Jon Bernthal’s return as Frank Castle is off to a better start than any screen version of the character before it. The Punisher: One Last Kill, a 45-minute Disney Plus Special Presentation released this week, opened with a 77% TomatoMeter score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 87% Audience Score.
That makes the standalone special the best-reviewed movie or TV adaptation of Frank Castle named in the conversation so far. The 1990 Punisher finished with a 24% TomatoMeter score and a 33% Audience Score, while the 2004 film came in at 30% and 63%. Punisher: War Zone, released in 2008, landed at 29% and 42%.
The numbers are even more striking when the character moved to streaming. The first season of the Netflix Punisher series scored 68% with critics and 88% with audiences, and the second season settled at 61% and 70%. One Last Kill has now passed both on the critic side, even as audience reaction remains close to the strongest showing Frank Castle has had on the platform.
Bernthal co-wrote the script with director Reinaldo Marcus Green, and the special serves as a sequel to the Netflix Punisher series. That makes the release more than a victory lap. It is a fresh test of whether a darker, stripped-down Frank Castle still has room inside Marvel’s larger screen plans.
That question matters now because Bernthal is already in the middle of two more Marvel lanes: he appears in Daredevil: Born Again season 1 and is scheduled to appear in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. For a character long treated as too harsh, too messy or too self-contained to fit cleanly into the wider franchise, the special’s opening suggests the studio has found a version that can travel.
Bernthal’s appeal has never come from polish. He was legendary as Shane Walsh in The Walking Dead, and that same rough-edged intensity has carried over to Frank Castle. One Last Kill does not erase the character’s past on screen, but it gives him his strongest modern showing yet and leaves Marvel with a simple, useful result: this Punisher is working.
