Netflix has confirmed that pretty much everyone in America has seen Bird Box, except for me. The Sandra Bullock film is the company’s most successful original movie, Deadline reports, with nearly 26 million U.S. subscribers devouring it in the first week. That means about one in eight Americans have seen this movie that I have not yet, and may never, see.
Bird Box outperformed Netflix’s Bright, another movie I have yet to watch, and “put up the best opening-week numbers of any title Nielsen has measured except for the second season of Stranger Things.” (I have seen Stranger Things, and I liked it).
After watching the trailer for Bird Box this morning, I have inferred that it is not a happy, lighthearted film. I know that it involves Sandra Bullock, two kids on a canoe, blindfolds… There’s mist, fog, murder? Horror, traffic jams, fear… Maybe birds? Birds in boxes? Are humans the birds in boxes?(Don’t tell me, even though I’m not sure I care.)
The longer these stupid memes keep up, the more resistant I become to watching it. But one day in 2042, when I finally let go of my pettiness, I’m sure I will watch Bird Box, have no one to process it with, and wish I would have just seen the damn movie when everyone else was talking about it. Such are the risks we take in life.