Netflix’s New #1 Movie Is An Awful, 2002 Angelina Jolie Film

The whims of Netflix viewers often confuse me, and that is certainly the case with what’s going on right now on the service’s top 10 movie list.

Currently, debuting at #1 on the list is Life or Something Like It. A film that I am guessing most people haven’t heard of, namely because it was a little-watched, quite bad Angelina Jolie movie from all the way back in 2002, which would have made her 27 at the time. This would have been three years after her Oscar win for Girl, Interrupted in 1999, when she broke out as a star.

The movie is…very bad? With 121 reviews it has a very poor 28% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 44% audience score based on a whopping 25,000 reviews, meaning it’s not some cult hit among viewers. Here’s the synopsis:

“Lanie Kerrigan (Angelina Jolie), a feature reporter at a Seattle television station, leads the ultimate superficial life, even though she thinks she has it all, like a superstar boyfriend, a gorgeous apartment, and a shot at a big network assignment. Her perfect world starts unraveling after a homeless street seer tells Lanie that she leads a meaningless existence, and will die the following week. When the savant’s other predictions come true, Lanie begins to re-examine her life and priorities.”

I mean, okay, weird. But why would this movie be doing so well? I have a theory that when a movie is old enough and not well-known enough, if it features a big star people recognize, they will flock to view it because they might think it’s a new release. I’ve seen this happen a few times on Netflix, and since the service will not tell you whether people think a movie is good or bad, everyone just watches without really knowing anything about it, or possibly even when it was released just because they see, say, Angelina Jolie in the preview art. But they’ll figure it out when it very much looks like a 2002 movie. Just for fun, here’s the trailer:

The movie co-stars Ed Burns and a pre-Monk Tony Shalhoub. Stockard Channing made her way in there too. I mean if people are liking this, more power to them, but I just think it’s always funny when one of these terrible old movies is suddenly one of the most-viewed films in the country out of nowhere. This one is a particularly amusing example. But I think it also demonstrates just how ageless Angelina Jolie is 23 years later:

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