45 million-hour opening weekend of Judd Apatow’s The Bubble. The frankly terrible showbiz comedy, the kind of “inside baseball” satire so off-the-mark that even seasoned outsiders can call BS, earned around six million complete views presuming everyone made it to the end of the 126-minute runtime.

Despite a stacked cast, including Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal, Leslie Mann, Keegan-Michael Key and David Duchovney, the nearly-laugh-free film isn’t just a bad comedy filled with good actors giving little to do. It’s not just obscenely hypocritical in being about how Hollywood is being pressured to cash in on social media stars in attempts to court “the kids” even while casting (a perfectly fine) Iris Apatow as a social influencer while casting Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova as “the love interest.” It’s a downright insidious flick that attempts to belittle Netflix’s biggest competition.

The film, set in a summer-of-2020 film set and very obviously based upon the Covid-era attempts to complete Universal’s Jurassic World: Dominion invites us to laugh at on-set incompetence and directorial hubris and constantly asks us why Hollywood was so determined to press on even in a pre-vaccine era. Amazingly, the film never bothers to even imply that streaming competition and the gains made by Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon amid a “you can’t go outside” pandemic was a huge driving factor.

Ironically, if the film was intended to show that streaming can be a safe space for star/concept/filmmaker-driven comedy, it didn’t quite work out. The film “opened” lower than any “big” Netflix original I could find going back to July 4, 2021. It nabbed fewer hours over the first three days than (for example) Red Notice (149 million hours), The Ice Road (13 million), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (29 million hours), The Weekend Away (44 million hours), The Royal Treatment (44 million hours), The Lost Daughter (18 million hours) and The Harder They Fall (64 million hours).

It debuted with less than half the viewership of the allegedly “too slow and boring for normal people” Power of the Dog (29 million hours). The extent to which the film got crushed by The Adam Project (a halfway decent Hollywood mockbuster) and is placed behind Death on the Nile, The Adam Project and Turning Red on the Whip Media list yet another sign that streaming is dealing with the same “everyone watches franchise-ish fare” or “IP adaptations” (along with, for streaming, ignored theatrical flicks) problems that ironically allowed television and streaming to supplant theatrical moviegoing on the top of the pop culture mountain.

The simplest explanation, beyond just miserable reviews and a lower profile for The Bubble, is that everyone who turned on Netflix to watch something sans their children opted for the second season of Shonda Rhimes’ Bridgerton. The first full week of the second season of the blockbuster romantic melodrama notched a stunning 251 million hours, followed amusingly by 51 million hours for… Bridgerton season one. The first season remains Netflix’s most-viewed English-language show (in the first 28 days) and the second season is now just below the top ten with 445 million.

Even if it drops by 50% this week, it’ll notch another 125 million hours and take third place overall behind only Stranger Thing season 3 (582 million) and Bridgerton season 1 (626 million). Without knowing offhand what’s dropping between now and Memorial Day, early June could see four of the top five slots occupied by seasons one and two of Bridgerton and seasons three and four of Stranger Things, with Shonda Rhimes’ Inventing Anna (511 million after 28 days) hanging out in number six. Once again. Rhimes stands alone as absolutely worth that mega-bucks development deal.