Prime Video's 118-Minute Post-Apocalyptic Thriller That's #1 Does What Netflix Failed To Do

Published Nov 7, 2026, 10:32 AM EST

Felipe Rangel is a Movie and TV Journalist ScreenRant. He has been writing about movies and TV since 2021. Felipe joined ScreenRant in 2022, working across different teams, covering everything from breaking news to features to reviews and more.

Felipe is a writer who is an avid film and TV fan, with superhero movies and series being his biggest passion. He graduated from college in 2019, having studied Journalism. Before college, he spent a month studying at the Oxford English Centre. His superhero knowledge expands to the comics, with his undergraduate thesis being "Politics Reflected In American Comics."

Prime Video has a new post-apocalyptic thriller that has quickly become one of the most popular movies in the world, and it does something that Netflix tried to accomplish with the genre, but could not follow through. Prime Video's movie slate is packed with releases of different genres, with many original films finding global success in 2026 so far, particularly in the romance department.

After all, the streamer has released movies like The Love Hypothesis and Love of Your Life this year, both of which went on to become global streaming hits. That said, Prime Video's successful offerings in 2026 extend beyond the romance genre, and it is through a foreign movie that the streamer has managed to tap into the popular post-apocalyptic genre, which other streaming services have had a lot of success with.

For instance, HBO Max is the home of one of the genre's biggest TV shows ever, Pedro Pascal's The Last of Us, which adapts the famous video game franchise of the same name. AMC+ is the home of The Walking Dead franchise, which made the whole world enter a zombie phase starting in 2010. Interestingly, Prime Video's new original movie taps right into that corner of the post-apocalyptic genre.

At the time of writing, Apocalypse Z: New World stands as the most popular movie on Prime Video worldwide, according to data from FlixPatrol, leaving behind films like Drive - The Pretenders, Love of Your Life, multiple Harry Potter movies, and more. Apocalypse Z: New World's streaming success right after its October 30 debut on Prime Video cements how the streamer beat Netflix in one way.

Why Apocalypse Z: New World Has Been Such A Big Hit On Prime Video

Apocalypse Z: New World's streaming success boils down to a few factors, with one of the most important being that Prime Video subscribers have already shown over the years that they are interested in post-apocalyptic stories. After all, Fallout has become one of the biggest Prime Video TV shows of all time, following characters like Ella Purnell's Lucy and Walton Goggins' The Ghoul in a barren wasteland after a nuclear holocaust. As for the genre's grip on the streamer when it comes to movies, another sci-fi take on the apocalyptic concept comes from Chris Pratt's The Tomorrow War, a hit movie where aliens are decimating humans in the future.

Apocalypse Z: New World also taps more specifically into the zombie niche of the post-apocalyptic genre, and we all know how these types of stories have proven immensely popular over the years, with streaming playing a role in that. While The Walking Dead might have ended, its many spin-offs are divided across different streaming services worldwide for international distribution, becoming regional hits across the globe.

Choose the movie with the higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

The Last of Us, albeit not a full-on zombie series, has also kept it at the forefront of peoples' minds. Finally, Prime Video's Apocalypse Z: New World is an intense zombie thriller in its own right, proving itself an engaging action movie with many intricate and grand set pieces, big zombie hordes, and a couple of twists.

Apocalypse Z Gives Prime Video The Zombie Franchise Netflix Failed At

Apocalypse Z: New World cements a successful Prime Video zombie franchise, as it is not an original movie, but a sequel to another Spanish zombie thriller, 2024's Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End, which has begun to trend again on the streamer, ranking 9th worldwide at the time of writing, according to FlixPatrol. As such, Prime Video has been able to not only craft a successful zombie movie franchise for itself, but also done exactly what Netflix tried to accomplish years ago, but did not manage to make it work.

Netflix tried to get its own zombie movie franchise off the ground through the release of Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead in 2021, but with a suboptimal reception to the film, and the failure of Snyder's ambitious Rebel Moon sci-fi franchise at the streamer, Netflix reportedly scrapped plans for any Army of the Dead sequels, an animated prequel, and more, according to The Wrap (via What's on Netflix). With its zombie sequel achieving global domination, Prime Video has done what Netflix couldn't, and Apocalypse Z: New World could pave the road for more sequels in the zombie franchise.