Jason Statham’s Sleeper Hit Surpasses an Underrated Tom Cruise Action Comedy on the Streaming Charts
Following their work together on the hugely successful 2024 hit The Beekeeper, everyone’s favorite British ass-kicker, Jason Statham, reteamed with director David Ayer for A Working Man. After their previous outing had proven a huge box office hit, turning a reported $40 million budget into $152 million worldwide, expectations were high for A Working Man. However, even with Sylvester Stallone as co-producer, a second success wasn’t to be, with A Working Man only managing a global haul of $98 million from a production budget of $40 million.
Nevertheless, as Statham movies tend to do, the film quickly became a streaming success on Prime Video and has rarely left the streamer’s top ten since. At the time of writing, A Working Man is the fifth-most-watched movie on Prime in the US. Statham’s former British Royal Marine, Levon Cade, has jumped ahead of another action genre mainstay in Tom Cruise, overtaking the now sixth-placed Knight and Day, a forgotten flop from 2010 that has recently surged up the streaming charts. Starring Cruise alongside the likes of Cameron Diaz and Peter Sarsgaard, and directed by Logan’s James Mangold, Knight and Day was panned by critics upon its debut fifteen years ago, with this recent unlikely rise up the streaming charts finally reaching a plateau. For anyone yet to catch Knight and Day, a synopsis of the movie reads:
“June Havens (Cameron Diaz) chats up her charming seatmate on a flight out of Kansas, but she doesn’t realize that she will soon land in the middle of an international adventure. The fellow passenger, Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), is a covert operative who claims he has been set up to take a fall. Now his reluctant partner, June must dodge bullets in Boston, leap rooftops in Austria and evade bulls in Spain, while she and Roy learn that trust is the most important survival skill.”
Did ‘Knight and Day’ Outperform ‘A Working Man’ at the Box Office?
Cruise’s forgotten action comedy might be losing to A Working Man in the current streaming charts, but which of the films won at the box office? The answer to that is Knight and Day by quite some distance. Compared to the Statham-led movie’s $98 million worldwide, Knight and Day earned an impressive $258 million in global revenue, split between a domestic haul of $76 million and a further $182 million from overseas markets. However, the latter’s production budget is almost three times the former, with both finding similar success when comparing the return on each investment.
A Working Man and Knight and Day are both streaming on Prime Video now.
Release Date
June 23, 2010
Runtime
109 Minutes
Writers
Patrick O’Neill
