Rebecca Ferguson’s $100 Million Sci-Fi Disaster Redeems Itself on Streaming

Nearly a decade old at this point, the sci-fi film Life has had more success on streaming than it did in theaters. The movie featured a star-studded cast, including a post-Deadpool Ryan Reynolds, but it grossed just $100 million at the worldwide box office, against a reported budget of around $60 million. Life debuted theatrically in 2017, but has witnessed the bulk of its success in the years since. It witnessed another spike recently, when it cracked the global HBO Max charts in the first week of December. According to FlixPatrol, Life was the fifth-most watched title on the global HBO Max charts on December 8, once again proving that genre movies have a way of finding their audience long after they’ve finished their theatrical runs.

In addition to Reynolds, Life also featured Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Hiroyuki Sanada. While Gyllenhaal was ostensibly the lead of the movie owing to his popularity, Ferguson and Sanada have caught up with him in recent years, thanks to their work on shows such as Silo and Shögun, respectively. Ferguson also played a key role in the last few Mission: Impossible movies, while Sanada has remained one of the biggest Japanese stars around the world for decades. Life was directed by Daniel Espinosa, who’d previously worked with Reynolds on the hit action film Safe House; it was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who’d worked with Reynolds on the first Deadpool.

Fans of ‘Life’ Found Ties to Tom Hardy’s ‘Venom’

The movie earned comparisons to Ridley Scott‘s groundbreaking hit Alien, seeing as it also revolved around the crew of a spacecraft having to deal with an extraterrestrial threat. Briefly, the movie inspired chatter about being some kind of prequel to the Venom film that would debut a year later. Life earned mixed reviews upon release, and is now sitting at a 67% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, “Life is just thrilling, well-acted, and capably filmed enough to overcome an overall inability to add new wrinkles to the trapped-in-space genre.”