Amazon Prime Video, the streaming movie division of Amazon.com, has over 200 million subscribers, which makes it one of the largest streaming operations in the world. Like Netflx, Apple TV+, and Hulu, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create its own movies and series. It is, essentially, its own Hollywood studio.
Despite its access to capital and, by extension, to talent, Amazon Prime Video occasionally puts out a genuinely awful movie. The worst of these is “Bliss.”
“Bliss” did not lack star power. Sundance Film Festival award-winner Mike Cahill wrote and directed this story of a recently divorced jobless man (Owen Wilson) who encounters a mysterious woman (Salma Hayek) who challenges his idea of reality. James Berardinelli of ReelViews opined “With its blend of existential science fiction and character-based romance, it would seem to be as close to a can’t-miss premise as one can imagine yet, despite that, it somehow does miss – and by a wide margin.” (It certainly doesn’t qualify as one of the best sci-fi movies of all time.)
How bad is “Bliss”? Its IMDb user rating is 5.4/10. Its Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score is 28%.