This might shock some of our younger readers, but there was a time when Bruce Willis was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, and one of the first names on any producer’s list when they were searching for a leading man to headline a big budget blockbuster designed to draw in a huge box office haul.
These days, you’re a whole lot more likely to find the Die Hard legend slumming it in the VOD circuit, where he’s churning out B-tier genre thrillers with an almost alarming regularity. To put things into context, between the beginning of 2018 and the end of 2022, Willis will have appeared in no less than 27 movies, precisely three of which made it to the inside of a theater.
Of those three, the Death Wish remake and Motherless Brooklyn were critical and commercial duds, and his admittedly amusing cameo in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part as John McClane was very brief. There are currently six Willis vehicles available as part of the Netflix content library, the very best of which could generously be described as mediocre.
Buddy cop action comedy Cop Out, crime thriller First Kill, historical drama Air Strike, revenge story Hard Kill, crime caper The Whole Nine Yards and sci-fi Cosmic Sin span 20 years and entirely different genres, but they’re all fairly terrible. Their respective Rotten Tomatoes score run from Hard Kill‘s 0% to The Whole Nine Yards‘ 43%, and the latter came when Bruce Willis was still something of a draw, which is probably why it holds the best reviews by some distance. Check them out at your peril, which a lot of subscribers clearly have, looking at how Cosmic Sin is performing.