What a great day to be trying to go about your normal routine like nothing is happening or anything is wrong! Totally typical Wednesday over here, how about you? Everything is fine, why do you ask! Hey you know what would be great? An anxiety-inducing trailer about a movie where you can’t look at anything or you’ll be driven insane! Doesn’t that sound like fun? Doesn’t it sound fun to live in a world where you’re constantly bombarded by fear and paranoia? Is it a documentary? No! It’s a new Netflix film starring Sandra Bullock! It’s her nightmare and our nightmare!
The movie is called Bird Box, and it’s basically A Quiet Place but for your eyes. Instead of monsters that attack at sound, there are “creatures” that drive you insane with fear if you look at them. So you have to go around blind-folded so you can’t see anything. You know what? These sensory-deprivation horror movies are honestly starting to sound like a vacation. Let me spend a week in a world where I can’t look at or hear anything. Give me a week of stillness and silence. Forget wellness retreats, I’m looking for a monster-movie experience where everyone just has to shut the f*ck up for a minute and not bother anyone else.
So, a couple things about this movie. One is that Netflix is clearly building a holiday slate to rival the typical holiday movie season. Lainey posits that based on the holiday-driven success of Making a Murderer in 2015, Netflix’s algorithm is telling them to put out bingeable content during the holidays and replicate that success. That’s a reasonable assumption. The holidays are typically a mini-blockbuster season because lots of people are looking to escape their families for a couple hours, but Netflix is making a case for staying home and ignoring each other, instead.
But there is also a tag on this trailer, that it will be “in select theaters” in December. You know what that means—award season. And it’s not far-fetched for a movie like this. Paramount is giving A Quiet Place an Oscar push, and Bird Box is in a similar vein. Plus, they have Sandra Bullock, and everyone loves Sandra Bullock. Netflix has their hands full getting the Academy to acknowledge Roma, but they’re not leaving out their Sandra Bullock vehicle, either. If Bird Box becomes a buzzy holiday movie, Sandra Bullock could be a Best Actress dark horse. No one is making this easy for Lady Gaga.
