Brad Pitt's Gritty War Thriller With Jon Bernthal Is Officially a Global Streaming Smash

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema. 

With the recently released survival thriller Heart of the Beast having exceeded box-office expectations, director David Ayer‘s previous collaboration with star Brad Pitt has been added to the Netflix library. Ayer and Pitt worked together on a fan-favorite 2014 hit, which remains the benchmark of success for Heart of the Beast. The new survival thriller has grossed more than $170 million at the global box office so far, against a reported budget of $80 million. It’s still trailing the 2014 movie by around $40 million. Like that film, Heart of the Beast has received exceptionally positive reactions from audiences.

This has become something of a signature for Ayer, who has now delivered a trio of crowd-pleasers in three consecutive years. In 2024, he directed the action hit The Beekeeper, which grossed more than $160 million globally and received a “Verified Hot” 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. A year later, Ayer reunited with Jason Statham on A Working Man, which made nearly $100 million worldwide and received an 87% audience score on the aggregator website. Heart of the Beast has outclassed both those films with a 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, Ayer and Pitt’s 2014 hit is perched at an 84% audience score, having cemented itself as a streaming juggernaut.

Four ships, four completely different reasons to be up there at all.
Here is the one that has your seat, what flying with them would cost you, and what it would give
back.

You belong on the fastest piece of junk in the galaxy, with a
crew that took the job for the payday and then quietly stopped caring about the payday.
Nothing on the Falcon has ever gone according to plan, and everybody aboard prefers it that
way.

• You improvise better than you prepare, which is why you keep ending up in situations
  that a careful person would have avoided.
• The Falcon is the only ship on this list that is genuinely funny, and half of that comes
  from it breaking at the worst possible moment.
• You would pretend the whole thing is transactional right up until somebody you like is
  in trouble, and then the pretending stops instantly.
• This crew is the reason the rebellion had a chance at all, and not one of them would
  ever admit to that out loud.

You belong with the crew that turned a tiny cell of misfits into
an actual rebellion. The Ghost is a home before it is a ship, and everybody who boards it
arrived with something broken that the rest of them decided to look after.

• Found family is the whole engine here, and Rebels earns it by making you watch these
  people choose each other over and over again.
• You are in it for the cause, but what actually keeps you going is the four people who
  would notice immediately if you stopped showing up.
• Hera is one of the best captains in the franchise, and the show is smart enough to make
  her competence the quiet centre of everything.
• This crew pays for its wins, which is exactly what makes the wins land the way they do.

You belong with the four kids who found a buried ship, launched
it by accident and are now extremely lost in a galaxy that eats people like them. Nobody
here knows what they are doing, and that turns out to be the fun of it.

• Your instinct is to open the door that says do not open, and you would do it again
  tomorrow.
• Skeleton Crew is the closest Star Wars has come to an eighties adventure movie, where
  the stakes are real but the wonder never gets sanded off.
• You make friends out of whoever is standing next to you when things go wrong, which is a
  genuinely useful survival skill.
• The pirates in this one are properly frightening, and that is precisely why the kids
  being out of their depth works so well.

You belong in the quietest ship in the galaxy, with one small
passenger and a code you have never explained to anybody. You told yourself this was a job,
and then it stopped being a job somewhere around the second week.

• You work alone by preference and by habit, which lasts exactly as long as it takes for
  somebody small to need looking after.
• The Mandalorian works because almost nothing gets said out loud, and the armour does the
  acting that a face usually would.
• Your loyalty is narrow and absolute, so there are very few people on your list and
  nothing will move you off it.
• The Mandalorian and Grogu took all of that to the big screen over Memorial Day 2026, the
  first Star Wars film in seven years.

Here’s How the World War II Movie Performed in Theaters

We’re talking, of course, about the World War II action movie Fury. Also featuring Jon Bernthal, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, and Michael Peña, the film follows the crew of an American tank during the final days of the war. The film ended its theatrical run with a $210 million global haul against a reported budget of $80 million. It now holds a “Certified Fresh” 75% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “Overall, Fury is a well-acted, suitably raw depiction of the horrors of war that offers visceral battle scenes but doesn’t quite live up to its larger ambitions.” Bernthal has had a terrific year, thanks to hits such as the Netflix series His & Hers, the Disney+ special The Punisher: One Last Kill, and the back-to-back blockbusters The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. You can watch him in Fury on Netflix beginning November 1. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.