A horror thriller movie that barely reached American theaters in 2020 has become a Netflix sensation. The Hunt entered Netflix’s global top 10 for the week of November 18 to 24, 2024, with 3.7 million views and 5.5 million hours watched. It ranked in the top 10 in 22 countries, with viewers calling it both a masterpiece and the boldest political satire in years.
The film almost never reached audiences at all because Universal nearly buried it after a catastrophic series of events. The studio had scheduled The Hunt for September 2019 and was already running commercials that summer. The ads showed people being hunted through woods and fields for sport, which seemed like standard horror movie violence until one August weekend made those images unbearable.
Two mass shootings killed 31 people in less than 24 hours. Suddenly, viewers were watching Hunt commercials sandwiched between real footage from El Paso and Dayton. Seeing those two side by side felt grotesque, and Universal knew it. Within four days, the studio suspended all marketing while executives debated what to do. A few days later, Trump tweeted that the unnamed film was made to cause chaos. Even though he’d never seen it. That tweet became the final nail in the coffin. The next morning, Universal canceled the release completely, burying a finished film rather than face more backlash.
Universal eventually reversed course and released The Hunt in March 2020, but it vanished within a week when theaters shut down. It seemed destined to disappear forever. But, when the horror movie resurfaced on Netflix years later, viewers found something they weren’t expecting. The satire about political tribes believing the worst about each other had become more relevant, not less.
The Film’s Basic Setup
The Hunt takes Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game and reimagines it for modern politics. Instead of straightforward horror, director Craig Zobel and screenwriters Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof shape it into a pitch-black comedy. Strangers wake up in a clearing and realize wealthy elites are hunting them for sport. That premise becomes the film’s central joke. The absurdity lies in watching people who consider themselves morally superior commit the most savage violence imaginable.
The hunters call their victims “deplorables,” a word Hillary Clinton used in 2016 to describe some Trump supporters. Because of that, early audiences assumed the film was pushing a liberal message about elites targeting conservatives.
But Lindelof told TIME in March 2020 that he and Cuse chose liberals as the hunters “because we would be very bad at it.” The humor comes from watching wealthy progressives obsess over the ethics of their murder spree. They “would be very conscientious about all the rules governing the hunt itself,” Lindelof explained, but “would not have the skills to execute it.”
The film takes the gore as far as the satire requires. Producer Jason Blum made that possible by keeping the budget at $14 million through Blumhouse Productions, which gave the team the creative freedom to go that far, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Zobel brings the same sharp eye for human behavior under pressure that defined his earlier work. In Compliance, he followed a fast food manager who strip-searched an employee after a caller posing as police demanded it. In Z for Zachariah, he traced three survivors wrestling with jealousy and control after an apocalypse. He’s drawn to moments when people’s choices show who they are, not who they imagine themselves to be.
Betty Gilpin Anchors the Film With Strange Choices That Work
Zobel told horror site Bloody Disgusting that Crystal could have been played like John Wick, what he called “kind of a cipher, a person who doesn’t get to know much about.” But he and Gilpin decided to do something different. They shot each scene two ways, what he called “the Linda Hamilton take” and “the Betty Gilpin take.” They mostly used Gilpin’s version, the one where she went kooky.
Crystal is one of the hunted who figures out the game fast and turns it back on her captors. And Gilpin came prepared. She spent 3 seasons doing her own wrestling stunts on GLOW, earning three Emmy nominations while building the body control The Hunt needed. The actress was finishing GLOW season 3 during The Hunt shoot, overlapping 2 weeks of brutal stunt work on both. Later, she said she sobbed with relief when her final GLOW episode didn’t require wrestling because the film training had pushed her to the limit.
But the performance works because of choices unrelated to physical skill. Crystal hums to herself between gunshots. Her voice stays flat during chase sequences. Before killing people, she pulls a grimacing face, twisting her features into something between a smile and a wince. These tics could have felt forced, but Gilpin commits so fully that they register as real reactions to an absurd situation.
That refusal to perform drives the satire. Crystal views both liberals and conservatives with equal contempt. She picks up weapons while everyone argues about politics. Her longest speech twists the tortoise and the hare into a story where the hare wins by being ruthless. When someone asks who the hare represents, Crystal doesn’t explain. The answer is clear. The person who refuses to play wins.
Two Mass Shootings Ended the September Release
Universal Pictures scheduled The Hunt for September 27, 2019. Conservative media outlets had spent weeks attacking the premise, calling it dangerous propaganda that glorified violence against Trump supporters, but the studio planned to move forward anyway.
Then one weekend in August ended that plan.
On Saturday morning, August 3, a gunman walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire on shoppers. He had posted a manifesto about stopping what he called a Hispanic invasion, then drove to a border city to act on it. The shooting killed 23 people and wounded 22 others, according to the El Paso Police Department, most of them Latino families doing weekend shopping. Thirteen hours later, another gunman opened fire outside bars in Dayton, Ohio, just after 1 AM. Dayton police killed him 32 seconds after the first shot, but nine people were already dead and 27 others wounded.
The back-to-back massacres killed 32 people in less than a day. Americans woke up Sunday morning to news coverage jumping between crime scenes in Texas and Ohio, networks running the footage on loop while politicians issued statements about thoughts and prayers.
Universal had been running TV spots for The Hunt all weekend. The commercials showed people being hunted and shot for sport, images that now sat next to real footage of mass shootings on the same screens. AMC had aired spots during Saturday programming, and ESPN had cleared commercials to run but pulled them before broadcast once the violence became clear.
On Wednesday, August 7, Universal suspended all marketing for the film, according to Variety. Promoting a movie about hunting people felt obscene. The studio released a brief statement and began weighing whether to release the film at all.
