Rage bait tends to draw a crowd (just ask anyone who has attended a Donald Trump rally), but even the controversies surrounding Matt Rife weren’t enough to turn attention away from a movie franchise that recently dethroned his own special on Netflix.
For context, Rife’s latest comedy special Lucid: A Crowd Work Special landed on Netflix this week, boasting a first for the streamer with a comedy set that involved crowd work for a major stretch of its runtime. Lucid followed Rife’s previous Netflix special Natural Selection, which was released last year and drew swift backlash for seeming to make light of domestic violence and jokes about transgender people.
Even amid all the controversy, still Natural Selection skyrocketed to the top of Netflix’s charts, and was at one point the most-watched title on the platform domestically. The headlines surrounding the TikTok star have only continued — from apparent internet beefs with children to widespread speculation about plastic surgery — so he might have foreseen another attention-grabbing, smash hit on Netflix with Lucid.
That hasn’t exactly been the case. While Lucid briefly sat atop Netflix’s most-watched charts in the few days after its release, it was quickly superseded by a bunch of extremely attractive Brits doing British things in tailored suits. Granted, that’s not the official logline for The Kingsman film franchise, but it’s first two installments — subtitled The Secret Service and The Golden Circle — have nonetheless ascended to Netflix’s most-streamed status, at the same rate my heart beats whenever I see Taron Egerton wearing reading glasses. Swoon!
According to FlixPatrol, the first two Kingsman films are currently dominating the Netflix charts internationally, with Lucid now trailing in fourth place behind the John Cena starring-animation Ferdinand. Of course, the ascendance of the Kingsman films should perhaps be expected, since Secret Service grossed over $414 million worldwide upon its 2014 release while Golden Circle brought in $410 million at the box office in 2017.
For those doing the math, that’s a nearly billion-dollar haul for the first two films, with the third installment, The King’s Man, getting it even closer to that line by grossing $125 million in 2021. Even Rife would have predicted that he couldn’t compete with Matthew Vaughn’s A-lister-clad franchise, no matter how many rage-filled tweets his comments seem to inspire.
For those eager to see Egerton on screens again, Vaughn is currently at work on two additional installments of the Kingsman franchise, so Rife should perhaps plan his next special around whatever the release dates for The Traitor King and Kingsman: The Blue Blood might be. Or he could just get into a TikTok feud with a jaw surgeon again and hope for the best.