Former president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama had their first box office success with ‘Leave the World Behind’, an apocalyptic thriller which debuted on Netflix on December 8.
The film, directed by Sam Esmail and co-produced by Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, stars Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Julia Roberts. The protagonist of the story, which is based on Rumaan Alam’s 2020 bestseller by the same name, is Julia Roberts’s character Amanda Sandford, who takes her family on an vacation to a leased home on Long Island. As the story progresses and more frequent technical malfunctions cause a string of eerie incidents, two families are forced to cooperate in the movie, and both must choose how to handle the impending crisis.
The former first couple is, however, coming under heavy fire for allegedly cautioning against White people. People have taken to social networking sites to share their thoughts about a specific scene in the film, where Amanda’s daughter is saying to her father, an African-American, “I’m asking you to remember that if the world falls apart, trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people.”
According to streaming service viewership tracking tool FlixPatrol, the two-hour plus movie about what happens when power inexplicably goes out in the US is Netflix’s top image globally and in the top spot in 85 countries. In its first two days, “Leave the World Behind” was viewed by almost 2.6 million US households, which is 73% more than “The Killer”, another significant Netflix movie from last month.
However, while Leave the World Behind topped the streaming service’s charts, outperforming movies like Family Switch and the animated The Grinch, rit got mixed reviews, and fans’ reactions—including Elon Musk’s—were even more divided. Leave the World Behind has an impressive 75% good critic score on review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes, but the audience score is far lower – at 42% and it also recorded one of the lowest scores possible, at a comprehensive 2.0 on Google reviews. One user called it “a maudlin and lugubrious film school exercise.”
The New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson calls it “a movie that ought to have been a lot more scary, or a lot more subdued” and whose ending is merely a punchline.
