Netflix is banking on Chris Hemsworth to bring millions more eyeballs to the streaming giant in Spiderhead, a dystopian prison thriller helmed by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski.
When Hemsworth isn’t swinging his mighty hammer in Marvel’s Thor movies, he’s laying waste in baddies in straight-to-Netflix actioners like Extraction, which was named the streamer’s most-watched original movie ever back in 2020.
In Spiderhead, Hemsworth plays a twisted pharmaceutical genius named Steve Abnesti, who runs experimental tests on prisoners in exchange for shortening their sentences.
Based on the George Saunders short story “Escape From Spiderhead,” the film also stars Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollet as prisoners in love who rebel against Steve at Spiderhead penitentiary.
“Beautiful people get away with too much,” Hemsworth’s character says in the trailer. “I say that having benefited myself from time to time.”
Here’s Netflix’s official plot synopsis:
In a state-of-the-art penitentiary run by brilliant visionary Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth), inmates wear a surgically attached device that administers dosages of mind-altering drugs in exchange for commuted sentences. There are no bars, no cells, or orange jumpsuits. In Spiderhead, incarcerated volunteers are free to be themselves. Until they’re not. At times, they’re a better version. Need to lighten up? There’s a drug for that. At a loss for words? There’s a drug for that, too.
But when two subjects, Jeff (Miles Teller) and Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), form a connection, their path to redemption take a twistier turn, as Abnesti’s experiments start to push the limits of free will altogether. Based on The New Yorker short story by George Saunders, SPIDERHEAD is a genre-bending and darkly funny psychological thriller directed by Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy, Top Gun: Maverick) and written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Deadpool, Zombieland).
Spiderhead streams exclusively on Netflix beginning June 17. Watch the first trailer above.