Based on the critical reactions and commercial performance of White House Down, Independence Day: Resurgence, Midway, and Moonfall, Roland Emmerich can’t even make halfway decent Roland Emmerich movies anymore. In retrospect, then, his regular collaborator Dean Devlin’s attempt at emulating the Master of Disaster with Geostorm was doomed from the start.
Having teamed with Emmerich as either a writer or producer on Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Patriot, you’d have thought Devlin may have learned a thing or two on how to craft serviceable big budget entertainment predicated on the end of the world. Instead, he ended up getting booted out of his feature-length directorial debut and replaced by Danny Cannon for the extensive reshoots, and you know things are bad when the guy who helmed Sylvester Stallone’s Judge Dredd is drafted in.
To the surprise of nobody, Geostorm died a slow and painful death at the box office, all while being torn to shreds in terms of reviews and audience reactions. On Rotten Tomatoes, the disastrous dud holds respective scores of 17 and 35 percent, while a respectable-sounding $221 million haul didn’t prevent Warner Bros. from ending up $75 million in the red.
However, as a blockbuster packed full of expensive CGI and Gerard Butler’s scowling visage, Geostorm has risen from the depths to avoid the apocalypse on the Netflix most-watched charts, as per FlixPatrol. The cinematic equivalent of “we have Roland Emmerich at home”, subscribers may be wishing they’d checked out one of the OG’s more palatable efforts by the time the credits roll.