It goes without saying that historical epics featuring plenty of sword-swinging action sequences and battlefields drenched in blood and dust are all-but-guaranteed to perform on streaming regardless of which platform they appear on, but 2019’s Kingdom stands out from the pack due to its unexpected origins.
Plenty of audiences – and now at-home viewers – have simply sat down and enjoyed a widely-acclaimed box office smash hit that holds respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 94 and 96 percent from critics and crowds without a care in the world for where it came from, what it’s based on, and how it came to be.
As a result, discovering that director Shinsuke Sato’s bone-crunching tale of destiny is based on a manga series might come as a surprise, not to mention that star Kento Yamazaki starred in a three-minute short of the same name that was released three years earlier, with the actor then reprising the role in the widely-lauded 134-minute feature.
The narrative is hardly groundbreaking within the context of the genre, given that it finds a young man of lowly social status pitching up alongside a king to battle massive armies, ruthless assassins, and mountain-dwelling miscreants in an effort to stave off all-out war and united a fractured nation, but seeing as FlixPatrol has named Kingdom as one of the most-watched movies on Netflix’s global charts as we head into the weekend, it’s clearly got enough about it to be deemed as a must-see.
The subgenre is about as bulletproof as it gets, and that’s been reinforced once more by the film’s stellar performance.