Henry Cavill’s 2019 action thriller has shot its way onto the streaming charts.

Cavill remains best known for playing Superman in movies like Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), and Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021), but his attempts to branch out beyond the DCU have seen mixed success. Cavill’s villainous turn in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) remains a career highlight, and his tenure as Geralt in Netflix’s The Witcher series was also well received. A number of other efforts, however, have fallen flat, including recent films like Argylle (2024) and In the Grey (2026).

Marking a quiet release for Cavill back in 2019, Night Hunter is now picking up steam on streaming. As of writing, the film ranks as the tenth most popular movie on Paramount+ worldwide, falling just behind titles like The Running Man (2026), The Internship (2026), and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023).

Directed by David Raymond, Night Hunter was a direct-to-VOD release following its premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2018. The film stars Cavill as Walter Marshall, a detective who joins forces with a psychological profiler and a vigilante to take down a cabal of serial murderers.

Despite a cast led by Cavill, Ben Kingsley, Alexandra Daddario, Stanley Tucci, Minka Kelly, and Nathan Fillion, Night Hunter was not well received upon its release. Originally screened under the title Nomis, the film has only a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics. The Popcornmeter score, however, is higher at 50%, indicating more acceptance from general audiences.

For Cavill, Night Hunter followed the release of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which remains the highest grossing and one of the most acclaimed entries in the Mission: Impossible franchise. The film suggested that Cavill could enjoy a strong career beyond Superman, but that’s a future that hasn’t yet come to pass.

Other than The Witcher, which Cavill has since departed, the 2020s saw Cavill appearing in three Enola Holmes movies, the disastrous Argylle, the unsuccessful Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024), and In the Grey, which earned mixed reviews but failed to spark at the box office. The Enola Holmes movies have been viewership hits, but Cavill, who plays Sherlock Holmes, is more of a supporting player in those.

Cavill, then, despite undoubtedly being a movie star, doesn’t actually have many hit movies under his belt in which he is the star. Night Hunter‘s resurgence on streaming suggests that audiences do enjoy Cavill’s screen presence, but this interest has yet to translate into theatrical turnout.

This could be about to change, however, as Cavill is set to star in the Highlander reboot from John Wick‘s Chad Stahelski. He’s also set to star in the Voltron movie and is rumored to be attached to Broadsword, a World War II film that would reunite him with Cruise.

It remains to be seen how the next few years of Cavill’s career will play out, but Night Hunter is evidently a movie in which he was trying to establish a leading man career outside the world of superheroes. Though the 2019 film didn’t quite get there, its streaming success suggests Cavill hasn’t lost his charm with audiences.

Release Date

August 29, 2019

Runtime

95 minutes

Writers

David Raymond

Producers

Kevin Scott Frakes, Nadine de Barros, Larry Harding, Nasrat Muzayyin, Zorin Finkelsen, Francesca Dutton, James Lancaster, Mitesh Parikh, Niraj Parikh, Gaurav Talwar, Pulak Parikh, Rob Wood, Mark Catton, Rick Dugdale, Sundip K. Bhundia, Steven Ashley, Peter Aitken, James Milligan, Chris Pettit, Alastair Burlingham, Buddy Patrick, Robert Ogden Barnum, Dave Hansen, Tony Parker