Bright

Described as “a contemporary cop thriller, but with fantastical elements”, “Bright” is directed by David Ayer with a script penned by Max Landis, which Ayer rewrote. Netflix officially picked up the film for a $90 million deal with filming beginning in fall 2016, making it the most expensive Netflix film to date. Ayer enjoyed a reimaginated Los Angeles for the fantasy script: “It’s a lived in world with this sort of exotic history. As you know, it’s a genre mash-up. So my big challenge was how do I add this layer of history and current presence to these species that have intermingled with humans for thousands of years and make it feel real? How have these cultures lived together? What would it look like? It was just really a lot of fun”, he told Slash Film. Set in an alternate-universe Los Angeles, Bright follows two cops, one human (Smith) and one orc (Edgerton) who encounter a magic wand that’s being sought by those who want to use it for evil. It’s up to Smith’s Daryl Ward to save the universe and discover his own powers, which are apparently quite vast. The rules seem complex and unlike those in other fantasy genre pieces, particularly since not everyone in Bright can wield the magic.

I was totally blown away [by the script]. It was funny, so I met David at my friend Joel Kinnaman’s house and I read the script and David was like, “So what do you think?” I like, well, I love it! He said, Okay, it’s yours. I was like, what? Just like that? He was like, yeah. I was like, okay, yeah, okay, boom! I was telling my friends like you don’t know what just happened. David Ayer just gave me the part. I read it and I was like, I’ve never read anything like this and it’s amazing because the writing is so smart. Sometimes if it goes too far, if it becomes like sci-fi, then you have to like use a lot of imagination. You have to kind of build this world and like imagine it, and see like yeah, are they going to use green screen? Later on, when you actually see that movie, you can see it all come to life. This was all real. I came to the sets and he was there, you know? (Noomi Rapace, Screenrant, December 26, 2017)

“Bright” made its Netflix debut to dismal reviews. Writing for Rolling Stone, David Fear gave the film 1 out of 4 stars, criticizing the script and incoherent action scenes, writing: “This combo of gritty cop procedural and fantasy is a dark, dank, dumb-as-hell mess.” David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film an “F” and called it the worst film of 2017, saying: “There’s boring, there’s bad, and then there’s Bright”. Contrary to the bad reviews, Netflix announced that the film had been viewed more times in its first week than any of its other releases. According to Nielsen ratings, about 11 million American viewers streamed Bright within the first three days of its release.