'Motor City,' Potsy Ponciroli's 103-minute revenge thriller starring Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster and Pablo Schreiber, made its subscription streaming debut on AMC+ on November 6 and immediately became the sixth most popular title on the platform, according to MovieWeb.

Ritchson plays John Miller, a Detroit autoworker who falls for the girlfriend of a local crime boss, is framed and imprisoned, then escapes to wage a bloody revenge mission.

MovieWeb reports the film earned just over $3 million at the global box office, yet topped the digital purchase charts on both the Amazon Store and the Apple TV Store months earlier.

This is an action movie built around the texture of 1970s Detroit — the blue-collar autoworker hero, era-specific needle drops feeding a jukebox with Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, the Moody Blues, Bill Withers and Foxy, and big American metal on screen, including an opening sequence where Ritchson drops a body onto a massive Big Three sedan.

Yahoo notes the film was reportedly shot in New Jersey and Saudi Arabia rather than Michigan, with obviously fake streets outside the Fox Theatre, and that the soundtrack pointedly ignores the Stooges, Motown and Alice Cooper.

Yahoo's critic even argues a fetishy shot of a 1973 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron would have gone over smashingly.

The reversal here is that a movie with almost no dialogue — a risky, experimental choice that critics say left theatrical audiences cold — is finding its audience at home.

Yahoo describes the film as an entertaining riff on revenge tropes: Martin Scorsese's Rambo funneled through modern John Wick-style aesthetics, where violence is the loudest language spoken and the soundtrack's lyrics carry the story's nuance.

Both outlets frame it as a second chance for an underrated film. MovieWeb calls it destined to become a cult classic now that it has a streaming home, and Yahoo's bottom line is simply: fun enough, stream it.

The streaming surge underscores an odd pattern MovieWeb lays out: Ritchson can pull millions of viewers on streaming — he led one of Netflix's biggest movies ever this year with 'War Machine' — yet his theatrical vehicles keep flopping, from 'The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare' to this one.

The supporting cast, including 'Hell or High Water' star Ben Foster, 'Divergent' lead Shailene Woodley, 'The Bear' star Lionel Boyce, 'Den of Thieves' veteran Pablo Schreiber and Amar Chadha-Patel, should have helped on the big screen, MovieWeb notes.

For now, 'Motor City' sits in AMC+'s top ten alongside YAGA, Kill Jackie and The Cycle, giving the 2025 release fresh momentum.