‘Ready Player One’ Meets ‘Dexter’ in Gerard Butler’s Brutal Sci-Fi Thriller Officially Streaming for Free

3 hours ago 23

Gerard Butler holds Michael C. Hall by the throat in Gamer

Published Oct 29, 2026, 6:30 AM EDT

In over three years at Collider, senior author Jake has now penned over 3000 articles covering a wide range of TV and film for the resources, lists, utilities, news, and interview teams. Alongside interviewing stars such as Selin Hizli, Rose Ayling-Ellis, Harlan Coben, and Chelsea Peretti, Jake was lucky enough to visit the set of Aardman and Netflix's Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl in 2024, getting the chance to chat with four-time Academy Award winner Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham. Jake has also worked for other publications, including Agents of Fandom. You can also hear Jake every week as the resident film and TV journalist on Track Radio.

Gerard Butler might prove an enduringly popular actor, but his fortunes at the box office often vary. This can be best illustrated in his two most recent big-screen releases. The first, released last summer, was Universal's How to Train Your Dragon remake, which earned $650 million globally in a hugely impressive theatrical run. This run began with two first-place weekend finishes, knocking Disney's Lilo & Stitch from the box office summit. With Butler reprising his role as Stoick the Vast from the original animated release, How to Train Your Dragon proved a big hit not just commercially but also critically.

This included a near-perfect 9/10 review from Collider's Maggie Lovitt, who called the film a "breath of fresh air" and "the gold-star example of how to do a live-action remake right." Then came his only movie of 2026: Greenland 2: Migration, an underwhelming sequel to the quiet 2020 hit. The film grossed just half of its reported $90 million budget worldwide, becoming one of many victims of the January box office blues, as well as earning a disappointing reception from critics. Sadly, Greenland 2: Migration's box office performance is similar to another Butler release which is about to make its way to a new streamer.

Directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who are best known for directing the opening two entries in Jason Statham’s action franchise, Crank, 2009's Gamer proved a big flop at the box office. The movie made just $42 million during its box office run against a $50 million budget, although it has since been reconsidered as a modern gem, with the subjects at the heart of Gamer undeniably ahead of its time. Should it have been released today, the movie, which also features Ludacris, Terry Crews, Logan Lerman, and Michael C. Hall, would perform much better. Next month, you can check out the misunderstood Gamer on free streaming site Plex.

Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard

Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.

🐕Wick

🏁Fast

🧨Mission

🎄Die Hard

FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →

How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.

ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said. BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we're already laughing about something. CI'm the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived. DBy accident. I wasn't supposed to be here, and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it.

NEXT QUESTION →

It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.

AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started. BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I'm not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup. CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving. DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don't go down.

NEXT QUESTION →

Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.

ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone. BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I'd trade the whole mission for any one of them. CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I'd still take the worst part of the job myself. DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don't know I exist.

NEXT QUESTION →

It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.

AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction. BThe people counting on me. I don't appear to have a limit when it's family on the line. CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it's going to be me. DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.

NEXT QUESTION →

There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.

AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it. BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion. CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff. DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.

NEXT QUESTION →

How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.

AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me. BI don't take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out. CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second. DThey're in a van outside telling me what I'm doing wrong while I'm the one bleeding on broken glass.

NEXT QUESTION →

Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.

ASomething was taken from me that can't be replaced, and I've been settling that account ever since. BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I'll defend it with everything. CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don't know how to hand that to anyone else. DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.

NEXT QUESTION →

When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.

AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to. BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table. CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me. DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.

REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →

Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.

John Wick

You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.

The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.

Fast & Furious

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.

This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

Mission: Impossible

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

Die Hard

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

Gerard Butler's Next Movie Is Sure to Be a Big Box Office Hit

Although it seems as if a Butler success at the box office is never guaranteed, his next is sure to be a major hit. That's because it's How to Train Your Dragon 2, a sequel to the aforementioned moneymaker, which is scheduled for release in June 2027. Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Nick Frost, and other favorites from the first installment will reprise their roles alongside Butler, with the iconic Cate Blanchett added as Valka Haddock, a role she voiced in the animated original.

Gamer will stream on Plex this November. Stay tuned to Collider for more streaming stories.