Netflix is making a big entrance to the blockbuster movies arena with their $90 million worth Bright which stars Will Smith. The company has a lot of faith in the movie, which is released today, since Bloomberg reports that Netflix already ordered a sequel with Smith reprising his role.
Set in an alternate present where humans and mythical creatures are living together, Bright has LAPD police officer Daryl Ward (Will Smith) teaming up with Orc rookie Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton) to fight the dark powers which are threatening to end the world as they know it. The movie also stars Noomi Rapace, Édgar Ramírez, and Lucy Fry. Bright was directed by David Ayer, who previously worked with Smith on Suicide Squad, while Max Landis (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency) served as a writer.
Unfortunately for Netflix, the movie hasn’t been received very well by the critics, who had the chance to see it before the official release. It has 27% approval rating on the review aggregator of Rotten Tomatoes while scoring 31 out of 100 on Metacritic. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus says that “Bright tries to blend fantasy, hard-hitting cop drama, and social commentary — and ends up falling painfully short of the mark on all three fronts.” This may not affect the decision to make a sequel since Netflix mostly pays attention to the wishes of their subscribers.
Netflix has already released 50 movies in 2017 alone, and targets to release up to 80 in the next year. Although most of the movies will still be low budget projects, with expensive ones like Bright Netflix wants to compete with major Hollywood studios. The company intends to spend over $8 billion on programming in 2018, with 25% of that will go to feature films, original scripted series, stand-up specials and anime projects.
