Russell Crowe never quite announced his arrival in the geriaction lane the way Liam Neeson did. Instead, the Gladiator star has drifted into the lane gradually over the past half-decade, alternating prestige work like the upcoming awards player Nuremberg with mid-budget thrillers that skip wide release entirely and depend heavily on home viewing.
The 2020 road-rage film Unhinged was arguably the turning point, proving Crowe could carry a lean genre picture on presence alone, and it also introduced him to director Derrick Borte. Six years later, that partnership has produced a second collaboration, one that barely registered in theaters this summer.
‘The Get Out’ Barely Registered in Theaters but Is Now Winning on Paramount+
According to FlixPatrol, The Get Out is currently the number one movie on Paramount+ in the United States, having climbed the chart almost immediately after landing on the service. That puts the Borte-directed crime thriller ahead of considerably splashier library titles, including Top Gun: Maverick, The Hangover, 300, and the new Scary Movie, along with recent originals like Passenger and Driver’s Ed.
For a film whose entire worldwide theatrical gross came in under $800,000 through Vertical’s limited release, it’s a fairly dramatic reversal, though perhaps not a shocking one given how these releases are structured. The film itself is an adaptation of Thomas Perry’s 2010 crime novel Strip, shot in Queensland under the title Bear Country before the distributor eventually renamed it. Crowe plays Manco Kapak, an aging Los Angeles nightclub owner hoping to cash out and retire with his younger girlfriend, played by Teresa Palmer, until a masked robbery pulls him back into a world of cartels and a would-be buyer whose interest in the club seems less than straightforward.
Russell Crowe’s New Crime Thriller Followed the Modern Geriaction Playbook Exactly
Reviews, however, were mixed at best, with the critics’ score hovering around 45 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and audience sentiment only modestly stronger. That said, this kind of result is no longer unusual for late-career action thrillers. Liam Neeson’s Retribution flopped theatrically in 2023 before later pulling 3.9 million views in a single week on Netflix. His In the Land of Saints and Sinners eventually reached number one in more than a dozen countries years after release, and Cold Storage has spent weeks in the MGM+ top ten. So, poor theatrical performance followed by streaming dominance is no longer an anomaly for these films. Crowe may have to absorb the lesson, and there’s a reasonable argument he’s better positioned than most to run this playbook, since he can still toggle back to prestige mode whenever a Nuremberg comes along.
Release Date
June 26, 2026
Runtime
96 minutes
