"The Day After Tomorrow" has climbed to No. 1 on Netflix in the United States in the latest update to the charts, pushing a 2004 disaster thriller back to the top of a streaming list it had no obvious business leading. The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Sam Hall and was directed by Roland Emmerich.
That rise is what makes the movie a current search item today. At 123 minutes, the film is now outranking newer titles on Netflix in the United States, including Ben Affleck's Animals, more than 22 years after its release in May 2004. For viewers checking the chart, the draw is simple: a long-running studio spectacle is suddenly the movie everyone is being served first.
The numbers explain why the film still carries weight. It grossed more than $552 million against a $125 million production budget, making it a major commercial success even as critics were far less kind. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 44% critics' score, a gap that would normally keep a movie out of the top spot on a modern streaming chart. Dennis Quaid also appears as Jack, and the story follows Sam Hall traveling to New York City for a high school competition as Earth enters an unexpected ice age.
That split between box-office force and critical doubt is the point of the movie's return. Roger Ebert gave it three stars out of four, called it silly, and still wrote that it was also very scary, praising the special effects as stupendous and saying the film worked despite its cornball plotting. The reaction helps explain why it can still travel well to a new audience: the movie is built around flood scenes, sheltering in the New York Public Library, and a father trying to rescue his son amid the apocalypse.
So the question is not whether "The Day After Tomorrow" belongs in the conversation. It does. The more useful question is how long a 2004 disaster movie can hold off newer releases before the Netflix ranking shifts again.
