Jeremy Renner & Gemma Arterton's Forgotten Horror Movie Is A Streaming Hit 12 Years Later

The Brothers Grimm-penned fairy tales have been passed down through generations as a way of imparting life lessons through folklore. These stories were often dark and twisted reflections of the horrors brewing beneath the magical sheen through which you viewed the world at a young age. Many of their rougher edges were smoothed out upon being translated into feature films. Disney practically built a branded empire on its sanitized adaptations, especially with "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Cinderella," and "Sleeping Beauty," avoiding the darker implications of their source material. There came a point during the early 2010s, however, when the movies surrounding the Grimm fairy tales started to lean toward older demographics.

The thing with movies like "Red Riding Hood" and "Snow White and the Huntsman" is that their attempts at capturing a darker tone hardly went beyond the surface level. They favored murkier color palettes and violent action sequences above digging into the thematic horrors within the Grimm stories. One of the most notorious examples of this is the Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton-starring horror-action film "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. In spite of a widely negative critical aggregate of 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, the 2013 film was a massive success at the box office, raking in $226 million on a $50 million budget.

The legacy of "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" was upheld in the following years, with it becoming somewhat of a cult hit, but it appears the film has found new life on streaming. According to the streaming data website Flix Patrol, "Witch Hunters" has been doing well in viewership numbers on Paramount+'s Top 10 for the past eight days in the United States. As of the time this article is published, the film has bumped up from the sixth most popular film on the service to the fifth.

The funny thing about "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" is that part of the film technically does adapt the beloved story, as it opens with the sibling pair approaching a candy-encrusted gingerbread house owned by a mischievous witch. After realizing she intends to devour them, the children toss her into the oven. Rather than going back to their broken home with her wealth, Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) instead dedicate their life to becoming witch exterminators. Their battles often lead to bloody carnage by way of turret pistols and loaded crossbows. When it appears that the wicked grand witch Muriel (Famke Janssen) is plotting to use the arrival of the Blood Moon to sacrifice the children of a local village, the witch hunters do everything they can to prevent their enemies' flammable immunity before it's too late.

"Witch Hunters" comes from the mind of director Tommy Wirkola, the Norwegian filmmaker behind the "Dead Snow" movies, "Whatever Happened to Monday," and the yuletide-themed bone breaker "Violent Night." His genre fare tends to involve a more humorous take on the violence being carried out. There's a moment in this film, for example, that sees two witches riding their broomsticks through the forest at top speed, only to get sliced up into itty bitty pieces upon flying directly into a razor wire trap. It's also the kind of movie where Hansel needs to take insulin as a result of magic-induced diabetes that stemmed from his youthful candy consumption, as well as a Gatling gun being used to mow down an evil coven. You kind of have to roll with the absurdity of the whole premise.

In addition to catering to genre freaks like myself, the 2013 actioner ended up being a successful gambit because it was both released in January and in 3D. It could just exist as mindless fluff that won't be remembered as anything special, yet will fulfill you with enough witchy carnage to have made it worth the price of admission. Renner and Arterton are both good actors who can make something as overtly silly as "Witch Hunters" work. It could have become another franchise for Renner in the wake of "The Avengers," but much like "The Bourne Legacy," any potential sequel plans simply petered out due to a lack of interest behind the scenes to move forward with it.

Oz Perkins' underrated "Gretel & Hansel" would really lean into the elements of what makes the Grimm story so haunting, with themes of abuse and neglect. But if you're looking for a horror-adjacent action movie with fun gore effects and witch exterminators looking cool in front of explosions, you now know where to find it.

"Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" is currently streaming on Paramount+.