Bad Times at the El Royale is worth watching now on streaming

Drew Goddard’s 2018 thriller Bad Times at the El Royale has started getting another look on streaming and home media after a theatrical run that pulled in about $31.8 million worldwide against a $32 million budget.

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Set in 1969, Bad Times at the El Royale throws a flashy ensemble cast into a faded, once-glamorous hotel on the California-Nevada border and lets the night unravel from there. Over the course of one tense evening, strangers carrying secrets, fake identities, and their own buried motives slam into each other in violent, unpredictable ways. Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, and Chris Hemsworth all make an impression, though Erivo and Bridges are still the two names that draw the most praise.

The movie runs on sharp dialogue, stylish direction, and a non-linear mystery that keeps shifting the ground under your feet. The Tarantino influence is hard to miss: the chapter-like structure, the morally messy characters, the Pulp Fiction comparisons, and the one-location tension that brings The Hateful Eight to mind. Beneath all that, it’s still digging into guilt, redemption, and innocence.

If you missed adult thrillers like Bad Times at the El Royale in theaters, it’s an easy one to pick up now, even if the same things that made it distinctive also kept it from turning into a larger property: the nearly 2.5-hour runtime, the layered storytelling, the lack of franchise branding, and a soft $14 million international haul that more or less shut down any immediate sequel or spin-off hopes. There’s still no official follow-up, no major re-release, and no expanded franchise, though Drew Goddard has stayed active in Hollywood.

You can catch Bad Times at the El Royale now on streaming and home media.