One factor we love about Netflix is that it produces a few of the most inventive and authentic movies we have seen in recent times. Oscar nominees similar to Practice Goals and KPop Demon Hunters have exceeded our expectations and confirmed to be actually progressive, and romances like Folks We Meet On Trip and Champagne Issues have delivered consolation once we’ve wanted it. However typically, regardless of how large the movie or how well-known the star, Netflix originals can merely fall off the face of the earth after their premieres.
Ever since this 12 months’s Oscar nominations got here out, large names together with Timotheé Chalamet, Ethan Hawke, and Benicio del Toro have been in all places. Whereas the movies they’re presently starring in — Marty Supreme, Blue Moon and One Battle After One other, respectively — have been critically acclaimed and acquired tons of press, every of them seems in Netflix originals that really feel like they have been misplaced to the algorithm.
Regardless of Chalamet being one of many largest stars round lately, how many individuals have ever seen The King, the 2019 medieval drama that co-stars Joel Edgerton? (Some would possibly argue Edgerton, who starred in Practice Goals, was ignored at this 12 months’s Oscars. He, too, seems in a number of different Netflix originals that you just won’t have seen.)
Is it the algorithm? Is it that a few of these movies simply weren’t that nice to start with? Or are there simply too many new releases arriving on streaming lately? Let’s check out a number of Netflix movies starring Oscar nominees and winners which have fallen means under the radar.
Directed by David Michôd and co-written by Michôd and Joel Edgerton, The King stars Timothée Chalamet as Hal, a prince and reluctant inheritor to the English throne who has rejected his noble life and prefers dwelling among the many folks. After his father’s demise, Hal is topped King Henry V and is compelled to embrace the life he beforehand tried to flee.
Edgerton performs Hal’s closest pal, John Falstaff, and the movie additionally options Sean Harris, Ben Mendelsohn, Robert Pattinson and Lily-Rose Depp. The story is predicated on Shakespeare’s Henriad, his assortment of historic performs that features Richard II, Henry IV, Half 1, Henry IV, Half 2 and Henry V.
Director Grant Singer reduce his enamel on music movies, and police thriller Reptile is his debut movie. 2026 Oscar nominee Benicio del Toro performs a detective investigating the demise of a girl whose shady boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) finds her physique, however Timberlake is only one of a number of creeps who could possibly be suspects in her homicide. The movie is slick and trendy with a powerful supporting solid that additionally contains Alicia Silverstone, Frances Fisher, Michael Pitt and Eric Bogosian, however Reptile stealthily slithered previous viewers when it first got here out.
The Responsible stars Jake Gyllenhaal and solely options the disembodied voice of Ethan Hawke. Each have acquired Oscar nods, with Hawke incomes one this 12 months for Blue Moon, and I believe it is bizarre that extra folks do not speak about this thriller.
The Responsible is directed by Antoine Fuqua, who beforehand collaborated with Hawke on Coaching Day, and takes place fully at a Los Angeles 911 name middle. Gyllenhaal’s character is underneath strain whereas fielding calls and making an attempt to trace down a girl who known as to report her personal abduction. Additionally showing within the movie (in voice solely) are Paul Dano, Riley Keough, Invoice Burr, and Oscar-winning Da’Vine Pleasure Randolph.
We would not blame anybody for overlooking a Netflix authentic film known as The Stranger, which got here out two years after the Netflix sequence of the identical identify. However the film shares solely its title with the present.
It stars Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, with Edgerton as an undercover police officer who will get a bit too near the prime suspect (Harris) in a toddler abduction case. The psychological thriller is loosely based mostly on the real-life case of the disappearance and killing of an Australian boy named Daniel Morcombe.
Cillian Murphy earned his Finest Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer, a movie that was inescapable when it got here out, thanks partially to the media frenzy round Barbenheimer. However to comply with up that blockbuster, he selected Steve, a quiet movie that arrived in 2025 and barely registered with viewers. The film is an adaptation of Shy, a novel by Max Porter, in regards to the headmaster — Steve — of a college for troubled younger males that is about to shut, leaving these boys nowhere else to go. Although the movie got here out final October, it by no means fairly received the publicity you’d count on for a movie starring one of many decade’s largest actors.
