This is shaping up to be the year that Anthony Mackie establishes himself as the king of streaming, wrestling the crown from Pedro Pascal after the latter spent December dominating the most-watched lists across three separate services thanks to Disney Plus’ The Mandalorian, HBO Max’s Wonder Woman 1984 and Netflix’s We Can Be Heroes.
We’re not even halfway through 2021 yet, and Mackie has already headlined Netflix’s biggest original movie of the year so far thanks to sci-fi actioner Outside the Wire drawing in 66 million viewers in the first four weeks following it being added to the library in January, while there’s a high chance that you’ve also seen him in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. If that wasn’t enough, Amazon’s star-studded anthology series Solos premieres next week and sees the former Falcon co-star with the likes of Anne Hathaway, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren, while he’s back on Netflix today with brand new mystery thriller The Woman in the Window.
The plot follows Amy Adams’ agoraphobic doctor witnessing something she shouldn’t while spying on the family next door, causing a chain reaction of increasingly dangerous and deadly events. If it sounds like a thinly-veiled Alfred Hitchcock knockoff then you wouldn’t be wrong, with most of the early reviews making the exact same comparison, and The Woman in the Window is sitting on a soft Rotten Tomatoes score of just 26% at the time of writing.
Having already appeared in sci-fi Io and buddy actioner Point Blank, as well as guest starring in Black Mirror and headlining season 2 of Altered Carbon, Anthony Mackie is clearly fond of working with Netflix, but The Woman in the Window is looking like a bit of a bust unless it draws in a big audience.