Netflix Sets Removal Date for $220M Sci-Fi Disaster Movie That Almost Kicked-Off a New Franchise

2 weeks ago 13

Published Feb 14, 2026, 9:40 AM EST

Rohan Naahar is a Weekend News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he'll watch anything once.

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

Here's a "what-if" scenario: Would the movie Battleship have been more successful had it been released now, at a time when similar franchise-minded films such as The Super Mario Bros. Movie, A Minecraft Movie, and Barbie have grossed a combined total of nearly $4 billion worldwide? In the last few years, we've also had movies based on the invention of the Blackberry, the video game Tetris, and even Cheetos and Pop-Tarts. There's a Monopoly movie on the way from directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, as well as a Matchbox movie from Extraction director Sam Hargrave. Not all these films were, or will be good. Which begs the question: Would Battleship have worked, even without a single frame changed? There's no way to know; unlike fellow Hasbro properties such as G.I. Joe and Transformers, there appears to be little interest in keeping the IP alive. That said, the Battleship movie foreshadowed the trends that have become so commonplace now, and audiences that didn't get the chance to check it out can do so on Netflix. But there's not much time left, as the film will leave the platform soon.

Directed by Peter Berg, Battleship was designed to replicate the success of Michael Bay's Transformers series, which already had three blockbuster installments by then. The Transformers franchise was delivering greater box-office hauls with each new film, indicating an audience appetite for military-minded sci-fi movies with aliens. Battleship was headlined by Taylor Kitsch, who starred in the fellow box-office disappointment John Carter that same year. The back-to-back failure of the two movies affected his career, and it was only years later that he bounced back. Kitsch reunited with Berg for his comeback project, the Netflix Western series American Primeval. He also headlines Prime Video's The Terminal List: Dark Wolf. Battleship, which earned $303 million worldwide against a reported budget of $220 million, seems to finally be behind him.

Here's How Long You Have Left Until 'Battleship' Leaves Netflix

Also featuring Alexander Skarsgård, Liam Neeson, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, and Shōgun star Tadanobu Asano, the movie opened to poor reviews. It's now sitting at a 34% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics' consensus reads, "It may offer energetic escapism for less demanding filmgoers, but Battleship is too loud, poorly written, and formulaic to justify its expense — and a lot less fun than its source material." Interestingly, the movie finished second at the global box office in its debut weekend, behind the re-release of fellow oceanic epic Titanic. You can watch Battleship on Netflix, but you only have until February 15 to do so.