Dave Bautista And Samuel L. Jackson's 2025 Post-Apocalyptic Movie Barely Made An Impact

J.J. Perry's post-apocalyptic movie "Afterburn" was released in 2025, but you wouldn't know it from any lists of the best action movies of the year. In fact, so few critics reviewed the movie that it doesn't yet have an official Rotten Tomatoes rating. That's not too surprising as, worldwide, the movie barely cracked a million dollars, according to BoxOfficeMojo.

If you have an insatiable appetite for post-apocalyptic films, however, you may want to give "Afterburn" a shot. Post-apocalyptic movies are all the rage; after all, sometimes it seems like we might already be living in one ourselves. The film tells the story of a near-future Earth that's been devastated by a massive solar flare, which scorches the entire eastern hemisphere and devolves into a wasteland ruled by evil warlords and villainous tribes. Treasure hunter Jake (Dave Bautista) has been sent to Europe by a man named King (Samuel L. Jackson) with a simple mission: steal the Mona Lisa. 

It's a fitting goal. In the 2022 film "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery," Bautista's character was also swept up in a plot to steal the famous painting. That movie was very much about the strange after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, so Bautista completionists are going to want to see his attempt to take the painting after the actual end of the world.

Knowing that the market for post-apocalyptic movies is bit crowded, director J.J. Perry tried offer something different with "Afterburn." Speaking with ScreenRant, he confessed to having been inspired by "The Book of Eli" and the "Mad Max" franchise, but wasn't interested in making a movie so reliant on fight choreography. "There's some fighting, but it's more of an action-adventure than a full-on action movie, with treasure hunting [and] problem-solving," Perry explained. "We try to reach for it that way."

The movie saw Dave Bautista play against type, which might seem strange to say about the famously-muscular ex-wrestler playing yet another burly, tattooed, bald character. Jake, however, just kind of looks like that. Although he's sent on a mission where he is expected to do crazy things like skydive, it seems nobody bothered to check Jake's resume first. "We thought it'd be funnier if they just [assumed] that he had done this before," Bautista explained to ScreenRant. "You realize that no, he hadn't done it; he didn't realize what he signed up for ... We wanted to play with a lot of different circumstances like that [where] he was a little bit in over his head."

That led to opportunities for the actor to lean in to his surprisingly-good comedic timing. After all, fans may know Bautista best for playing the hilarious Drax the Destroyer in the comedy-heavy "Guardians of the Galaxy" franchise.

Plenty of box office bombs blew up on Netflix, but after "Afterburn" failed to light the box office on fire, the movie found its way onto MGM+. Away from the pressures of ticket sales and making back its budget, "Afterburn" found its audience, surprising industry watchers by topping streaming charts.

Not long after, "Afterburn" was released on Amazon Prime Video more broadly, and it's been a worldwide hit ever since. According to FlixPatrol, as of press time, the film appeared in the Top 10 chart on Prime Video for 127 days this year. CBR noted that it even topped the charts in countries as varied as Mexico, Uruguay, and France, while coming close to the top spot in other locations from the Netherlands to Panama.

The movie provides an interesting case study for what success looks like in the streaming age. A movie like "Afterburn" can make little noise in theaters, failing to excite either audiences or critics. Thanks to the almighty algorithms that control what we see at home, however, audiences may find things to latch on to, proving that you can't judge a film by its Rotten Tomatoes score ... or lack thereof.