‘Shin Godzilla’ Director’s Pulse-Pounding Thriller Dominates Netflix Charts (2025)

Table of Contents

'Bullet Train Explosion' Is a Crowd-Pleaser Your Rating Cast References

By Rahul Malhotra

Published 8 hours ago

Followed

Thread

Link copied to clipboard

‘Shin Godzilla’ Director’s Pulse-Pounding Thriller Dominates Netflix Charts (2)

With roughly 30 million views in its first week of release, Netflix's brutal action film Havoc, starring Tom Hardy, topped the English-language top 10 list. The streamer's non-English list, on the other hand, was topped for the second time by the Dutch thriller iHostage. However, a couple of new releases claimed the second and third spots on the global top 10 list. At number three was the poorly reviewed Indian heist movie Jewel Thief: The Heist Begins, but the number two spot was claimed by the much better-received Japanese thriller Bullet Train Explosion.

The movie scored a total of 12.3 million views in its first week on Netflix. It found spots inside the top 10 in as many as 80 countries, and was the number one movie of the week in four countries, including Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A legacy sequel to the 1975 classic Bullet Train (not to be confused with the 2022 Brad Pitt film), the movie is directed by Shinji Higuchi, who will probably be best known to Western audiences for having co-directed the 2016 film Shin Godzilla, with Hideaki Anno. The movie paved the way for Godzilla Minus One to gross over $100 million worldwide a couple of years ago. Shin Godzilla itself made nearly $80 million globally in its theatrical run. Higuchi, a veteran of visual effects-heavy filmmaking, is now experiencing success of a different kind.

Bullet Train Explosion is a thriller that follows an ensemble of characters who are called to action when a Shinkansen is essentially taken over by a bomber. The bomber threatens to blow the train up if their demands aren't met, and if the train slows down to below 100 mph. If the premise reminds you of Speed, that's because the Keanu Reeves film was directly inspired by the 1975 Japanese Bullet Train. The original film also inspired the 1985 Jon Voight and Eric Roberts vehicle Runaway Train.

'Bullet Train Explosion' Is a Crowd-Pleaser

The movie opened to mostly positive reviews, and is currently sitting at a "fresh" 72% Rotten Tomatoes score. It also earned an 80% audience score on the aggregator website. In his review, Collider's Jeff Ewing described it as "a solid action-thriller with strong set-pieces," but compared it unfavorably to Higuchi's earlier films. He added, "Bullet Train Explosion is an engaging action thriller with a high set of stakes, amplified by the filmmakers' commitment to realism. It could innovate more thoroughly and ground its antagonistic plot with stronger internal logic, but it's a solid action outing that's well worth any audience's time."

You can watch the film on Netflix, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.