I don't think it was a terrible movie.
Discover reviews, ratings, and trailers for Bright on Rotten Tomatoes. Stay updated with critic and audience scores today!
www.rottentomatoes.com
Set in an alternate present-day where humans, orcs, elves, and fairies have been co-existing since the beginning of time. Bright is genre-bending action movie that follows two cops from very different backgrounds. Ward (Will Smith) and Jakoby (Joel Edgerton), embark on a routine patrol night and...
www.metacritic.com
By any reasonable critical standard, it's a really,
really bad movie. Godawful writing that's clumsy and extremely lazy on multiple levels, terrible pacing, not-great action scenes, Joel Edgerton really miscast (and not the only one), dumb as a box full of rocks, and it's even visually ugly thanks to the colour filtering and the mediocre cinematography. That doesn't mean it doesn't have fans. There are no major movies so bad they don't have fans. Even the recent car-crash that was The Rise of Skywalker has defenders.
One review said: "Bright is dedicated to using promising ideas in the least imaginative ways possible." and that is absolutely spot-on. It's like if you told someone kind of thick and unimaginative, who really loves cliches and stereotypes, really sees the world solely through cliches and stereotypes, about Shadowrun, after he'd been watching mediocre LA-set action movies whilst drunk, he might come up with this.
Honestly Bright is easily the most disappointingly awful movie I've ever seen. How do you waste Will Smith that badly in a buddy-cop action movie? How is that even possible? I've seen plenty of bad movies but none just as soul-destroying as Bright. I heard it was bad before watching it, but I didn't believe it, obviously critics were just "not getting it". Then I saw it...
EDIT - Funnily enough I think it did pretty well by Netflix movie standards. I mean, it was decent-budget buddy-cop movie starring Will Smith. So huge numbers of people (including me) saw it despite terrible reviews. I'm sure the cost of the script was relatively minor next to say, Mr Smith's fee. It's obviously not justifiable relative to the cost of other scripts, but that's kind of besides the point. It was good enough by the standards of the day that there was supposed to be a sequel. However, that didn't start shooting when it was supposed to (late 2020, so a couple of years ago), and indeed, last we heard, the script was still in development hell, so I wouldn't hold your breath.