With horror writ large into its premise, Netflix’ novel cinematic offering Bird Box has garnered controversy and commercial success in equal measure. The production team attracted a fair share of criticism for timing the release coinciding with Christmas festivities. But if the proof lies in the pudding, then these factors did not matter in the end, as Bird Box became one of the largest successes in the history of content streaming.
Reviewers elsewhere have compared Bird Box to A Quiet Place, another horror feature that introduced monsters that employed a form of echo-location device to target their victims. Whereas in Bird Box, it is the sense of vision that is deployed to achieve evil designs. While this central premise is a novel idea in cinema, most of the rest of the elements in the film were dismissed by critics as either ‘tried and tested, and hence, tired’ or as ‘too incoherent to make a cogent logic’. Unfavorable comparisons were also made with Will Smith starrer Bright, as well as the modest successes in the form of The Cloverfield Paradox, Extinction, etc. Critics also frowned upon Netflix’ audacity to tread a genre that is tightly linked to the cinematic/theatrical experience, namely the horror genre. Accounting for all these perceived deficiencies in terms of creativity and marketing logic, many showbiz commentators predicted a sub-par performance for the feature. Now that Bird Box is acclaimed a super hit, one can look at what were the catalysts for this success.
Firstly, the much criticized marketing extravaganza in the lead up to the release, is proving to be worth every penny in hindsight. The manner in which the lead crew and the production team hit the television promotion circuit has also paid off. The savvy social media marketing, in the form of curiosity-provoking memes, should be given due credit. While the marketing team initiated certain memes, the general audience later took it on their own to come up with witty memes related to the show. Some of these memes have gone viral, running into tens of thousands of shares or retweets – a phenomenon no marketing company could have bought with money.
The viewership figures released by Netflix bear testimony to how Bird Box ranks as high (if not actually surpassing) its other iconic productions like The Christmas Chronicles, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, etc. The viewership figures is projected to cross the 100 million mark if this trend will continue, although independent verification of these numbers is yet to be done.
If the success of a movie is measured by its infiltration into the common everyday lexicon, then Bird Box is an uncontested winner. Beyond its impressive viewership numbers, the film seems to have captured the public imagination. The mushrooming of fan clubs and merchandise and memorabilia surround the movie is another indication of hot it has seeped into public consciousness.
But not all of these are to be seen as innocuous. There are already reports of fans indulging in Bird Box Challenge, where people try to accomplish various everyday activities by blindfolding themselves. Needless to say, there have been reports of accidents and unintended outcomes of such misadventures, that it forced Netflix to make a public appeal that essentially said: ‘DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME’.
It is difficult to fathom that a project that is such a blockbuster had seen several false starts in recent years. Although the copyright to the original novel by Josh Malerman was bought by Universal in 2013, it passed several aborted attempts and a handful of production houses to finally settle with Netflix. And the rest of the story is all too well-known now to have legends spun around it.
It terms of production costs too, with an investment lesser than twenty million dollars, the returns on investment have outperformed some of the more expensive productions from the Netflix stable. Some industry analysts continue to debate that the film might have received greater box-office collections had it been released in cinemas. But this is mere speculation, as no one could simply transpose online numbers as ticket sales at the cinemas.
What is undeniable though, is the star appeal of Sandra Bullock, whose stature as a premiere category movie star and whose base of fan following have steadily increased over the years. With an Oscar award to her credit for her role in The Blind Side (2013), Bullock has lent a certain gravitas to many of her recent projects. Given her propensity to be very choosy with her projects, she must have sensed the value of the script when she was offered the role in the Bird Box. And the responses to the project since its release have only affirmed her intuition. In terms of performance, Bullock’s acting skills in Bird Box should rank alongside her much vaunted performances in Gravity and The Heat.
The casting has been near-perfect with each actor carefully chosen after considerable thought and vetting process. Trevante Rhodes, Sarah Paulson, John Malkovich, Machine Gun Kelly, Jacki Weaver and Tom Hollander, are all award-winning actors with considerable experience and skill. Bullock’s towering screen presence does not in any way detract from their commendable performance.
There have been some criticism over how Netflix’s ambiguity in its certification (or lack thereof) of the film. The standards of grading a moving depending on age-based suitability is very lax or nonexistent in the online streaming domain. Netflix seems to have exploited this lacuna in law to full effect, by pushing violence, bloody imagery, expletives, and sporadic sexual scenes into a secular offering that could be accessed by all age-groups. Netflix should not brush ethical questions under the carpet under the gleam of commercial success. The sooner it answers these questions the better.
On a final note, Netflix is to be commended for how it has not ignored critical reception in pursuit of commercial gains. Sure enough, Bird Box was an out-and-out entertainment flick with no pretensions to be high art. But the same categorization cannot be given to Roma (directed by Alfonso Cuaron) which has created a buzz with its critical acclaim. One can also include Martin Scorsese’ The Irishman, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Velvet Buzzsaw and Panama Papers (starring Meryl Streep) in the list of Netflix masterpieces that don’t sacrifice the art quotient at the altar of profit pursuit.