It’s always fascinating to see which older movies suddenly find new life on Netflix. The streamer’s daily Top 10 charts are constantly shuffling, resulting in unexpected and often forgotten titles climbing the ranks, with the latest example being “San Andreas“ — the 2015 disaster blockbuster written by “Lost’s” Carlton Cuse that starred Alexandra Daddario alongside Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Carla Gugino, and Paul Giamatti.
A decade after its initial release, the film has managed to find a second wind on Netflix, where it’s currently sitting at #2 on the U.S. Top 10 movies chart — behind only one of the streamer’s biggest releases of all time, “KPop Demon Hunters.” For a mid-2010s disaster flick with middling reviews (more on that in a moment), that’s not only a pretty strong showing. It’s also proof of how, no matter what critics or even viewers thought about a film the first time around, the streaming era affords the chance for another bite at the apple down the line.
San Andreas surges up the Top 10 chart
We can only speculate as to why a disaster movie like “San Andreas” is currently soaring up the Netflix Top 10 movies chart — which, on one hand, seems a little curious given its middling Rotten Tomatoes audience score of just 52% (based on more than 50,000 user ratings).
Disaster movies are certainly a form of cinematic comfort food for many viewers, offering generally big spectacle, bankable stars, and pretty simple stakes (of the save the world/avert disaster sort). “San Andreas” gives you The Rock as a helicopter pilot, Alexandra Daddario as his daughter, and wall-to-wall scenes of California crumbling in the wake of a massive earthquake. It’s escapism that doesn’t ask too much of you, and streaming is the perfect home for that kind of story.
Moreover, Netflix’s Top 10 ranking is designed to resurface exactly these kinds of movies. Fewer than half of the films in the current Top 10 are Netflix originals, which leaves plenty of room for catalog titles like this one to climb. And when they do, it reinforces one of the platform’s most underrated strengths: The ability to turn a forgotten movie into a buzzy hit all over again. “It’s enormously entertaining,” opines a 2015 review from “The Atlantic” about the movie, “thanks to the undeniable charisma of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and the wanton CGI destruction of all of the West Coast’s greatest landmarks.”
