Before Warner Bros. made a big mistake by dumping Clint Eastwood’s latest movie on the Max streaming service, the screen legend was churning out box office hits. In fact, his 2014 biographical war drama “American Sniper” became the biggest January movie ever at the box office, making $547.6 million on a $58 million budget.
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The movie is based on Navy SEAL Chris Kyle’s book of the same name, and chronicles his four tours in Iraq. Known for being the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, Kyle, as played by Bradley Cooper, was given a full Hollywood hero narrative, which simultaneously helped the movie become the hit that it was and prompted controversy among reviewers who noted the impressive lack of critical analysis, especially when it came to the politics surrounding the Iraq War itself. As Vox put it, the movie “deeply misrepresents why America went to war in Iraq and how the war actually went down.” It didn’t help that Kyle was also accused of embellishing the truth, including his military record. Sadly, the marksman was killed by ex-Marine Eddie Ray Routh at a Texas shooting range a year before his movie debuted.
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When it did debut, however, the film not only made quite a bit of money but received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for Cooper, though it ended up only winning one award for Best Sound Editing. Many critics also looked past the historical inaccuracies to praise Cooper’s performance and Eastwood’s direction. Now, the movie is re-emerging in an age where its director’s movies are going straight to streaming platforms rather than dominating the box office. It will perhaps be little consolation to Eastwood to learn that “American Sniper” is faring well on Netflix, but it is perhaps interesting to think about how modern audiences might interpret the film, removed from the context in which it originally debuted.
American sniper hits the Netflix target
“American Sniper” follows Chris Kyle as he’s deployed to Iraq, where his sniping abilities quickly earn him the moniker “Legend.” However, this reputation also spreads to the enemy, who become determined to take out the deadliest sniper in the U.S. military. Meanwhile, Kyle is balancing the intensity of his service with his family life back home, where his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) and two children await his return, only to find that war has taken its toll on their husband and father.
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Considering films like Dylan Sprouse’s “Die Hard”-like action movie “Aftermath” can dominate Netflix, the kind of human drama on offer in Clint Eastwood’s film isn’t a requirement for success on the streamer. But it seems subscribers have taken to this film anyway, propelling “American Sniper” into the number one position on Netflix. The movie hit the streamer on April 21, 2025, and according to streaming viewership tracker FlixPatrol, debuted at number one on the U.S. most-watched film charts the following day. It then slipped to the number two position on April 23, 2025, but it’s still early days, meaning there’s more than enough time for Eastwood and Bradley Cooper to retake the top spot as the week plays out.
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American Sniper has more going for it than your average Netflix chart-topper
“American Sniper” currently enjoys a “fresh” 72% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which might indicate that critics were largely complimentary of the film. But that’s not entirely true in this case. After all, at its core, Rotten Tomatoes really reduces reviews to a binary between “fresh” and “rotten,” which works for some movies, say Kevin Hart’s “Lift,” which somehow dominated Netflix in 2023. But for “American Sniper,” there’s a clear tension between the fact that the film is well-made and contains a typically committed performance from Bradley Cooper and the controversy surrounding its hero narrative and uncritical view of the Iraq War. As such, the percentage churned out by the Tomatometer isn’t really reflective of the nuance involved in critiquing this particular Clint Eastwood effort.
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For Slate writer Dana Stevens, Eastwood’s movie was neither some jingoistic lionization of its subject matter nor a full-on critique of it. Highlighting what she saw as “a perspective that’s recognizable from the classic Westerns Eastwood has long been associated with,” Stevens saw the film as both “an existential critique of violent machismo that doubles as a celebration of violence.” Now, that sounds like something worth checking out, right? Something that isn’t cobbled together by an algorithm to lull us into a stupor, at least. If anything then, it’s worth watching or indeed rewatching “American Sniper” just to break up the monotony of streaming “content” and decide for yourself whether Eastwood’s film is a puff piece or whether it’s more nuanced than that.
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If that doesn’t appeal, it will at least be interesting to see how “American Sniper” fares on Netflix moving forward. At the time of writing, it has to dethrone the movie about a real Apple Store robbery that’s been dominating the Netflix charts for days now. But perhaps more interesting is the potential to see how the movie might be received by a generation too young to remember the controversy surrounding the Iraq War.
