Tim Allen and Chevy Chase‘s brief stint in the superhero genre is about to lose one of its streaming homes.
Based on Jason Lethcoe’s children’s novel, Zoom starred Allen as retired superhero Jack Shepard who is recruited by the government for help when his villainous brother, presumed dead 30 years prior, is revealed to be on the verge of returning through a dimensional rift. Shepard is tasked with building a new group, codenamed Team Zenith, working with four misfit super-powered young heroes, becoming an underdog group along the way.
Now, nearly 20 years after it hit theaters, Zoom is about to lose one of its streaming homes. The superhero comedy will be leaving Netflix on March 1, leaving just a few weeks for viewers to tune in on the platform. At the time of writing, that leaves the movie’s only remaining platforms come March as being the public library-driven Kanopy and Hoopla.
Also starring Chase, Scream vet Courteney Cox, Men in Black‘s Rip Torn, Reagan‘s Ryan Newman, Spencer Breslin, Michael Cassidy and future Emmy nominee Kate Mara, Zoom was a very notable flop upon its 2006 release. Critics were very dismissive of the family-focused superhero comedy, awarding it a paltry 5% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while audiences also failed to turn out for the film in theaters, resulting in a disastrous $12.5 million box office haul against its surprisingly hefty $75 million production budget.
This underperformance proved to be a shocker for a number of reasons. For starters, family-friendly superhero movies were on a steady rise at the time, with Pixar’s The Incredibles becoming an Oscar-winning box office sensation, while Disney’s live-action comic book send-up Sky High also became a critical and commercial hit, before later gaining a cult following on home media.
Additionally, the majority of its big-name cast and director Peter Hewitt were still seen as bankable figures going into Zoom‘s release. Allen, whose priorities shifted to movies after the end of Home Improvement‘s eight-season run, had a string of box office hits prior to it, particularly the Santa Clause and Toy Story franchises. The year after even saw his highest-grossing live-action film with the road trip comedy Wild Hogs, bringing in over $253 million worldwide.
Allen landed a triple nomination for Worst Actor at the Razzies for Zoom, The Shaggy Dog and The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.
Even beyond Allen, Cox was just fresh off of Friends‘ blockbuster run and the back-to-back hits of The Longest Yard remake and Barnyard, while Hewitt was behind the Bill Murray-led Garfield movie, which quadrupled its budget at the box office in spite of its poor reviews. Breslin was also one of the most popular child actors at the time, having previously worked with Allen in both The Santa Clause 2 and Shaggy Dog, as well as being part of such hits as Disney’s The Kid and Return to Neverland.
However, with it being a rare outlier of a flop in Allen and his co-stars’ careers, it will be interesting to see if Zoom looks to find a new streaming home after its Netflix exit. With Allen’s continued relationship at Disney with his new sitcom Shifting Gears, it seems possible Disney+ could look to acquire its rights and make it the ultimate streaming home for fans of the Golden Globe winner.