This Cillian Murphy Thriller Bombed in 2005. Now It's a Netflix Sensation.
Fresh off his Oppenheimer Oscar win, Cillian Murphy is finally getting credit for a long-overlooked thriller that most people ignored when it actually came out.
Red Eye, a tight 85-minute psychological nail-biter from Wes Craven, quietly flopped in 2005. Two decades later, it's somehow clawed its way into the Netflix Top 10.
The movie hit Netflix on July 1, 2025, and despite the platform being a digital landfill of throwaway content, Red Eye managed to briefly rise from the algorithm sludge:
- July 2 – Debuted at #8 on Netflix US
- July 3 – Vanished completely
- July 5 – Climbed back to #10
- July 6 – Held at #9, where it still sits (for now)
That's not exactly a streaming juggernaut, but considering it's competing with The Old Guard — a Charlize Theron film described by critics as "an immortal bore" — we'll take it.
Murphy stars as Jackson Rippner (yes, that's really the character's name), a charming sociopath who traps a hotel manager (Rachel McAdams) on a red-eye flight and blackmails her into helping assassinate a U.S. official. It's Wes Craven ditching slasher tropes for a stripped-down psychological chess match. No masked killers, no supernatural nonsense — just two great actors stuck on a plane, trading threats at 30,000 feet.
Red Eye wasn't a total disaster back in 2005. It actually turned a profit:
- Budget: $26 million
- Box office: $96.6 million
But it came and went without much fanfare — especially since Murphy's other 2005 villain role as Scarecrow in Batman Begins stole most of the spotlight. Critics liked Red Eye, but it never stuck in the cultural memory the way Craven's horror hits did.
Now? Thanks to Netflix's content vacuum and Cillian Murphy's post-Oppenheimer glow-up, people are finally revisiting it — and realizing it's actually one of Craven's best-directed films.
The reviews hold up:
- Rotten Tomatoes score: 80%
- AV Club called it a "perfect piece of architecture"
- The New Yorker praised its "moment-by-moment continuity"
- Washington Post said it had the sharpness of a '50s thriller, not the bloat of modern ones
So yes, Red Eye is getting its second wind, long after anyone expected it. And unlike a lot of movies that blow up on Netflix for no reason (*lookin' at you, The Out-Laws), this one actually earns it.
If you missed it in 2005 — and you probably did — now's the time to catch up. Murphy might've gotten the Oscar for Oppenheimer, but he was already out here doing killer work in coach class.