To give you an inkling of just how long the Red Dawn remake was sitting on the shelf, Chris Hemsworth was cast in May 2009, the exact same month he was announced as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thor. And yet, his debut as the Odinson arrived in theaters a full 18 months before director Dan Bradley’s do-over.
In between those two points, the pointless update of the 1984 cult favorite was scuppered by studio MGM’s financial difficulties, while it was forced into a massive overhaul in post-production after China caught wind of its presence as the villains of the piece and caused an uproar, leading to painstaking CGI work to scrub all references to the country and replace them with North Korea instead.
It proved to be for absolutely nothing, too, after Red Dawn cratered at the box office by failing to even come within touching distance of recouping its $65 million budget. It was also resoundingly trashed by critics to the tune of a 14 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, so all those years sitting on the shelf and being overhauled after the end of shooting proved to be a futile waste of everyone’s time.
There’s also a bizarrely eclectic ensemble in place that finds Tom Cruise’s son Connor making one of his very few forays into acting alongside Hemsworth, Josh Peck, Adrianne Palicki, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and more, which may have piqued the curiosity of Freevee subscribers after FlixPatrol surprisingly revealed Red Dawn to be one of the most in-demand titles on the ad-supported platform.