Another month has passed, and with it a new crop of new content on Netflix, including some unexpected films that have made their way into the streaming service’s Top 10. The most recent of these is the 2012 sci-fi action film Battleship, yeah, the one based on the iconic board game. Battleship, directed by Friday Night Lights and Hancock filmmaker Peter Berg, featured an unusually large ensemble cast, including Taylor Kitsch, Rihanna, Alexander Skarsgrd, Hamish Linklater, Jesse Plemons, Rami Malek, and Liam Neeson. The film’s biggest surprise, though, is that Neeson never says the sentence “You sunk my Battleship.”
As of this writing, Battleship is the third most popular movie on Netflix in the United States, a position it jumped to when it initially appeared on the website, and the seventh most popular piece of material on the entire site. Only Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming, a Netflix original, and Shrek 2 are currently higher on the list than Battleship. The film has surpassed Netflix originals The Tinder Swindler and the two Despicable Me films, which have recently found new life on the site, as well as the Steven Soderbergh thriller Contagion, which was a great smash on streaming when the COVID-19 epidemic began to spread internationally in 2020.
Battleship, which was released just two weeks after Marvel’s The Avengers, had mediocre reviews, which along with its rivalry resulted in poor box office returns. Battleship was also released at a time when Hasbro was experiencing significant success with their Transformers feature films, which resulted in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Battleship, and, subsequently, Ouija. Despite this, and the fact that everyone knew it was based on a board game, Berg went out of his way to remove the film from its….source material, while pointing out that certain Easter eggs do exist.