Trump Joined the Attack Without Watching the Film
Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves “Elite,” but they are not Elite. In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite. The movie coming out is made in order….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2019
Two days after Universal suspended marketing, President Donald Trump joined the attack. On Friday, August 9, he tweeted that “the movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos,” according to TIME, never naming The Hunt directly but making the target obvious. At that point, the film was still scheduled for September 27.
Fox News had been running segments about the film all week. Conservative commentators called it dangerous propaganda and warned it could inspire violence. The coverage treated the film as glorifying the murder of Trump supporters, even though the trailer showed viewers were meant to root for the conservative victims against their wealthy attackers.
The irony wasn’t lost on director Craig Zobel. Seeing Trump tweet about his first major studio film felt like an “out-of-body” experience, he told Rolling Stone. “The film became something that it never was,” Zobel later said. “These kind of things became truth.” The movie had made its point before anyone saw it.
Universal Canceled the Release Entirely
The next day, August 10, Universal announced it had decided to “cancel our plans to release the film” after thoughtful consideration, according to Variety.
Screenwriter Damon Lindelof hadn’t seen it coming. He admitted to Rolling Stone that he was naive about how people would react. “In my brain, it was just such a clear satire,” he said. “If you had sat me down and asked me about the possibility that this series of events would lead to the movie getting canceled, I would have said that’s as ridiculous as the premise of the movie. The president is not going to tweet about the movie. But then it happened.”
The Pandemic Killed Its Second Chance
The Hunt sat in limbo for 6 months. Then, in February 2020, Universal announced a March 13 release with marketing that leaned into the controversy.
Movie posters featured quotes from the harshest critics as selling points. The studio embraced the fight instead of running from it.
Producer Jason Blum told The New York Times that “not one frame was changed” since the delay. Universal bet that audiences would finally judge the actual movie rather than their assumptions about it. Director Craig Zobel told reporters he thought the timing was perfect. “We’re about to go into a fall that will be a torrent of media aimed to divide us during this election,” he said. “I think it’s the perfect time for this movie to come out.”
However, the timing could not have been worse. The Hunt landed just as the COVID-19 pandemic began shutting down theaters nationwide. Most cinemas closed within a week of release. The film bombed before theaters went dark. Universal fast-tracked it to video on demand on March 20, just 7 days after its theatrical debut. The movie that survived mass shootings and presidential criticism was taken down by a virus.
Critics and Audiences Stayed Lukewarm
The Hunt earned $12.4 million worldwide against its $14 million production budget. Domestic theaters brought in $5.8 million while international markets added $6.6 million, which meant Universal lost money. The modest budget at least kept the damage contained.
The few people who actually saw it weren’t impressed. Opening weekend audiences gave the film a C+ on CinemaScore, which surveys moviegoers as they leave theaters. Most wide releases score a B+ or higher because opening night crowds usually chose something they wanted to see, so a C+ meant The Hunt disappointed even its most eager viewers.
Critics couldn’t agree on much either. Rotten Tomatoes reported 57% positive reviews while Metacritic landed at exactly 50 out of 100, splitting professional opinion down the middle. Some reviewers argued the film mocked both sides without actually saying anything, treating liberals and conservatives as equally ridiculous without taking any real position. Others praised that exact quality, saying the satire worked because it attacked everyone. The fight over what the movie actually meant mirrored the partisan warfare it tried to mock.
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Finding New Life on Netflix
The horror movie arrived on Netflix on November 16, 2024. In its first full week, it drew 3.7 million views and 5.5 million hours watched, landing at number 9 on Netflix’s global charts. It made the top 10 in 22 countries and reached number one in Turkey. Brazil, Germany, Greece, Nigeria, Thailand, and Vietnam all showed strong viewership.
Audiences who might have skipped the film in 2020 gave it a chance once the initial controversy faded. Netflix allowed people to judge it as a lean action thriller on its own terms. Curiosity no longer came with a $15 ticket. It just required hitting play.
The Hunt proved streaming could rescue theatrical failures, and other disasters followed. Kraven the Hunter bombed with $61 million before finding viewers on Netflix in March 2025. Madame Web flopped at $100 million worldwide before climbing to number one on Netflix in May 2024. Kevin Costner spent $38 million of his own money on Horizon, watched it earn just $38.2 million theatrically, then saw it find audiences on Netflix and Max. Each time, streaming turned financial risk into idle curiosity.
The Film Proved Its Own Point
The controversial horror movie The Hunt became a global streaming hit on Netflix in November 2024, five years after Trump condemned it. In 2019, he attacked the film without seeing it and ironically, the film’s plot satirizes what happens when people accept stories about their opponents without checking if they are true. That behavior, accepting claims about enemies without testing them, now defines how people form beliefs.
The internet made it possible to find groups that validate any view. Science writer David Robert Grimes explained the psychology in a PBS NewsHour segment on March 26. “Many years ago, if you walked in with an outlandish belief and voiced that in polite company, someone would probably challenge you,” he said. “Now, if I go online, I can find communities that not only validate my belief, they amplify it.”
These groups meet real needs for belonging while offering constant reinforcement. When everyone agrees, no one tests whether the beliefs hold up. The friction disappears, and people build separate versions of reality.
An NPR poll in July measured the split. 76% of Americans said democracy was under serious threat, but they disagreed completely on what caused it. Democrats pointed to rising authoritarianism while Republicans blamed corrupted institutions. Each side saw collapse coming through feeds that told entirely different stories.
The film spent years buried because people believed stories about it that weren’t true. Now it’s finding viewers who recognize its message. Sometimes the right audience just needs time and the right platform to show up.
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