M. Night Shyamalan Sci-Fi Thriller With Dylan O’Brien Is A Huge Hit On Max

It’s been a busy year for M. Night Shyamalan. This summer, he dropped the wildly entertaining (and wildly silly) concert-set serial killer thriller “Trap,” starring Josh Hartnett and Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka. The “Sixth Sense” director has several other projects in the works, but he’s also been branching out as a producer, producing Ishana Shyamalan’s “The Watchers” earlier this year and “Caddo Lake,” co-directed by Logan George and Celine Held, this month. It’s the latter film that’s been climbing the streaming charts this week, with the latest viewership data from FlixPatrol listing it as the most-watched movie on HBO, home to the streaming site Max.

According to the data site, “Caddo Lake” is the most popular movie on HBO today, outpacing Gary Dauberman’s long-anticipated “Salem’s Lot” remake and some 2024 theatrical releases, including Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s “Bad Boys: Ride Or Die,” Mark Wahlberg’s inspirational stray dog flick “Arthur The King,” and the Liam Hemsworth-led action movie “Land of Bad.” The trippy, Shyamalan-produced thriller has the benefit of having only recently hit the streamer — “Caddo Lake” dropped on October 10, 2024, and didn’t get a theatrical release — but it also no doubt has what I like to call the “Dylan O’Brien Advantage.”

O’Brien is a great actor, and he’s been popular ever since his breakout role in the “Teen Wolf” series. The actor’s turn in the “Maze Runner” trilogy may not be talked about enough these days, but the three movies made close to a billion dollars total at the global box office (per The Numbers), and are an underrated part of the 2010s’ dystopian film trend. O’Brien slowed down his workload after surviving a terrible accident while filming “Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” but nearly everything he’s made since has still found a loyal (if not always sizable) audience.

In “Caddo Lake,” O’Brien stars as Paris, a man living in Texas who’s still reeling from the loss of his mother. When the young stepsister of a local girl (Eliza Scanlen, back on an HBO-adjacent project after killing it in “Sharp Objects” several years ago) goes missing, Paris and Scanlen’s Ellie both set out to find her, and discover that the freaky swamplands near their rural Texas homes have secrets of their own. While O’Brien is an underrated actor with a strong following, Shyamalan’s ties to the film no doubt give it a wide appeal, too. The trailer for “Caddo Lake” shows that some truly strange stuff is going on in the titular body of water, and while it’s not immediately clear whether the story will resolve with a purely science fiction angle or a metaphysical one, it’s all intriguingly Shyamalan-esque nonetheless.

Interestingly, “Caddo Lake” marks one of the first times Shyamalan has ever worked as a producer on a project that he — or more recently, one of his kids — didn’t direct personally. In 2010, he produced the elevator-set horror movie “Devil,” directed by John Erick Dowdle, and he continued executive producing Chad Hodge’s mystery series “Wayward Pines” after directing the pilot episode. The filmmaker rarely puts his personal stamp of approval on others’ projects in the form of a producer credit, so his name means something for people who might be on the fence about watching “Caddo Lake.” The movie also appears to be a bit less polarizing than some of Shyamalan’s own works: it currently holds a 79% fresh rating on critical aggregate Rotten Tomatoes.

“Caddo Lake” is now on Max.