Russell Crowe’s New 107-Minute True-Crime Thriller Has Shot to No. 1 Worldwide on Netflix — Despite Rotten Tomatoes Scores Stuck in the Twenties

Russell Crowe doesn’t even play the central criminal in his latest movie.

That hasn’t stopped it from becoming the biggest film on Netflix worldwide just two days after its premiere.

The 107-minute true-crime thriller Unabomber arrived on Sept. 25 and rapidly climbed past Netflix’s previous chart leader, Best of the Best.

According to FlixPatrol figures cited by MovieWeb, it now sits at No. 1 on Netflix’s worldwide movie chart, ahead of titles including A Minecraft Movie, The Whisper Man and Black Adam.

There’s just one problem.

Critics don’t appear nearly as impressed as Netflix viewers are curious.

The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes scores are languishing in the twenties.

Russell Crowe Isn’t Playing Ted Kaczynski

Anyone expecting to see Crowe transform into the infamous Unabomber may be surprised by the casting.

Jacob Tremblay, the former child star of Room, plays the teenage Ted Kaczynski.

The film follows Kaczynski as a gifted 16-year-old mathematics student entering Harvard in 1958, long before he became the subject of one of America’s most notorious manhunts.

Crowe instead plays Henry Murray, the real-life Harvard professor whose controversial psychological experiments form a major part of the movie.

Those experiments subjected the young Kaczynski to deliberately confrontational interrogation sessions.

And it was this lesser-known chapter of the story that particularly fascinated director Janus Metz.

The Movie Explores a Darker Part of Kaczynski’s Harvard Years

Metz, whose previous work includes Borg vs McEnroe and All the Old Knives, directs from a screenplay by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves.

The story moves between two periods.

One examines Kaczynski’s years at Harvard and his involvement in Murray’s experiments.

The other follows the hunt for the Unabomber decades later.

Metz explained that although the enormous FBI investigation initially interested him, Kaczynski’s student years ultimately became the more compelling part of the project.

“I was fascinated by the fact that the hunt for the Unabomber was the FBI’s longest and most expensive operation to date,” Metz told Netflix’s Tudum.

But he said discovering the Harvard chapter revealed “a very dark chapter in American history” that he hadn’t previously known about.

Crowe Approached Murray Differently

Crowe’s Henry Murray isn’t presented simply as a conventional movie villain.

Instead, the actor described him as an academic whose pursuit of his theories gradually overwhelms the objectivity his work should require.

“Henry’s big problem is that, at a certain point he loses his academic objectivity in the pursuit of trying to prove his theories to be true,” Crowe explained.

That places the character at the center of one of the film’s most unsettling questions: what happens when academic ambition crosses ethical boundaries?

The movie also brings Shailene Woodley into its later timeline.

She plays a fictional FBI agent involved in the 1990s search for Kaczynski, allowing the thriller to move between his formative years and the eventual investigation.

Critics Aren’t Buying the Whole Movie

Its Netflix performance may be impressive, but Unabomber hasn’t received the same enthusiasm from reviewers.

MovieWeb reports that its Rotten Tomatoes ratings remain in the twenties.

Even some of the more positive reviews have focused heavily on the performances rather than the movie as a whole.

Crowe and Tremblay have received consistent praise, while the portion of the story involving the later FBI manhunt has attracted considerably more criticism.

That hasn’t stopped subscribers from pressing play.

Within two days of release, the movie had already overtaken Best of the Best on the worldwide Netflix ranking.

Netflix Has Seen This Pattern Before

The disconnect between reviews and streaming success isn’t particularly unusual.

MovieWeb points to The Whisper Man and The Last House as two other Netflix movies that spent significant periods at No. 1 during 2026 despite receiving weak reviews.

Unabomber appears to be following a similar trajectory.

The recognizable cast undoubtedly gives it immediate visibility.

Crowe remains a major attraction in darker genre material, while Tremblay’s transformation into a teenage Kaczynski gives viewers another reason to investigate.

Add the real-life subject matter and the promise of exploring a relatively unfamiliar part of an infamous story, and the movie has several ingredients capable of overcoming poor reviews — at least when it comes to attracting that crucial first click.

No. 1 in Just Two Days

Whether Unabomber can hold onto the top position remains to be seen.

But its opening performance is already striking.

A 107-minute true-crime drama arrived with reviews stuck in the twenties, put Russell Crowe in a major supporting role rather than at the center of the story, and focused heavily on an unsettling period of Ted Kaczynski’s life that many viewers may know little about.

Two days later, it was the No. 1 movie on Netflix worldwide.

The critics may be divided, but curiosity clearly isn’t.