Published Jul 21, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT
Ever since 2014’s Godzilla, Gareth Edwards has proved he’s the guy studios call when they need to inject new life into an old franchise. He brought Star Wars back to the big screen with Rogue One, and most recently he soft-rebooted the Jurassic franchise with Jurassic World Rebirth. But when it comes to his original, non-IP work, audiences have never really shown up in the same numbers.
The film in question came out in 2023 to a muted box office, which is a shame given the scale of what Edwards was attempting. It’s set in a future where an AI designed to protect humanity detonates a nuclear warhead over Los Angeles, and this leads to a full-scale war between the humans and the machines. John David Washington stars as an ex-special forces operative sent to hunt down a mysterious war-ending weapon created by AI, only to discover that the weapon is actually a compassionate AI child.
The film is called The Creator, which just arrived on Netflix in most international markets this week. And the response has been immediate. According to FlixPatrol, the sci-fi epic has already broken into Netflix’s Top 10 charts in 45+ countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It is currently absent from Netflix’s U.S. charts because it is not available to stream on the platform in America. The Creator was previously added to the U.S. Netflix library in March, but its run on the service ended about a month ago when it was removed from the catalog, which likely means that it didn’t do quite as well in the U.S.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Part of what makes The Creator’s belated streaming success so satisfying is what the film pulled off on a comparatively modest budget. Edwards had made the movie for somewhere between $80-$86 million. That’s less than half of what a film of this scale would normally cost. There are giant explosions, flying warships, huge armies of droids that wouldn’t look out of place in a* Star Wars* movie or even Cyberpunk 2077, and the little AI child has a visible hole in the back of her head in nearly every scene. But none of it looks cheap or uncanny for even a second. For comparison, The Flash came out the same year with a $200 million budget, and it looked like a literal PS3 video game.
The Creator pulled in just $104 million worldwide and was considered a flop, and it’s genuinely hard to pin down why it struggled the way it did. Perhaps it was the generic-looking plot that seemed derivative of other AI-versus-humanity movies like Terminator and The Matrix, and being an original film without built-in IP recognition likely didn’t help it find an audience. But the visual effects work never went unrecognized. Almost every other review praised The Creator’s CGI, and the film also ended up winning Oscars for Best Visual Effects along with Best Sound.
*The Creator *is available to stream on Hulu. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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Chris Weitz, Gareth Edwards
Arnon Milchan, Gareth Edwards, Jim Spencer, Kiri Hart