Jordan Peele’s Polarizing Football Horror Movie, Which Flopped in Theaters, Is Now a Netflix Top 10 Hit

A familiar pattern is playing out on Netflix, and this time it involves Jordan Peele. ‘Him’, the sports-meets-supernatural horror film produced under Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions banner, barely survived its theatrical run before arriving on streaming and immediately climbing the charts. It is the latest example of a critically divided film finding the audience it was always going to need at home.

‘Him’ was directed by Justin Tipping and co-written with Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers. The film hit theaters on September 19, 2025, and follows Cam Cade, a young quarterback whose career is derailed after a brutal attack by a masked stranger. His only path forward comes when football legend Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans, invites him to a secluded training compound for an intense and increasingly disturbing week.

The film received a 31% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 38 on Metacritic, with critics broadly agreeing that its ambition outpaced its execution. Even audiences were divided, reflected in a 56% Rotten Tomatoes audience score. The film grossed just $27.8 million worldwide against a $27 million budget, barely clearing its production costs.

After its theatrical run, ‘Him’ streamed exclusively on Peacock for several months as part of an existing deal between Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Universal Pictures. It arrived on Netflix on April 19 and within a day had climbed to the number seven spot on the platform’s daily top 10 movie list in the United States, later rising to number six. The rapid jump confirmed what has become a well-established dynamic in the streaming era: a film that struggled theatrically can still land with a massive audience at home.

Wayans responded to the original wave of negative reviews with a thoughtful social media post, suggesting the film had the potential to become a cult classic and reminding followers that critical opinion is not universal. He pointed to a history of films that arrived before their time and went on to be remembered as classics.

Director Tipping told SFX Magazine that the film was designed around a Venn diagram where sports and horror overlap in a way he had never seen before, a genre mashup that he described as a new creative language. That ambition comes through on screen even when the storytelling falters, and it is part of what makes the film compelling enough to seek out on streaming even after a poor theatrical reception.

Some reassessments have pointed to the film’s shared DNA with Peele’s own directorial work, arguing that its premise operates as a sports-world equivalent to ‘Get Out’, transplanting the horror of exploitation and systemic predation from the suburbs to the professional football pipeline. Whether that reading holds up or not, audiences are clearly curious enough to find out for themselves.

The Netflix chart performance of ‘Him’ is a reminder that the theatrical window is not the final verdict on a film’s cultural life. Some movies simply need a lower barrier to entry before they find the people who were always going to connect with them.