Ben Affleck's Animals Could Revive A Classic Hollywood Thriller Genre On Netflix

Ben Affleck’s New Netflix Movie Is Exactly The Kind Of Thriller Hollywood Stopped Making Image via Netflix Published Oct 12, 2026, 6:30 PM EDT Sky Blanton is a Movie Contributor at ScreenRant with professional experience covering movies, television, and pop culture. Her published work spans news, interviews, features, and opinion pieces, with a focus on film, franchise storytelling, and the entertainment industry. She earned her bachelor's degree in Communications with a concentration in Professional Writing and a minor in Business Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. Sign in to your ScreenRant account Ben Affleck’s Animals has plenty to offer anyone who misses thrillers like Ransom. Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped days before the election. He and his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), need to raise the ransom while dealing with secrets that could wreck their marriage and his campaign. Affleck also directs, and twelve years after playing Nick in Gone Girl, it’s hard to take his character’s word for much when his wife has questions of her own. Those older thrillers made it easy to worry about who someone had let into their life. In Pacific Heights, Michael Keaton turns a couple’s rental property into a nightmare, while Unlawful Entry has Ray Liotta’s seemingly helpful cop begin stalking the homeowner’s wife. Body Heat takes that misplaced trust further, with William Hurt’s lawyer agreeing to help his lover murder her husband. Watching them ignore the warning signs makes the wait for everything to go wrong even worse. Television has given viewers plenty of marriages to second-guess since then. In The Undoing, Hugh Grant keeps trying to convince Nicole Kidman that she can believe him, even as she discovers his affair with the woman he’s accused of killing. Animals puts Affleck and Washington in another marriage where explanations may be difficult to accept. Mark and Abigail need to get their son home, which means relying on each other when their secrets are coming out. Why Hollywood Stopped Making Adult Thrillers A movie like Unlawful Entry asks audiences to buy a ticket because Ray Liotta looks like a convincing nightmare of a cop. A Batman sequel already has people waiting for it before the trailer arrives. According to publications like Vox, studios are increasingly favoring another installment of a series people already watched over the adult thrillers Hollywood once made regularly. There was also less money coming in after theaters. On Hot Ones in 2021, Matt Damon explained that DVD sales had once helped studios justify financing movies for adults. Someone who skipped a film’s theatrical run might still rent or buy it months later. Losing much of that income made those films harder to get approved (via TheDigitalFix). Yet Gone Girl earned roughly $369 million worldwide (via IMDB), showing that the story of a husband trying to explain his wife’s disappearance could still fill theaters. Also, television gave viewers more chances to watch marriages fall apart and wonder which spouse was lying. Big Little Lies gave Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon several episodes to reveal what their characters were hiding. Animals gives viewers a similar reason to keep guessing about its characters, with a kidnapping thriller they can finish in one evening. The kidnapping in Animals creates a problem that gets harder once the parents’ own lives enter the picture. Mark’s campaign is already deep in debt, so finding ransom money means confronting financial trouble at the worst possible moment. His political ambitions and marriage also give him reasons to hesitate over decisions that might otherwise seem straightforward. Like the older thrillers, Animals gives viewers reason to worry about the parents’ decisions as well as the kidnappers’ demands. In Ron Howard's Ransom, Mel Gibson’s father goes on television and offers the ransom money to anyone who catches his son’s kidnappers. It’s a gamble that could get the boy killed, and his wife begs him to reconsider. Basic Instinct makes Michael Douglas’s detective just as difficult to root for when he keeps sleeping with Catherine Tramell while investigating her for murder. It’s easy to keep watching just to see whether either man will finally listen to someone else. Animals puts Mark in a position where he has to listen to Abigail, even when their conversation turns to secrets he’d rather keep. He may know how to win over voters, but his wife has more to go on than a campaign speech. With their son’s life at stake, she needs answers she can act on. That gives their arguments a reason to hold viewers’ attention between calls from the kidnappers.