Why was The Hunt such a controversial movie?

In the summer of 2019, one of the hottest political topics on the planet was a Blumhouse horror movie. The Hunt, directed by Craig Zobel, drew thousands of column inches and even incurred the wrath of the then-president Donald Trump. Even more strangely, nobody had actually seen it.

The Hunt did eventually arrive in US cinemas — albeit just days before COVID-19 forced them all to shut their doors — and it turned out to be less of a lightning rod than original reports suggested. Five years after the original controversy, though, The Hunt is zooming up the Netflix UK charts. Has the movie lost its edgy reputation, or is that what's drawing the new crop of viewers?

First, we have to go back to the start. Blumhouse announced The Hunt back in the spring of 2018, having acquired a script by Nick Cuse and high-concept TV veteran and Lost creator Damon Lindelof. The film went in front of cameras at the beginning of 2019 and inked a September 2019 release date. In a fraught political climate, Blumhouse and Universal Pictures had a button-pushing thriller on their hands with, as they saw it, great potential. But they can't have realised just how many buttons it would push.

In August 2019, The Hunt became a newspaper sensation. The first trailer for the film had landed the previous month, introducing the concept of "elites" kidnapping "normal folks" and hunting them for sport in an annual game. This, in and of itself, wasn't a new idea. Richard Connell's short story The Most Dangerous Game was published all the way back in 1924 and The Purge: Anarchy had done something similar as recently as 2014.

Events forced the studio's hand this time, though. Two horrific mass shootings within days of each other in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas saw Universal take the decision to pull advertising for the film and yank it from the release calendar in an entirely understandable move. But this wasn't the end of the story.

Read more: The Hunt writer defends controversial film as Universal sets new release date (Yahoo Entertainment, 4 min read)

In a pair of tweets, then-president Donald Trump — without explicitly naming The Hunt — waded into what had then become a major debate about the film's content. He wrote on X: "Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves 'Elite', but they are not Elite. In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite.

"The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!"

Around this time, it was being reported that the film told the story of wealthy, liberal elites hunting down "deplorables" — a reference to a common term for Trump supporters. One story, which was denied by Universal, even claimed the film was once called Red State vs. Blue State and was poorly received at test screenings. Zobel said the movie was about partisanship and how "rush to judgment is one of the most relevant problems of our time", rather than targeting either end of the political spectrum.

Read more: Donald Trump blasts ‘fake and classless’ biopic The Apprentice (BANG Showbiz, 2 min read)

Between constant negative discussion on Fox News and those tweets from the White House, Universal decided to put The Hunt on the back-burner. At that time, Zobel told Variety he supported the decision to delay the film after the shootings and the swirling controversy.

"In the wake of these horrific events [in Dayton and El Paso], we immediately considered what it meant for the timing of our film," he said. "Once inaccurate assumptions about the content and intent of the movie began to take hold, I supported the decision to move the film off its release date."

Six months later, The Hunt resurfaced. Universal announced a March 2020 release and launched a marketing campaign with a tagline that tackled the controversy head-on. "The most talked about movie of the year is one that no one's actually seen... decide for yourself," said the poster. Jason Blum, meanwhile, said no concessions had been made in terms of the film's boundary-pushing content. “Not one frame was changed,” he told the New York Times. “This is exactly the same movie.”

Read more: I Just Learned Why Horror Movies Make So Much Money And I Had No Clue (HuffPost, 2 min read)

Promoting the film in an interview with The Guardian, Zobel said he never wanted the controversy. "The film was supposed to be an absurd satire and was not supposed to be serious and boring and I felt that the conversation immediately got serious and boring,” he said.

The Hunt arrived to a fairly middling crop of reviews — it currently sits at a 57% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and saw one last hurdle in its way. Just as it debuted, multiplexes began to shut their doors under COVID restrictions. Much of its $12.4m (£9.8m) worldwide gross came from drive-in cinemas.

Ultimately, the controversy over The Hunt fizzled out in the wake of a much more pressing threat to humanity. Politics was trumped by the most devastating public health event in a century. It's now down to audiences to discover the film and decide whether it actually deserved to be as much of a lightning rod as it was. For my money, its desperation to avoid taking a political side actually robbed it of any teeth it might have otherwise possessed.

As for its most vocal critic, Zobel actually told The Guardian that he thought Trump "might like the movie" if he took the time to watch it. He said: "I’m proud of the action scenes in the movie. If he wants to just watch the action scenes, I’m fine with that.”

The Hunt is streaming now on Netflix UK.