
In the Bird Box universe, looking at one of the world’s invisible monsters causes people to immediately die by suicide, a grim reality that requires Bullock’s character, Malorie, and her fellow survivors to spend most of the film blindfolded.

It wasn’t until White noticed images from the film inundating his feeds on Twitter and Instagram that he seriously considered watching it.
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“I had this vague idea that it was a good enough movie to be on Netflix but not good enough for anyone to get excited about.” “Eventually I learned enough about the movie through pop culture osmosis to have the idea that it involved Sandra Bullock, that it was like A Quiet Place but with blindfolds,” White, a 28-year-old civil litigation attorney in Chicago, told me via email. White recalled seeing its trailer advertised during Thanksgiving break, around the time the movie premiered at the American Film Institute Festival. subscribers were confused by Bird Box’s title, its recognizable star, autoplay previews, and prime above-the-fold real estate were enough to catch people’s attention. Bird Box premiered at the top of Netflix’s homepage December 21, around the time that people were settling into their couch grooves for a sedentary holiday vacation. The formulaic nature that hurt Bird Box’s critical reception is, as they say in Silicon Valley, a feature, not a bug.įirst, I should offer you a quick play-by-play of why we are currently discussing an otherwise unremarkable movie. Its SEO-friendly name, overcrowded cast, gimmicky imagery, and savvy release schedule all add up to pure meme bait. But even if the Bay Area–based corporation has overseen an impressive lineup of genuinely delightful projects-from rom-com revivers To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Set It Up to a legitimate Oscar contender like Roma- Bird Box’s results are quite different. Bird Box is a “Netflix original” adapted from Josh Malerman’s 2014 sci-fi novel of the same name and one of the many high-budget films that the company has funded in an expensive mission to prove that it can upend the traditional production cycle of a Hollywood studio. “Not really, but it doesn’t need to be.” In the context of a movie review, this is an unexpected statement, but also spot-on: The circumstances under which Bird Box wormed its way into our zeitgeist explain why, in the age of direct-to-consumer streaming, quality may be more irrelevant than ever.


“Is it good?” asked Salon’s Melanie McFarland. Amy Nicholson, writing for The Guardian, called it “forcibly screwed together, a movie marionetted by strings of data code.” I personally have seen more creative claustrophobic disaster scenarios played out by Sims characters. The sensory-deprivation horror flick is “filmed with illustrative approximations, in generic gestures and fragments,” according to The New Yorker’s Richard Brody. Chief among the film’s problems is its lack of originality (and more than passing resemblance to another 2018 movie, A Quiet Place). The postapocalyptic thriller starring Sandra Bullock was panned by critics and currently sits at 66 percent among audience members on Rotten Tomatoes.
