It’s hard to keep a David Fincher film quiet. Since making the jump from ads and music videos to feature films with Alien 3, the director has been continually attached to high-profile projects with big-name stars, screenwriters, and/or source materials. Given all that, it’s remarkable how Fincher’s 1997 thriller The Game has managed to stay relatively under the radar, especially in the streaming era, when it’s not as available as his Netflix projects and seems like less of a Blu-ray library fixture than Fincher’s other movies of the ’90s. That’s why The Game’s recent arrival on Peacock, where it’s currently streaming, is kind of a big deal.
Among those early Fincher films, The Game is arguably the second-most-successful by traditional metrics, outdone only by his seminal 1995 horror film Seven. It was precisely the surprise success of Seven that dwarfed Fincher’s immediate follow-up, even though The Game made more money than Fight Club and was much better-received than Alien 3. The movie might have also suffered by its ability to truly blend into its environment. While Seven and Fight Club read as ’90s movies in ostentatious, grunge-adjacent ways that take advantage of Fincher’s stylish music-video background, The Game is more genuinely evocative of the time period. After all, it’s a vaguely Hitchcockian Michael Douglas thriller that came out in between other vaguely Hitchcockian Michael Douglas thrillers like Disclosure and A Perfect Murder (the latter an actual remake of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder). These movies attempted to bring the Douglas audiences knew from era-defining films like Wall Street and Fatal Attraction into respectable Baby Boomer middle age.
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