Idris Elba’s Wild Survival Movie Is #1 On Streaming
Idris Elba's 2022 thriller Beasts is the #1 streamed movie on Amazon Prime Video.
Last year was one of Idris Elba’s busiest on both the big and small screens, particularly when it came to his prolific voice-acting career. But it’s one of his live-action roles, 2022’s edge-of-your-seat survival thriller Beast, that’s dominating the streaming charts on Amazon Prime Video. The film just unseated J.Lo‘s action rom-com Shotgun Wedding as the number one most-streamed movie on the platform.
In Beast, Idris Elba plays Dr. Nate Samuels, a father trying to reconnect with his children following the death of his wife. To help with that connection, he brings his two daughters, Mare (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries), to the Mopani Reserve near where their mother was born. Unfortunately, it isn’t just memories waiting for the Samuels family in South Africa, but a rogue lion that’s killing everyone and everything in its path.
Once the ruthless lion is on their trail, the Samuels’ only ally is Shartlo Copley (District 9) as Martin Battles, Nate’s old friend and a biologist. Unfortunately, Martin’s help threatens to put the Samuels in a war on two fronts — fighting to survive not only the rogue lion, but the poachers that Battles has been in conflict with for years and whose crimes likely triggered the beast’s rampage. It all builds up to a showdown between the grieving widower and the wild lion.
Sadly, Beast didn’t do well financially and not much better critically. The Idris Elba-led thriller ended its theatrical run grossing $59.1 million against a production budget of $36 million. While reviewers didn’t trash it enough to give it the dreaded green splat on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 68 percent Tomatometer score, it didn’t earn enough love to get verified either.
The general consensus among critics seemed to be that while Beast wasn’t necessarily a bad movie, it wasn’t particularly memorable. If you want to watch an Idris Elba movie that will stay with you, the reviewers argue, there are plenty more to choose from.
There were plenty of other Idris Elba movies to choose from the same year that Beast hit theaters. In fact, the very same month that Beast was released, it was joined on the big screen by the fantasy romantic drama Three Thousand Years of Longing in which Elba plays a Djinn unleashed by a professor played by Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton). It was helmed by the Oscar-winning George Miller, who made it his sole cinematic focus since the 2015 release of Mad Max: Fury Road.
Idris Elba made a surprise appearance earlier in the year in a mid-credits scene for Thor: Love and Thunder as his Marvel character Heimdall, who was murdered by Josh Brolin‘s Thanos in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War. After her sacrifice, it’s Heimdall who welcomes Natalie Portman‘s Jane Foster to her reward in Valhalla.
If you want to decide for yourself whether or not Beast is a memorable flick, the thriller is streaming right now on Amazon Prime Video.
