There’s been no shortage of headline-grabbing box office disasters this year, but the main difference between Knights of the Zodiac and the likes of Haunted Mansion, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and The Flash is that people were actually aware of their existence.
Despite carrying a substantial budget of $60 million, director Tomasz BagiĆski’s live-action adaptation of bestselling manga series Saint Seiya came and went without barely a soul even noticing, and even the ones who did weren’t interested in paying for a ticket based on its performance.
A global tally of $7 million made Knights of the Zodiac a penny-for-penny flop easily comparable to all of 2023’s most notorious misfires, but no-one really seemed to notice. However, everybody that’s been paying attention knows Netflix is often where forgotten fantasies go to find a new gust of wind in their sails, and the commercial catastrophe that only released five months ago has become the latest to benefit.
Perhaps buoyed by the presence of One Piece star Mackenyu in the lead role – coincidental timing given his status as a key figure in the streaming service’s biggest new show of the last few months – Knights of the Zodiac has celebrated its addition to the content library by becoming the fifth most-watched feature among users in the United States, per FlixPatrol.
The movie’s chances of making money have long since vanished in a plume of smoke, but at the very least it’s gaining the awareness it never had first time around thanks to the biggest streamer on the block.