Director Robert Rodriguez has said that Netflix is 'shocked' at how well his 2020 film We Can Be Heroes is doing on the platform. Priyanka Chopra played a supporting role in the film, which centred around a bunch of kids who are called upon to save the world after their superhero parents are kidnapped.
Not only does We Can Be Heroes have a strong 'completion rate', its 'repeat rate is off the charts', Robert Rodriguez said in an interview. The filmmaker is currently working on a sequel, which he hopes to start shooting next year.
He told Collider, "They've been shocked at how well it's kept doing. They call it unstoppable. They've never seen any movie behave like that. It just will not stop. Kids will just not stop watching it. And I think it happened with the Spy Kid movies, but you couldn't ever keep track of it, because you can’t tell how many times kids watch it on VCR or watch on Disney channel. But now with their metrics, they can tell how many times a household is watching something again and again, through completion. Which a lot of the times when it's been a big opening weekend, it didn't mean people actually watched the whole movie. It means they watched five minutes or more."
He continued, "The completion rate was really high, but also the repeat rate was just off the charts, because kids just will watch it in the morning before school and after school every day. So yeah, they definitely want a sequel, which I'm working on, because it's a new franchise for them. That behaves very differently. But kids crave empowerment and those movies just hit those buttons.”
We Can Be Heroes was one of two back-to-back Netflix films for Priyanka. She also starred in an executive produced The White Tiger, directed by Ramin Bahrani and co-starring Adarsh Gourav and Rajkummar Rao. The film was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
Priyanka signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Amazon last year, through which she'll produce a wide slate of content across languages for the streamer. She is currently filming Amazon's spy series Citadel, executive produced by the Russo brothers.
We Can Be Heroes also featured Pedro Pascal, YaYa Gosselin, Christian Slater, Sung Kang, Adriana Barraza, Boyd Holbrook, Taylor Dooley, Vivien Blair and Christopher McDonald.