On April 25, 2025, the movie adaptation of "Until Dawn" released in theaters. It received a mixed reception: with a 53% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 67% audience rating, and a 5.7/10 rating on IMDb, the movie was generally considered a disappointment. It wasn't a disaster of course — with its relatively low budget of $15 million, its $53 million box office performance worldwide wasn't half bad. But it still wasn't the runaway hit the creators hoped for, and within a few weeks it felt like
the world had already forgotten the film.
It turns out, however, that "Until Dawn" has found a second life on streaming. It's currently the #2 most-watched movie on Netflix this week, at least among American audiences. Viewers may not have been able to muster up the motivation to see "Until Dawn" in theaters, but they seem to be interested enough to click play from the comfort of their own homes.
Most notably, it seems like viewers are willing to forgive the movie for its biggest sin: despite being based on the popular horror video game "Until Dawn," the movie is very much it's own separate thing. It follows a different plot with different characters, to the point where it feels like sacrilege to some fans to have even named this movie after "Until Dawn" at all. This has frustrated a lot of the hardcore fans of the game, as those brutal YouTube comments underneath the movie's trailers demonstrate.
It feels like "Until Dawn" is trapped in a "10 Cloverfield Lane"-type situation: they're misleading viewers by taking the name of a previous work that feels too different, but they also might not have been given a chance at all if they'd sold themselves as an original property.
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Until Dawn Might Not Be A Faithful Video Game Adaptation, But That's Not A Bad Thing
But much like "10 Cloverfield Lane," the original storytelling approach of "Until Dawn" (2025) has been appreciated by viewers willing to take it on its own terms. Critic Alison Foreman from Variety, who criticized the unearned title, still gave the movie credit for being "an inventive experiment with pops of explosive humor that manage to seriously entertain... if not always by design." There are indeed plenty of things to enjoy about the "Until Dawn" movie, providing you can put the videogame it claims to be adapting out of your mind. It's a big ask for many, I know, but it's worth a try.
In his 8 out of 10 review for the film, /Film's own Bill Bria described the movie as "the most horror movie of the year," writing:
"Although the film is deliberately not a repetition of the video game's plot, it absolutely adapts the game's implicit concept of asking the player whether they could actually survive a horror movie or not. "Until Dawn" the movie subtextually asks those questions of its viewers throughout, and with so many various beasties to encounter, the answers will vary for each person alone, never mind for multiple people. The movie's variety is the peanut butter to that idea's chocolate, never allowing the film to feel stuck in one mode even as it establishes its own structure."
It's particularly wholesome to see "Until Dawn" winning these days, because director David F. Sandberg has seemed so passionate about the movie during his press tour earlier this year. In an exclusive interview with /Film this April, he talked about how making the movie allowed him to "go all out" with the practical effects in a way that he'd "been wanting to do forever." As he explained, "Even in the previous horror movies I'd done, they've been sort of supernatural and not as gory, or not as much. So this was a real chance to finally let all that out and get to experience all these things and try on genres I haven't worked in before, like slasher or found footage and these things."
Sandberg took his chance to do something completely new, both as a director and as an "Until Dawn" fan. The results may not have led to a box office miracle, but it's clear that there are definitely viewers out there who appreciate his take on the franchise.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
