Netflix has another true-crime obsession on its hands. ‘Unabomber,’ a feature dramatizing the life of Ted Kaczynski, shot to the top of the streamer’s global movie chart within days of its Sept. 25 debut. By the weekend it was the most-watched film on Netflix in most countries where the service operates, according to the tracking site FlixPatrol, turning a grim subject into the platform’s dominant title of the moment.
The film, directed by Janus Metz, splits its story across two timelines. One follows a teenage Kaczynski, played by Jacob Tremblay, as a Harvard math prodigy pulled into abusive, CIA-funded psychological experiments in the 1950s. The other tracks the 1990s manhunt that finally caught him, led by an FBI agent played by Shailene Woodley. Russell Crowe co-stars as Professor Henry Murray, the academic who runs the experiments, with Annabelle Wallis as his collaborator Christiana Morgan.
Tremblay said the dual nature of the character drew him in. “I did really enjoy playing a young Ted and an innocent take on this domestic terrorist,” the actor said. Metz described the bond between the student and his mentor as the dark engine of the story. “Murray is seductive and charismatic, and as Ted starts to see him as a father figure, he discards his real parents,” the director said, framing the experiments as the wound the rest of the film flows from.
Behind the camera, the production leaned on seasoned talent. Marco Beltrami wrote the score, and Oscar winner Zach Staenberg handled the edit. The R-rated drama was shot in and around Montreal over roughly six weeks in the summer of 2025, and it was written by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves. The result is a character study that spends as much time on the making of a bomber as on the chase to stop him.
The quick rise fits a familiar pattern for Netflix, where stories about real killers and the systems that failed to catch them reliably draw enormous audiences. Releasing ‘Unabomber’ as a single film rather than a limited series gave viewers a self-contained watch they could finish in a night, which likely helped it spread. Whether the movie deepens the debate around Kaczynski or simply feeds the endless appetite for true crime, it has already done what Netflix wanted, which is to own the conversation for a week.
