Published Sep 27, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT
Chris is a Senior News Writer for Collider. He can be found in an IMAX screen, with his eyes watering and his ears bleeding for his own pleasure. He joined the news team in 2022 and accidentally fell upwards into a senior position despite his best efforts.
For reasons unknown, he enjoys analyzing box office receipts, giant sharks, and has become known as the go-to man for all things Bosch, Mission: Impossible and Christopher Nolan in Collider’s news division. Recently, he found himself yeehawing along to the Dutton saga on the Yellowstone Ranch.
He is proficient in sarcasm, wit, Photoshop and working unfeasibly long hours. Amongst his passions sit the likes of the history of the Walt Disney Company, the construction of theme parks, steam trains and binge-watching Gilmore Girls with a coffee that is just hot enough to scald him.
His obsession with the Apple TV+ series Silo is the subject of mockery within the Senior News channel, where his feelings about Taylor Sheridan’s work are enough to make his fellow writers roll their eyes.
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Jason Statham has faced plenty of foes: hackers, mutineers, traffickers, mafia bosses, and more. But his biggest foe to date has been, well, quite literally enormous. And when you discover that there’s a 75-foot enemy hunting you from the deep, what’s the best ploy? Closing the beach seems sensible. You’ve seen Jaws, you know how it works. Staying on dry land feels even better. Not for the Stath.
Statham (The Beekeeper) stars in The Meg, which officially found a new streaming home last week when the sci-fi monster movie landed on HBO Max in the United States. Jon Turteltaub’s (National Treasure) gloriously silly 2018 blockbuster became a much bigger hit than anyone expected, eventually earning more than $530 million worldwide and spawning a sequel.
In The Meg, a massive creature attacks a deep-sea submersible, leaving it disabled and trapping the crew at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. With time running out, rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) must save the crew and the ocean itself from an unimaginable threat: a 75-foot-long prehistoric shark known as the megalodon.
The cast also features Li Bingbing (Transformers: Age of Extinction) as Suyin Zhang, Rainn Wilson (The Office) as Jack Morris, Ruby Rose (Orange Is the New Black) as Jaxx Herd, Cliff Curtis (Avatar: The Way of Water) as James “Mac” Mackreides, Winston Chao (The Wedding Banquet) as Dr. Minway Zhang, Page Kennedy (Rush Hour) as DJ, and Jessica McNamee (Mortal Kombat) as Lori.
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Okay, so nobody was expecting “Jason Statham, Shark Puncher” to be a critical hit, let’s be honest. And the reaction from critics reflects this, with the movie currently sitting at 46% on Rotten Tomatoes. But judging it on a scale of anything other than, well, Statham punching a shark seems silly, and audiences certainly understood the assignment. **The Meg opened at No. 1 domestically **before swimming all the way to approximately $530 million worldwide, including roughly $155 million in North America and another $155 million from China. It became the highest-grossing Chinese-American co-production at the time and comfortably earned itself another encounter with prehistoric sea life.
That sequel, Meg 2: The Trench, followed in 2023 with Statham returning as Jonas. It added more giant sharks and even more prehistoric monsters because, apparently, the lesson from the first movie was that one megalodon simply isn’t enough. The Meg is streaming now on HBO Max in the United States.
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Science Fiction
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