Mister Police, you are the #1 movie on Netflix.
What a curious turn of events. Six years after The Snowman opened in theaters to terrible reviews from critics and equally bad box office — it earned just $6.7 million in the US in its entire theatrical release against a $35 million budget — the chilly detective thriller starring Michael Fassbender is now not only on Netflix, it is the number one film on the entire service.
You read that right. Faced with hundreds (if not thousands) of entertainment options on Netflix alone, people are standing together en masse and says “Yes! We want to see the cop movie where Michael Fassbender plays a dude named Harry Hole.”
In case you haven’t revisited the film on Netflix yet, a brief refresher: Fassbender’s, erm, Hole, is an Norwegian police officer assigned to investigate the case of the “Snowman Killer.” Inspector Hole (that’s his name!) must solve the case with the help of a new partner (Rebecca Ferguson), while he receives strange letters from the killer addressed to “Mister Police” — a bizarre phrase that inspired the movie’s ridiculous poster.
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The strange thing was, as I noted in my review of The Snowman on ScreenCrush in 2017, while the poster talks about the killer giving Hole all the clues, that’s not something that actually happens in the film…
Despite a poster inspired by the killer’s letters that read “You could have saved her, I gave you all the clues,” there are not any clues in the movie, and certainly none from the snowman guy. Instead, Mr. Hole follows a trail of very stale breadcrumbs to a similar string of killings years earlier, investigated by another detective (Val Kilmer). And there’s enough circumstantial evidence for Bratt to take a long look at Arve Støp (JK Simmons), a wealthy businessman running a campaign to get Oslo chosen as the site of the next Winter Games.
So why is this movie, which is possibly even sillier (and more clumsily assembled) than I have made it sound, the top film on Netflix at the moment? This is a strange phenomenon of the streaming service which demands further investigation, but it does seem that a lot of movies with big stars that tanked in theaters often find an audience on Netflix. People may not have wanted to spend $15 to see The Snowmanbut when they turn on Netflix, and it’s the first movie at the top of the screen, and it’s got Michael Fassbender looking very handsome and he’s Mister Police, you figure you might as well give it a shot.
Whatever the reason, Harry Hole is now on top of the world. And this is not an isolated incident. Keep reading to see what I mean….
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