Television stars trying their hand at blockbusters and not having the best time of it is nothing new. Kit Harington is one of them, and when he became one of the biggest names on television thanks to Game of Thrones, an offer to lead his own movie came in, surrounded by a terrific cast of thespians. It was a movie that borrowed a little from Gladiator, threw in a doomed romance straight out of Titanic and was all "based on a true story." But unlike the climax of the movie, it didn't set anything on fire.
That movie is Pompeii, the 2014 historical disaster thriller directed by Paul W. S. Anderson (Resident Evil), which is officially leaving Netflix in the United States. The movie earned approximately $117 million worldwide during its original theatrical run, bringing the destruction of the ancient Roman city to the big screen with a combination of gladiatorial combat, romance and some fairly spectacular volcanic destruction.
Set in 79 A.D., Pompeii tells the epic story of Milo, a slave turned gladiator who finds himself in a race against time to save his true love, Cassia, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy merchant who has been unwillingly betrothed to a corrupt Roman senator. As Mount Vesuvius erupts in a torrent of blazing lava, Milo must fight his way out of the arena to save his beloved as the once magnificent Pompeii crumbles around him.
The cast is led by Harington (Game of Thrones) as Milo, alongside Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) as Cassia, Kiefer Sutherland (24) as Senator Corvus, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Lost) as Atticus, Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix) as Aurelia, Jared Harris (Chernobyl) as Severus, and Jessica Lucas (Gotham) as Ariadne.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it's ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn't want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it's about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it's about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn't be possible. Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Pompeii wasn't particularly popular with critics, earning just 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. Much of the criticism focused on its familiar story and dialogue, although the action sequences and visual effects received a warmer response. The movie's $117 million worldwide box office wasn't enough to make it a major hit, particularly against a reported production budget of around $100 million. It's still a good laugh though. Yeah, it never really hits the high points of something like Gladiator but everyone knows that Pompeii is going to be destroyed and you're sitting there waiting for it to blow. And it delivers.
Pompeii is leaving Netflix in the United States.
