Netflix's number 1 movie shouldn't surprise anyone – it's a genre mashup classic

It's always interesting when a new movie shoots to the top of Netflix's chart – some combination of marketing, algorithmic favour and genuine appeal takes hold and people flock in droves to see the hot new thing. In Netflix's particular case, the charts seem to be really resistant to snobbiness, too, with plenty of movies having occupied the top spot despite dire reviews.

Follow T3.com on Google News to keep our latest news, insights, and features at the top of your feeds!

Now a new one is taking its turn – Thrash, which I suspected could be a breakout hit the moment I saw its first corny teaser trailer. It takes the long-established shark movie format and injects a ridiculous twist by basically crossing it with another type of disaster movie: environmental disasters. Now it's sitting pretty at the top of the global Netflix movie charts.

Thrash | Official Trailer | Netflix - YouTube

Watch On

Thrash has a fun central premise, to be clear. It asks the question of what would happen if a coastal community were ravaged by a huge hurricane, and in the process lost its flood defences. Its key twist, though, is that in the process of the storm's fallout, a huge meat shipment crashes into the floodwaters and acts as a giant chunk of bait for a shark infestation to come in from the ocean.

I want to be fair here – that's a dynamite idea, one that takes the silly ingenuity of Sharknado and makes it just credible enough to actually retain a somewhat realistic tone. It does that while still being able to put its cast of characters in life-or-death situations that are objectively ridiculous, but not totally fanciful despite that. However, there's a sting in the tail, despite the movie's chart success: its reviews are horrible.

Image 1 of 5

I'm not a big fan of Rotten Tomatoes, with its weird binary "good or bad" score system, and prefer Metacritic, which aggregates actual star ratings (albeit a little arcanely). It has Thrash sitting on an average review score of 48/100 from critics, with a user review score of just 4.6. Those are rookie numbers, obviously, and they make me wonder if this will be a film that Netflix sees as the start of a franchise based on its streaming metrics alone.

After all, Netflix runs a careful business. The biggest priority is getting people to watch things, but it's also clear that if it can also make movies that review well with critics and audiences, it would aim to do so. So, while Thrash has a classic idea at its heart, mixing thriller subgenres with abandon, it currently isn't looking like it'll become anyone's favourite shark movie, for all that matters to Netflix.