Josh Brolin And Megan Fox's Comic Book Movie Flop Is A Streaming Hit On HBO Max

Back in 2010 (three years before introducing the DC Extended Universe), Warner Bros. and DC were still figuring out how best to compete with Kevin Feige's then newly-launched Marvel Cinematic Universe. Needless to say, 2010's "Jonah Hex" wasn't the answer. Despite boasting a stacked cast that, alongside star Josh Brolin, featured John Malkovich, Megan Fox, Michael Fassbender, Will Arnett, and Michael Shannon, this misguided superhero Western flick was a gigantic flop. Now, however, much like its protagonist, the movie has risen from the dead to secure a place on the HBO MAX most-watched films charts 15 years after it imploded in theaters.

According to FlixPatrol, a site that tracks streaming viewership data, this forgotten DC Comics movie has been in the HBO MAX charts for some time, hovering around the lower half of the Top 10 in the United States, but rising to number five on September 11, 2025. Since then, "Jonah Hex" slipped back to the ninth and eventually 10th positions, where it sits at the time of writing.

The film stars Brolin as the titular gunslinger, who is ordered to burn down a hospital by his commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (Malkovich), during the Civil War. When he refuses, he's forced to kill his best friend and Turnbull's son, Jeb, before Malkovich's antagonist takes revenge by killing Hex's family and branding the face of his former soldier. Of course, this being a comic book movie based on the titular DC character, Hex survives — only now he's able to converse with the dead. He then becomes a bounty hunter and is hired by President Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn) to track down Turnbull, giving him a perfect opportunity for revenge. Along the way he encounters Megan Fox's Lilah Black, a working girl for whom Brolin's gunslinger eventually falls.

Sadly, none of that appealed to the masses as "Jonah Hex" made just $10.9 million worldwide against a $47 million budget. Now, however, the movie is proving its worth as streaming fodder.

Directed by Canadian filmmaker James Hayward, who had previously worked solely on animated features, "Jonah Hex" suffered from its director's lack of experience. But it was also heavily reworked by Warner Bros., which seemingly only made things worse. In a 2023 Variety interview, Josh Brolin, who has openly talked about knowing what went wrong with "Jonah Hex" multiple times, said that once the studio intervened they transformed the film into "the least accessible movie." Brolin has also recalled the exact moment he knew "Jonah Hex" was going to flop, pointing to the way in which journalists would raise their voice up an octave while talking to him on the press tour for the movie.

Why might "Jonah Hex" be experiencing a brief renaissance in 2025? Well, it seems as simple as the movie being added to the HBO MAX server on September 1, 2025. The film had previously been licensed elsewhere but returned to Warner's own streaming service at the start of September, and it seems subscribers were ready to give Brolin's flop another go — or they had no recollection of it ever coming out in the first place (which, considering hardly anybody actually saw "Jonah Hex" and the fact it debuted 15 years ago, seems more likely).

With an 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie's days in the charts are surely numbered. Then again, in the world of streaming (a place where even something as widely forgotten as Sandra Bullock's derided horror movie "Premonition" can flourish), who knows what to expect.