Remember the Hungry Hungry Hippos game we passionately played as children? Apparently the affection for that notion has manifested into something different these days, thanks to Prime Video.
Hungry, a 2026 survival thriller about a group of tourists who find themselves facing a rampaging hippopotamus in the Louisiana swamplands, is now the No. 1 movie on Prime Video in the U.S. According to FlixPatrol’s Oct. 29 rankings, the film has moved ahead of Love of Your Life and Masterplan to take the top spot.
What Is ‘Hungry’ About?
Hungry follows a group of vacationers whose Louisiana boat tour takes a terrifying turn when they become stranded in the swamplands and encounter an aggressive hippo.
Madison Davenport stars as Sistine, with Tracey Bonner, Joaquim de Almeida, Samantha Coughlan and others rounding out the cast. The group must figure out how to survive while being hunted by an enormous animal that is considerably more dangerous than the alligators they expected to encounter.
The movie runs for 93 minutes and was directed and written by Nunn, whose previous credits include One Shot and Wildcat.
And while the idea of a killer hippo might sound more ridiculous than frightening, Hungry does attempt to play its creature relatively straight.
The movie currently has a 54% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 26 reviews, while its audience score sits at 34%. One critic, however, had a particularly memorable way of describing the movie’s central threat.
Writing for AIPT, critic Nathaniel Muir gave Hungry a Fresh review and described the hippo as a “gigantic killing machine.” He also praised some of the film’s shots of the animal, particularly the sequences that put viewers directly in front of its enormous mouth.
Other critics have been less enthusiastic.
The Guardian’s Leslie Felperin called the movie an animal-attack horror film built around a rampaging hippo, but argued that its thinly developed characters and intentionally absurd premise sometimes work against the tension.
Still, the movie’s premise gives it an obvious advantage in a crowded creature-feature market: there aren’t many thrillers about people being stalked through a Louisiana bayou by a massive hippopotamus.
‘Hungry’ Is No. 1 on Prime Video
Whatever critics think of the movie, Hungry is clearly connecting with enough viewers to push it to the top of Prime Video’s movie rankings. The movie is also No. 3 overall on the streamer (considering both shows and movies), falling only behind The Terminal List and Carrie.
The film originally arrived on digital platforms in June before making its way to Prime Video on Oct. 1, where it has now climbed to the top of the U.S. movie chart.
