Angelina Jolie's Wanted Is Now A Top United States…

Summary

Wanted is being rediscovered on Netflix, becoming a popular streaming hit.
The 2000s featured a surge in comic book adaptations, including Wanted.
Wanted was a rare successful R-rated action film, smashing the international box office.

Every once in a while, a funny thing can happen with streaming services like Netflix. Seemingly out of nowhere, a film that most people haven't thought about in years comes along and becomes a streaming hit. Well, it's happened again.

You won't be surprised to learn that comic book adaptations were all the rage in the late 2000s. Films featuring Batman and Spider-Man were lighting up the box office every few years, meaning almost every popular comic was either actively getting an adaptation or in the process of getting one. Big draws like Superman and the X-Men were getting huge movies. Projects once considered unfilmable, like Watchmen, were getting the green light. Adult-oriented comics like Sin City and V for Vendetta were getting big-budget flicks. If you think Marvel and DC are out of control now, you are forgetting how wild and crazy the 2000s were for comic book adaptations. The film based on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen straight up caused Sean Connery to (mostly) retire from the acting game altogether. It was a weird time in Hollywood!

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A lot of people are either discovering or rediscovering 2008's Wanted on Netflix at the moment. To be fair, Wanted was only the tenth most streamed film in the United States on Netflix last week, but every other film was either a Netflix Original Film (like Happy Gilmore 2), featured Adam Sandler (like the original Happy Gilmore), or was released in the last decade (like Despicable Me 4). Wanted is none of those things and its random success is a testament to what Netflix and other streaming services like it offer: the ability for a random movie to be found by mountains of people who never would've watched it otherwise.

Wanted Is Well Worth Any Action Fan's Time, Even If The Oft-Rumored Sequel Never Happens

"Bullet Curving" Is Super Cool, You Guys

Extremely loosely based on the comic book miniseries of the same name by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, Wanted kind of came out of nowhere in the summer of 2008 to prove that R-rated action films could still make a ton of money if done right. On a relatively scant budget of $75 million, Wanted blew the doors off the international box office and raked in over $342 million. The film follows the somewhat pathetic Wesley Gibson, played by James McAvoy, as he discovers that he is the son of an assassin with a genetic ability to produce otherworldly amounts of adrenaline that basically give him superpowers. As such, Wesley joins Angelina Jolie's Fox and Morgan Freeman's Mr. Sloan as member of the assassin guild known as the Fraternity. Chaos and copious bloodshed unsurprisingly ensue.

Russian director Timur Bekmambetov introduced himself to American audiences with a bang that set him up to be the next hot director in Tinseltown (something he squandered with 2012's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) and McAvoy hinted at his star potential years before he became the face of the X-Men films in 2011's X-Men: First Class. The supporting cast of Jolie, Freeman, Terence Stamp, Common, and Chris Pratt (among others) is top-notch and the whole "curved bullets" ability that members of the Fraternity can pull off—literally bending bullets around solid objects to hit their targets—is both wholly stupid and extremely awesome.

Basically, if you have Netflix, and you've never seen Wanted, you should hop on the trend with everyone else. And if you have seen Wanted, well, maybe it's time to watch it again!