Henry Cavill's In the Grey flopped in cinemas. It's now number one on Starz
Written off in cinemas, Henry Cavill’s newest action film is now building a proper cult following on streaming.
Cult hit status doesn’t usually arrive by choice, but In the Grey seems to have stumbled into it after a right old mess at the box office. Now, with its unexpected streaming takeover, Cavill and Ritchie are quietly laughing all the way to, well, not the bank, but maybe the group chat. Let’s pull apart how another Guy Ritchie-Henry Cavill action flick went from flop to streaming chart-topper all within a few months.
‘In the Grey’ shot to #1 on Starz and remains top four worldwide on Prime Video.
The Ritchie-Cavill Problem
Things haven’t exactly gone to plan for Henry Cavill or Guy Ritchie at the cinema in recent years. Since Cavill was shown the door at Superman HQ (in comes David Corenswet for James Gunn’s new take), his big action outings haven’t exactly set box offices alight. Argylle tanked in 2024. His first team-up with Ritchie, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, ended up in the same skip.
Even when Cavill’s tried branching out with less-hyped thrillers (barely anyone saw Night Hunter in 2018—$1 million in takings isn’t so much a flop as a faint ripple), there’s a clear pattern. Still, he keeps jumping back on the horse, and in early 2026, he gave it another go alongside Ritchie and a juice box of A-listers.
What’s In the Grey Actually About?
Written and helmed by Guy Ritchie, In the Grey delivers exactly what you’d expect: punchy action, a motley crew, and another payday gone sideways. Cavill plays the mysterious Sid (nobody’s got a surname, apparently), joining up with Jake Gyllenhaal (as Bronco) and Eiza Gonzalez (as Rachel). The plot’s brisk: get together a covert team, recover a stolen billion-dollar stash, then survive long enough to figure out who’s double-crossing whom. Naturally, it all goes spectacularly wrong.
If assembled casts were trophies, they’d need another shelf: Rosamund Pike, Carlos Bardem, Michael Vu, and Mohammed Al Turki all add their faces to the chaos.
Streaming Redemption
Here’s where it gets interesting. In the Grey opened on streaming back in June, landing on Prime Video first. For a few months, it quietly turned into one of the most-watched movies on that platform worldwide. Now it’s pulled a bit of a coup, surfacing on Starz in the US, where it’s not just popular—it’s at the very top. At time of writing, In the Grey is the #1 film on Starz, nudging Michael into second and $100k indie Hierarchy into third. And on Prime Video it’s still holding strong, clinging to the fourth spot on their global movie chart.
Why Did It Flop at the Cinema?
If you’ve followed Guy Ritchie’s career arc lately, the trend’s hard to miss: long gone are the days when Snatch and Lock Stock could pack out picture houses, and his Hollywood spell (even live-action Aladdin was a weird sort of curse). By rights, In the Grey—with Cavill and Gyllenhaal up front—should’ve been a hit. Instead? The script simply didn’t land. Critics were left unconvinced, and the Rotten Tomatoes score sits on a wishy-washy 52%.
Audience reception, strangely enough, has gone the other way—fans have taken to it online, bumping its user score to a healthier 82%. Watching at home, it seems, does the film some favours.