Clint Eastwood’s $547M War Blockbuster Is Officially Leaving Netflix

Few directors can say they’ve given as much to the world of movies as Clint Eastwood, who spent the better part of 60 years starring in and directing iconic Westerns. After his last movie, Juror , was released just a few years ago, it seems that Eastwood has officially retired and is ready to call it quits — this isn’t all that surprising considering he’s over 90 years old. Despite the mostly positive reception to Juror , Warner Bros. declined to give the movie a wide theatrical release, instead releasing the movie straight-to-streaming on HBO Max in America. It has continued to prove the studio wrong throughout the last year by being one of the most-watched movies on the platform. Eastwood is no stranger to his movies being massive hits on various streaming platforms, though.

Clint Eastwood has directed dozens of legendary movies over the years, but one that broke into the spotlight like few others was American Sniper. Released in 2014, the film tells the story of real American war hero, Chris Kyle, a Navy S.E.A.L. sniper with pinpoint accuracy who saved countless lives on the battlefield. Kyle was portrayed by Bradley Cooper in the film, and even to this day, it’s widely viewed as one of Cooper’s finest performances. American Sniper had safely secured a home streaming on Netflix for the last few months, but the streamer recently removed the movie from its library at the end of October. It had been a few weeks since it was last seen in the top 10, but it’s expected to find success on whichever platform it migrates to next, as Eastwood’s movies often do.

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.

You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.

• The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
  honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
  against him.
• You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
  then completely immovable past it.
• Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
  and turning it into technique rather than noise.
• People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
  work.

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.

• This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
  because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
• You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
  defend it past the point of reason.
• You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
  an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
• The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

• This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
  rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
• You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
  administrative error.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
  The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
• Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

• Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
  bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
• You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
  and then it makes you unstoppable.
• You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
  and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
• You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

What Is ‘American Sniper’ About?

In addition to Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, American Sniper also stars Kyle Gallner as Goat-Winston, Ben Reed as Wayne Kyle, Sienna Miller as Taya, and even Yellowstone veteran Luke Grimes as Marc Lee. The film is based on Chris Kyle’s book he co-wrote with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice, but Jason Hall wrote the script for the film with Eastwood directing. The official synopsis for American Sniper, which earned scores of 71% from critics and 84% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, reads as follows:

“U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) takes his sole mission — protecting his comrades — to heart and becomes one of the most lethal snipers in American history. His pinpoint accuracy not only saves countless lives but also makes him a prime target of insurgents. Despite grave danger and his struggle to be a good husband and father to his family back in the States, Kyle serves four tours of duty in Iraq. However, when he finally returns home, he finds that he cannot leave the war behind.”

“U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) takes his sole mission — protecting his comrades — to heart and becomes one of the most lethal snipers in American history. His pinpoint accuracy not only saves countless lives but also makes him a prime target of insurgents. Despite grave danger and his struggle to be a good husband and father to his family back in the States, Kyle serves four tours of duty in Iraq. However, when he finally returns home, he finds that he cannot leave the war behind.”

Check out American Sniper before it’s removed from Netflix, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of Clint Eastwood’s past projects.

American Sniper