A Hugh Jackman film which underperformed at the box office and divided critics is finally getting the love it deserves on Netflix.
Jackman – who separated from his wife of 30 years this year and is reportedly set to release a bombshell memoir – is surely best-known as gruff, invulnerable X-Man Wolverine.
But fans are now rediscovering one of his lesser known roles from a 2011 sci-fi movie.
Real Steel was recently added to Netflix, and is already climbing up the rankings on the streaming platform.
Think Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, the movie. That’s pretty much it.
Boxers have been replaced by enormous robots which duke it out in the ring as proxies, and Jackman’s retired prize fighter character must find his place in this new world.
You might think that this would remove the part of boxing which focusses on the intense human struggles and stories which make the sport so compelling.
The sweat, the grimace of effort and pain, the glory of victory and crushing devastation of defeat.
But, robots fighting also sounds cool I guess. Plus, fewer debilitating neurological injuries, which is definitely a positive.
Jackman plays a former boxer who now owns a boxing robot and has to fight it out in the shady world of underground robot boxing, while repairing his relationship with his estranged son.
It also stars Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly and Anthony Mackie.
The movie Real Steel divided critics at the time, with a mixed score on Rotten Tomatoes.
It has a reasonable 60 percent on the reviews aggregator, with fans pushing the score up to 70 percent.
While far from a box office bomb, it pulled in $299 million globally on a $110m budget, so it wasn’t exactly setting the world alight either.
It did, hownver, bag an Oscar nod with a nomination for Best Visual Effects.
The film had enough of a fanbase that director Shawn Levy started developing a sequel, although this is now more likely to be a Disney+ series apparently, with no real news since last year.
Execs might want to get a move on with that follow-up, with the movie steadily climbing the rankings on Netflix after it was added onto the streaming service.
Some reviewers even go so far as to describe the movie as a ‘hidden gem’, some 12 years after it was first released.
As for Jackman, he is currently set to reprise the role of Wolverine after promising he’d hung up the claws years back.
The character is set to make a return in the third Deadpool movie, which will be his twelfth outing as the iconic character.
All this despite Wolverine being killed off at the end of 2017’s Logan.
It seems studios have rendered the character as immortal in real life as he is in the comics.
Except in real life it’s not adamantium that sustains Wolverine, but cold, hard, cash.
