The Amateur Finds Its Audience on Prime Video Over a Year Later

There is a long and instructive history of films that underperformed at the box office only to discover their true audience on home video or streaming — The Shawshank Redemption being perhaps the most celebrated example. Rami Malek's The Amateur may not reach those mythological heights, but its trajectory on Prime Video suggests that the 2025 spy thriller was genuinely ahead of where theatrical audiences were willing to meet it. Now, more than a year after its initial release, the film is quietly having a moment.

A Post-Oscar Career That Has Defied Easy Definition

Winning an Academy Award for Best Actor is supposed to unlock doors, but the architecture of Hollywood stardom is rarely that straightforward. Malek's Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody — which grossed over $900 million worldwide — made him an undeniable awards presence, but converting that into consistent box-office leverage has proven more complicated. He played the villain opposite Daniel Craig in No Time to Die and appeared in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer as a nuclear physicist, roles that benefited enormously from franchise momentum and directorial prestige respectively. His lead work in David O. Russell's Amsterdam, however, barely cleared $30 million globally despite an ensemble cast of considerable wattage. The pattern suggests an actor whose talent is rarely in question but whose commercial profile remains genuinely difficult to categorize — which, in many ways, makes The Amateur such an interesting case study.

What the Film Actually Gets Right

Adapted from Robert Littell's 1981 novel, The Amateur centers on Charlie Heller, a cerebral CIA cryptographer who is very much not a field operative. When his wife, played by Rachel Brosnahan, is killed in a terrorist attack in London, and his superiors decline to pursue justice, he leverages sensitive intelligence to blackmail the agency into funding his own mission of revenge. The film's central conceit — an intellectually formidable but physically unremarkable man forced to improvise his way through tradecraft — is a refreshing inversion of the Liam Neeson model, where competence is taken as a given from frame one. Malek's particular brand of coiled, watchful intensity, honed across years of Mr. Robot, suits the premise well. Charlie is someone who thinks faster than he moves, and the film constructs its set pieces accordingly. It is a clever structural choice, even if theatrical audiences weren't entirely won over at the time.

Streaming Is Rewriting the Film's Narrative

According to Polygon, The Amateur is currently sitting at No. 2 on Prime Video in the United States, with FlixPatrol data showing it has now spent 21 days inside the platform's top 10. That kind of sustained performance, rather than a one-week spike, indicates genuine word-of-mouth momentum — the sort of organic discovery that streaming platforms are uniquely positioned to facilitate. It is a similar phenomenon to what we've seen with other titles that found new life after theatrical exits, including Hugh Jackman's The Sheep Detectives becoming a Prime Video hit after its own theatrical window closed.

What Comes Next for Malek

Interestingly, Malek himself has already pivoted toward work that sits at the opposite end of the tonal spectrum. He stars in Ira Sachs' The Man I Love, a musical fantasy set in late-1980s New York — a film that premiered at Cannes and in which Malek plays Jimmy George, a performance artist living with AIDS, alongside Tom Sturridge, Rebecca Hall, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. It is exactly the kind of formally ambitious, auteur-driven project that speaks to where Malek's artistic instincts tend to pull him, even as he continues to be spotted navigating his public life with characteristic low-key discretion.

Whether The Amateur's streaming success is enough to convince a studio to hand Malek another action vehicle remains an open question. What it does confirm is that the film's theatrical misfortune was not a verdict on the material itself — only on the timing of its delivery.

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