The Secret to Kevin Hart's Success Is No Accountability

By Dustin Rowles | Film | January 17, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | January 17, 2024 |

Netflix’s Kevin Hart movie Lift is not good. But you already knew that. Kevin Hart has been making forgettable Netflix films for a few years now (see also: Me Time, Man from Toronto, Fatherhood). He, Mark Wahlberg, Ryan Reynolds, Chris Hemsworth, and a few others have cornered the market on these expensive films that require little accountability to the creative process.

A movie like Lift, which reportedly cost $100 million to make, would do absolute shit business in theaters. It’s a formulaic heist film with bad CGI and characters as generic and forgettable as Sam Worthington, who I forgot was in this movie the second the credits rolled. It comes from F. Gary Gray, who has much better films, including … all of them. Every movie he’s ever made, including Men in Black: International. But when Men in Black: International bombed at the box office, F. Gary Gray was left with egg on his face. F. Gary Gray gets a no-strings-attached paycheck for Lift.

Who cares if it’s a bad movie? It’s on Netflix! That has been the secret to Kevin Hart’s success for most of the decade. He makes terrible movies that only have to compete with third-rate “movies for guys who like movies” and AI-written YA flicks, so they’re all “hits” within the streaming ecosystem, whether they’re good or not. Genuinely, this is one of the reasons I like the box office: It does not tolerate movies as shit as Lift. If Lift had been released theatrically, reviews for the film wouldn’t have been written by fourth-string critics and sat next on the web page to a junket interview with Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who has little to do in this film aside from looking stunning, which she is very good at.

There would have been a reckoning. There would be think pieces. USA Today would ask, “Has Kevin Hart lost his mojo?” The Wall Street Journal would ponder, “Will Netflix recover from their latest flop?” Released traditionally in theaters, Lift would get eaten alive. There would be serious questions about whether Kevin Hart is still a bankable movie star.

But this? No one will pay attention to the reviews of Lift because everyone will know what to expect. It will coast to the top of the Netflix charts for a week or two anyway and disappear into the ether, remembered only when next January’s fourth-string critic has to recount the last few movies of Hart’s career. And let me remind you how much money live-action Kevin Hart-fronted movies have made since Jumanji: The Next Level in 2019: $0. What are the average Rotten Tomatoes scores for Kevin Hart’s last four Netflix films? 32 percent. The audience score of 45 percent is not much better. That’s less than the Cats audience score. No, I am not kidding.

And yet, Netflix continues to pony up $100 million for these movies that no one likes and that no one remembers because they attract a lot of viewable hours. But I have to wonder: Does Netflix not differentiate between quality viewable hours and what is essentially garbage time? A lot of bored people might watch Kevin Hart movies, but how many subscribe to Netflix because of Kevin Hart movies? No one is like, “I need to pay $17 this month because I have to see The Man from Toronto.” It’s a content farm. Netflix may dominate the streaming market, but I’ll say this of Max: A lot more people subscribed to HBO for the final eight episodes of Succession, which reportedly cost about $90 million, than subscribed to Netflix to watch the $100 million Lift. Netflix is winning, but it is a shitty investment strategy.

Either way, Kevin Hart gets to do that obnoxious laugh all the way to the bank, where he deposits millions of dollars without being held accountable by an invested audience.