Due to the sheer amount of money Netflix has to play with (last year it spent about $18bn on content) and the ever-increasing number of subscribers it must satiate, the streamer often acts as a home for the unwanted goods of others, a digital island of misfit toys. At one stage, the shark thriller Beneath the Storm was being primed for a theatrical release by Sony, shot back in 2024. The following year it was renamed Shiver and slated for an August premiere. Cut to 2026 and it’s now known as Thrash, unceremoniously offloaded to Netflix instead.
While this might not be the most encouraging Wikipedia description of a technically new film, it’s also not always a cause for concern. Back in 2018, David Ellison found Alex Garland’s stylish and scary sci-fi thriller Annihilation “too intellectual” so passed it to Netflix for the majority of international territories. In early Covid, Disney sold the unusually excellent Fear Street trilogy to Netflix. Just last year, Netflix saw its biggest hit to date with KPop: Demon Hunters, a film that had originally been intended for a Sony release. But Thrash is not a fellow exception to the rule; if anything, it acts as the very definition of what the rule usually is: a messily made, choppily edited and entirely misfiring cavalcade of bad decisions and dodgy accents. I just hope Netflix got it on the cheap …
