Home Netflix

An epic waste of Paul Rudd’s time breezes past a noisy Justin Timberlake sequel to steal Liam Hemsworth’s Netflix crown

'Madame Web,' meet your villainous Netflix successor.

Ghostbusters Frozen Empire
Screengrab via Sony Pictures

Remember when the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot came out and the overwhelming majority of the internet had the most misogynistically unhinged meltdown of the century, only for the film to stand out as a genuinely great movie that understood precisely what made the original Ghostbusters work?

Recommended Videos

Well, because of that little catastrophe, we didn’t seem to save enough vitriol for the Ghostbusters films that actually deserved to be dragged; specifically, 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which hit theaters earlier this year.

Indeed, it’s one thing to recklessly cash in on an IP, but the newer Ghostbusters reboot has mangled its source material to such a grossly commercialized degree, that we should feel ashamed for even knowing that these movies exist. But, evidently, we don’t, because Frozen Empire has managed to debut at number one on the Netflix film leaderboards in the United States.

Slimer flying at the screen in 'Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire'
Image via Sony Pictures

Per FlixPatrol, American Netflix users have quite unthinkably chosen to spend their streaming time shoving this Paul Rudd-led disaster to the top of the Top 10, edging out the likes of Trolls Band Together (the delightful little DreamWorks romp starring Justin Timberlake), and previous leaderboard champion Land of Bad (which is probably the best movie about Liam Hemsworth fighting for survival in the Philippines alongside his Delta Force team that we’ll get all year).

There’s a joke in here about Frozen Empire shouldn’t cross the streams and poison the minds of Max viewers after its Netflix run ends, but the mere existence of this film has sapped too much of my Ghostbusters-tinted mirth to give it much in the way of attention. Just know there are better uses of your Netflix time, folks; trust me on that.