Netflix's Apex fuels Hollywood's obsession with Australia's deadly outback

Netflix's Apex arrived in late April and moved through the streaming service like a dust storm. Within weeks, the film had accumulated 2.54 billion minutes of viewing time and claimed the number one spot on Netflix's Global Top 10 English movies list. The action thriller, starring Charlize Theron alongside Welsh actor Taron Egerton and Australian Eric Bana, tells the story of a woman grieving in the wilderness who becomes trapped in a predatory game with a serial killer. It is, by any measure, a major hit. Yet what makes Apex notable is not merely its viewership but what it represents: the latest evidence of Hollywood's deepening fascination with Australia's outback as a setting for stories about danger, isolation, and the particular terror that comes from other people.

Director Baltasar Kormákur originally wrote the script with an American setting in mind. The shift to Australia came down to practical necessity—the production needed a warm climate at a specific time of year. But the choice reveals something deeper about how filmmakers now think about the Australian landscape. The outback has become a character itself, a place where the wilderness is less threatening than what humans do within it. This is not new. The pattern runs through decades of cinema, from international productions to homegrown Australian films, across genres from horror to revisionist Westerns to historical drama.

Take Rabbit-Proof Fence, released in 2002, which opened many viewers' eyes to the Stolen Generations and the machinery of state power that separated Indigenous children from their families. Or Road Games from 1981, where director Richard Franklin drew inspiration from Hitchcock's Rear Window to craft a cross-country thriller featuring American stars Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis encountering a serial killer on the long stretch across the Nullarbor. In Quigley Down Under, Tom Selleck's character confronts a landowner played by Alan Rickman who has hired a gunman to exterminate the local Indigenous population. The message is consistent: the most dangerous creatures in the outback wear human skin.

The landscape itself has starred in stranger stories. Razorback, a 1984 film by Russell Mulcahy, centers on a wild pig terrorizing the region—a creature so absurd and over-the-top that it becomes almost funny, shot with visual flair by future Oscar-winner Dean Semler. Walkabout, Nicolas Roeg's 1971 film, follows two English children wandering the outback in school uniforms until rescued by an Indigenous man in his film debut. Evil Angels, based on the Chamberlain case from 1980 when a dingo took a baby at Uluru, became one of Australia's most famous legal stories, transformed into cinema by director Fred Schepisi. Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir's 1975 masterpiece, offers no explanation for why four schoolgirls vanish during an outing—the mystery remains unsolved even in the novel's later chapters.

But the films that have most shaped the world's anxiety about the Australian outback are the ones that weaponize human violence. Wolf Creek, released in 2004 and inspired partly by real killers Ivan Milat and Bradley Murdoch, became so effective at depicting brutality that it may have deterred tourists from visiting Australia more than any other film. John Jarratt's character, Mick Taylor, became legendary—though the film itself, with its graphic depiction of suffering, reads as torture cinema. Wake in Fright, from 1971 and often called the greatest Australian film ever made, tells of a city teacher at an isolated outback school who stays overnight in a town resembling Broken Hill, hoping to win enough at a two-up game to escape his contract. Instead, he confronts his own demons and the locals who introduce him to the outback's horrors, including a notorious kangaroo shoot. The film was retitled Outback for international release.

What connects these films—from Burke & Wills, the 1985 account of two ill-prepared explorers who died of thirst crossing the continent, to Apex's contemporary thriller—is a shared conviction that the outback reveals something true about human nature. The landscape is vast and unforgiving, yes. But the real danger emerges from what people do to each other when civilization falls away. This is the obsession that keeps drawing filmmakers back: not the wildlife or the heat or the distance, but the question of what happens when humans are left alone with their worst impulses. Apex, with its 2.54 billion minutes watched, suggests that appetite shows no sign of diminishing.