Prime Video continues to find huge success when playing in the action thriller genre, with the streamer’s proudly “anti-woke” and somewhat divisive franchise now dominating the streaming platform. While the likes of Alan Ritchson’s Reacher remains the streamer’s biggest action hit, Prime Video could well have another major genre franchise on its hands if these results are anything to go by.
Starring Chris Pratt and Taylor Kitsch, The Terminal List and its recent prequel spin-off The Terminal List: Dark Wolf have joined forces to climb their way up into the Top 5 on Prime Video. Now beating the likes of fellow action shows Countdown and Butterfly, there is clearly an appetite for the action thriller series and its tale of conspiracy centered on a group of Navy SEALs.
Released back in 2022, The Terminal List is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Jack Carr and follows Pratt as James Reece, a Navy SEAL who, after returning home, begins to question his own memory of an ambush he and his team faced while on a covert mission. The series was deeply divisive at the time, earning scores of 40% and 94% from critics and audiences, respectively. And it’s a divisiveness that creator and author Carr previously blamed on its lack of “woke stuff.”
Does ‘The Terminal List’ Spin-off Disprove the “No Woke Stuff” Theory?
However, the response to this year’s prequel series, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, acts as an argument against such a claim, and suggests it was about the quality of the show itself. Since debuting last month, Dark Wolf has achieved a far more promising 75% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, alongside 82% from audiences.
Led by Terminal List star Taylor Kitsch, and featuring a cameo role for Chris Pratt’s James Reece, Dark Wolf details the origin story of Kitsch’s Ben Edwards throughout his journey from the Navy SEALs to the clandestine side of CIA Special Operations. Both installments of The Terminal List franchise have now been huge hits for Prime Video, as reflected in their combined domination of the streamer currently, which should hold Carr and the studio’s future plans for the show in good stead.
These plans will see The Terminal List taking cues from one of the most successful franchise filmmakers in the business right now, Taylor Sheridan. Carr and Amazon are now hoping to follow in the footsteps of Yellowstone, which has sparked all manner of spin-offs alongside its acclaimed main series. Carr recently teased plans for prequels that could take audiences back decades, saying…
“There’s a lot of pieces on that board right now. A lot of options on that board right now. I have Cry Havoc coming out October 7th, available for pre-order right now. It’s a story of James Reece’s father in Vietnam, 1968, and every character in there is written through the lens of 1968. So without those 50 plus years of hindsight, which took me a lot longer than I anticipated and really became historical fiction as I was delving into these characters and then their backstories that brought them to this point in 1968 to do these things, it’s really an espionage story set in Saigon, 1968.
But there are options there. There’s options with some other characters and the Hastings side of this map. And from the very beginning I was very cognizant, very deliberately put in these two families, Reece family, Hastings family that had backstories for their fathers and grandfathers that would be worth exploring in more depth.”
