Russell Crowe's 'Mindhunter' Replacement Explodes Past 40M Views on Netflix

Netflix didn't produce a third season of the cult hit series Mindhunter, but seven years after the show's abrupt ending, the streamer has released a psychological thriller movie that picks up from where it left off. Like Mindhunter, which follows a team of FBI profilers conducting state-of-the-art investigations into the psychology of mass murderers, the new movie revolves around the study of a future terrorist's mind. Russell Crowe plays a Harvard professor who conducts scientific experiments on a young Ted Kaczynski, who is played in the film by former child star Jacob Tremblay.

The two appear prominently in one of the film's two parallel storylines, with the other focusing on the FBI's decades-long manhunt for Kaczynski, later dubbed the Unabomber. In the second storyline, Shailene Woodley appears as the lead investigator handling the Unabomber case. Directed by Janus Metz, the new movie opened to poor reviews, standing in contrast to the filmmaker's earlier work on shows such as Andor and True Detective. It also stood in stark contrast to another movie starring Crowe, released around the same time. The other film, The Weight, debuted theatrically and emerged as Crowe's top-rated title in nearly three decades, according to the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.

Russell Crowe's New Movie Is the Latest in Netflix's Streak of Mid-Budget Hits This Year

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While The Weight holds a "Certified Fresh" 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, Crowe's Unabomber is sitting at a 26% score on the website. Despite the poor reception, the film delivered 16 million views in its opening week of release. According to the latest edition of Netflix's weekly viewership report, Unabomber retained its crown as the streamer's most-watched movie, adding another 24 million views between September 28 and October 4. This puts the film's total views at 40 million, which means that it qualifies as the latest in Netflix's stellar streak of mid-budget hits this year. It comes on the heels of fellow genre movies such as War Machine, The Rip, Thrash, Apex, The Last House, and more recently, The Whisper Man. Several of these films were able to hit the coveted 100-million-views mark, and Unabomber seems primed to join them.