Forgotten animated movie becomes Netflix hit five years after release
After never finding its footing at the box office, the James Cameron-penned epic Alita: Battle Angel has been gaining traction as one of the biggest hits on Netflix.
The film had been tied to the Titanic director for years in between his work on the second installment of the Avatar franchise, but after shakeups during production, it was eventually directed by Robert Rodriguez. Although the film had a major success at the box office, critics panned it at the time, awarding it a 61% on Rotten Tomatoes.
However, the film’s recent arrival on Netflix has shown it to be a darling of the streaming service, still placed in the top 10 in the Global rankings after its premiere on the service on November 8th. Since then, the film has been viewed over six million times and is currently sitting just under 13 million viewer hours.
The film follows the story of Alita, a cyborg who finds out that she has the soul of a teenage girl and spends the rest of the movie trying to rediscover her past. Despite the premise working at the box office at the time, many moviegoers were blacklisting the film before it came out, claiming the story’s premise had too much in common with Marvel’s latest superhero film at the time, Captain Marvel.
Like the MCU, though, Alita: Battle Angel was also based on a popular manga by Yukito Kishiro. This is far from the first time that Rodriguez had dealt with reimagining pages of a graphic novel, having turned in work bringing Frank Miller’s Sin City to life in 2005 starring Elijah Wood, Jessica Alba, and Bruce Willis.
Since then, Cameron has shifted his focus to working on the next pieces of the Avatar saga. While the long-awaited sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, received massive praise from moviegoers upon release, it marks only the beginning of the saga, with Cameron already looking for a December release date for the third movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash December 2025.
However, given Alita‘s success on Netflix, Cameron could possibly come back into the fold for a sequel. Despite walking away from the project, Kishiro had been pushing for a potential sequel since the film wrapped. Cameron had also expressed his desire to work on a sequel if given the opportunity, but there have been no announcements regarding the next chapter of the cyborg’s journey.