Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz’s The Most Dangerous Game is getting a second season while its first season will be recut into a feature film.
These are potentially grim times for Quibi. The ambitious streaming platform, with original and star-driven content specifically designed to be viewed in five-to-ten-minute increments, had the miserable luck to launch during a global pandemic which kept most folks stuck at home with all the time in the world to stream episodic shows and long movies. But even beyond the bad timing, the mere idea of Quibi, created by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, was a misunderstanding of the streaming boom. Audiences liked watching content they wanted to watch on their phones as a matter of convenience and accessibility. That didn’t mean the mere idea of consuming content on their smartphones was inherently appealing. So word that just 72,000 launch-day subscribers continued to pay for Quibi after the 90-day trial period (a figure which Quibi vigorously disputes) isn’t a surprise.
But in a speck of good news, one of their better original shows, The Most Dangerous Game, is being renewed for a second season. Moreover, and this is a pleasant surprise, Nick Santora has told Deadline that he has plans to turn the first season of the show, starring Liam Hemsworth as a terminally ill man who agrees to be hunted for sport in order to leave his pregnant wife money after he dies, into a stand-alone movie. That makes sense, since the show’s fifteen ten-minute episodes can easily be nipped and tucked into a 110 minute-to-120-minute movie. Heck, most of Quibi’s dramatic shows, by virtue of their length and structure, are essentially single feature films (or extra-long anthology episodes) chopped into bite-sized chunks. You can argue turning them into movies after the fact is subtext made text.
This is especially true for their dramatic shows, like Sophie Turner’s plane crash drama Survive, the ride-share-gone-wrong thriller The Stranger or the coming-of-age mystery When the Lights Go On. Some of them are more explicitly serialized than others (the ten-part, 70-minute When the Lights Go On is ambitious and looks lovely, but far too much of the storytelling is done via voice over), but the Liam Hemsworth (as, uh, Dodge Tynes)/Christoph Waltz (as the sleazily charming handler named, uh, Miles Seller) action thriller is good enough in its initial form that I would happily rewatch it, even if just for curiosity, to see how it plays as a movie. Ironically this fixes (indirectly) one of my biggest issues with Quibi.
As noted on launch day, I was very disappointed that the dramas and comedies only offered a handful of introductory episodes, even with shows that seemed clearly “paced for the binge.” Part of that was merely me being desperate for something vaguely “mainstream” to review in the early days of the quarantine, but the first four episodes of The Most Dangerous Game, which led up to the start of the hunt, were entertaining and compelling enough to keep my attention. Hemsworth was quite good in the earlier episodes, and his realistically terrified reaction to the game up-and-starting on a dime inside a crowded restaurant was one of the show’s highlights. The show was an interesting bit of experimental cinema, creating something that looked “big” yet was intended to be viewed on a phone, either vertically or horizontally.
I don’t want to oversell the “show,” as it still dives into genre clichés and is really, at best, a three-star diversion. But Waltz gets plenty of moments to offer a skewed morality on an immoral situation, Hemsworth doesn’t oversell the “reluctant everyman turned action hero” bit and the whole thing ends up a rather satisfying note. Will I watch the second season? Sure. Will I be curious to see how this plays as a movie? Yeah, yeah, I will. And with the rights to “made for Quibi” content going back to the creators after a period of time, I imagine we may see this sort of thing more often. Moreover, the possibility of episodic dramas and comedies having a second life elsewhere is probably going to continue to entice artist and actors to participate, since it’s almost risk-free.
If the show is a hit on Quibi, great. If it’s not, but you can repackage it as a movie and sell elsewhere? That’s fine too. So while Quibi may risk becoming the streaming equivalent of New Coke or Atari’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial game, it’s good that the shows, some of them worth saving (like Anna Kendrick’s genuinely hilarious sex doll comedy Dummy), may live on even if the format does not. We’ll see if fortunes change if and when the country opens up again in terms of day-to-day travel and business to a point where someone on the subway might want to watch the next episode of Kevin Hart’s Die Hart (an action comedy premiering on July 20). But it’s nice that one of their better original shows seems to have a second lease on life.
I’ve studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for nearly 30 years. I have extensively written about all
I’ve studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for nearly 30 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last 11 years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing scholarship have included The Huffington Post, Salon, and Film Threat. Follow me at @ScottMendelson and “like” The Ticket Booth on Facebook.