Liam Neeson’s 2012 survival thriller “The Grey” is leaving Netflix on Nov. 1, according to What’s on Netflix.
That leaves about a week to watch a movie that almost had a different star.
Bradley Cooper Had the Part First
Director Joe Carnahan first lined up Bradley Cooper for the lead. Carnahan had just made “The A-Team” (2010) with both actors, with Neeson as Hannibal and Cooper as Face.
Cooper was set to star before negotiations fell through, The Film Stage reported in September 2010. Neeson then went into talks for the role.
Cooper still showed up for the movie’s Los Angeles premiere on Jan. 11, 2012, where he posed with Neeson on the red carpet.
What ‘The Grey’ Is About
Neeson plays John Ottway, a sharpshooter hired to keep wolves away from the workers at a remote oil facility in Alaska. On the flight home to Anchorage, the plane goes down in the frozen wilderness.
A handful of men survive the crash. Then the wolves start coming for them.
Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie and James Badge Dale play the other men on the plane. Carnahan wrote the script with Ian MacKenzie Jeffers, based on Jeffers’ short story “Ghost Walker.”
The movie was shot in about 40 days, from January to March 2011, around Vancouver and Smithers in British Columbia.
A No. 1 Opening and Year-End Lists
“The Grey” opened at No. 1 at the box office with $19.7 million in January 2012. It made $81.2 million worldwide on a budget of about $25 million.
It has an 80% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 207 reviews. Richard Roeper ranked it third on his top 10 movies of 2012, and A.O. Scott of The New York Times put it on his list of the year’s 10 best films.
Roger Ebert couldn’t sit through the next movie he saw after it. “It was the first time I’ve ever walked out of a film because of the previous film,” he wrote.
His review opens with this line: “‘The Grey’ is an unrelenting demonstration that wolves have no opinion.”
Where to Watch ‘The Grey’
You can stream “The Grey” on Netflix until it leaves on Nov. 1.
For more Neeson, read about his 1995 epic “Rob Roy,” which earned Tim Roth an Oscar nomination, and why “Schindler’s List” is still called one of the greatest movies of all time.
