Most movies manage to feel real. They’re usually announced well in advance of their premiere, followed by casting updates, production details, and then eventually a trailer and release date. It’s very rare that a movie like the 2025 War of the Worlds, starring Ice Cube and Eva Longoria, will sneak out like it’s a secret everyone involved wanted to keep. When you watch it, though, you get why maybe, just maybe, Universal Studios chose to quietly drop it with minimal fanfare, in the hopes that people wouldn’t notice it exists.
To their credit, that was actually true for a good week or so, as the movie premiered on July 30th, 2025. I happened to learn about it in advance through Rick Ellis’ Too Much TV newsletter, which features a through news roundup section, and even then, it didn’t seem real: In the days before its premiere on Prime Video, I kept revisiting the Deadline article confirming its release date, because that post was the primary proof of its existence.
I then featured it in last week’s Stream On, Consequence’s streaming recommendations newsletter, in the spirit of “if enough people watch this movie, then maybe I’ll stop wondering if I hallucinated it.” Because quite seriously, the experience of watching this movie on opening day was baffling, and not made any less baffling by the movie now going viral on TikTok (the only sign of it existing on social media).
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A big reason movies aren’t usually made in secret is that most movies require a lot of people to be involved — especially big adaptations of classic science-fiction stories. As an example, scroll through the hundreds of names listed in the credits for 2005’s War of the Worlds, directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise. By comparison, the 2025 movie’s credits are close to one-tenth as long.
How, you ask? Well, this movie uses a style recently defined as “screenlife” to depict an alien invasion of Earth only through what can be seen on the computer monitor of Will Radford (Ice Cube) — an approach enabled by its origins as a pandemic-era production. Now, Will’s a government employee with access to a very secret and very invasive security system, which means he can see a lot through his various feeds, not to mention his government contacts (played by notable folk like Clark Gregg and Andrea Savage). But there are still points where this movie perhaps completely rejects the idea of plausibility as it fumbles through its interpretation of H.G. Wells’ classic tale.
Early in the movie, we see Will get updates from his NASA crush Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria) on some strange weather patterns she’s noticing (early warning signs of the invasion to come) while also using his surveillance superpowers to keep tabs on his pregnant daughter Faith (Iman Benson) and son Dave (Henry Hunter Hall). Then the attacks begin — slow first, then fast — and we see epic scenes of disaster broadcast as news reports or via shaky Facetime footage from people on the ground, all while Will sits at his computer and tries to figure out what’s going on and how to stop it.
It’s really the point at which the movie’s hero becomes Faith’s baby daddy Mark (Devon Bostick) where the laughter really starts. Mark, you see, works as an Amazon delivery dude, and he helps to save the day by — I swear to God — piloting an Amazon delivery drone across town. We see this all via drone POV footage, of course. It’s maybe worth mentioning again that this movie is available on Amazon Prime Video. Amazon, a fine and good company! Amazon can do it all!
Okay, Ice Cube actually saves the day, in an action climax we see via him literally running through a data server while on FaceTime, because everyone knows that when you’re trying to save the world, you should always have your phone in one hand to document your efforts.
A fun fact for you is that Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds (the one which was convincing enough to make people believe aliens were actually invading) was only 60 minutes long. 2025’s War of the Worlds, meanwhile, clocks in at 89 minutes, whereas 2005’s adaptation was 117. In the 2005 movie’s case, that runtime actually feels remarkably short, given how much running from aliens Spielberg and Cruise are able to pack in. The 2025 movie, meanwhile, adds a truly ridiculous subplot about an Anonymous-type group that’s taking aim at government surveillance, just like the kind Will does.
The core message might be that an over-reliance on technology… is bad. But that message honestly feels a little toothless, given how we just saw that technology saved the planet Earth. Hilariously, Prime Video’s recommended viewing for this user at the end of the movie was the CBS drama Person of Interest, which was also all about the dangers of the surveillance state. The algorithm is sometimes not subtle.
Two things can be simultaneously true: It’s fun to see filmmakers push the boundaries of what’s possible with a relatively unique storytelling approach, and that storytelling approach can also be very very stupid in execution. (Especially if you forget to do things like remove the reflection of the green screen from Ice Cube’s glasses, a thing that happens in multiple scenes.)
Telling a story largely through (fictionalized) second-hand sources is certainly a solution to the problem of “we don’t have Spielberg money to make this movie,” but it turns out not to be the best one by a long shot. That being said, I am kind of hoping more people discover War of the Worlds. Maybe someday, if enough people watch, it’ll actually seem real.
War of the Worlds is streaming now on Prime Video.
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