A 2007 True Crime Thriller With A 90% Rotten Tomatoes Score Is Hitting Netflix Soon

Although David Fincher is one of the best directors of our time, his work is often underappreciated in its initial release. Take for instance "Zodiac," his 2007 true crime thriller about the Zodiac killings. The movie is possibly Fincher's best ever, but it was a box office disappointment and considered a step down from his previous serial killer movie "Seven." It only grossed $84.7 million worldwide on a budget of $65 million, and it was criticized by viewers for being too long, complicated, and lacking a satisfying resolution.

But as true Fincher and "Zodiac" fans know, all these criticisms are actually positives. The movie lacks resolution because the real-life Zodiac killings famously lacked resolution, and it was long and complicated because that's exactly what the investigation was. "Seven" had the standard cinematic escalation of stakes that viewers want from a serial killer story, but "Zodiac" takes the historically accurate approach of the Zodiac killings tapering off on their own. This is a film about being obsessed with a mystery that has no clear solution, about how to find peace when you know a question will be nagging at you forever. Critics understood this, as evidenced by the film's 90% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, but general audiences needed time. 

Viewers in 2025 — an era where seemingly everyone's familiar with the appeal of musing over unsolved cold cases — should be more on this film's level, so it's great news that "Zodiac" is coming to Netflix on November 17. You can enjoy the start of the holiday season by watching Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Jake Gyllenhaal all go crazy trying to catch the world's most famously uncatchable serial killer. 

In a May 2007 interview with Sight & Sound Magazine, Fincher acknowledged that "Zodiac" disappointed at the box office, and credited it to the movie having a strange niche that was hard to market:

"Even with the box office being what it is, I still think there's an audience out there for this movie. Everyone has a different idea about marketing, but my philosophy is that if you market a movie to 16-year-old boys and don't deliver 'Saw' or 'Seven,' they're going to be the most vociferous ones coming out of the screening saying 'This movie sucks.' And you're saying goodbye to the audience who would get it because they're going to look at the ads and say, 'I don't want to see some slasher movie.'"

This is the key to why the movie flopped, and also the key to why it's so good: "Zodiac" isn't a gory slasher movie but a restrained detective/journalism movie. It's about competent people drinking coffee and rummaging through old files, making phone calls and talking over the case together at various bars and diners. 

As many have pointed out, "Zodiac" is a surprise comfort movie for a lot of viewers. As horrifying as some of those early murder sequences are, and as stressful as that basement scene is, there's something satisfying about watching smart people methodically tackle the case from three different angles. It's the process of solving the case, not the answer to the case, that makes "Zodiac" so special.