Film alum Jeremy Robbins '13 wrote Apex—a lean action film starring Charlize Theron as a wilderness climber and kayaker hunted by a single-minded killer (Taron Egerton) in the Australian outback—because he wanted to watch it.
Robbins began writing Apex during the pandemic, after writers' rooms had closed down. A pared-back, '90s-style thriller that lets the action speak for itself, Robbins modeled Apex after the action films that made him fall in love with cinema: A River Wild, The Edge, Deliverance. Hard work, years of patience, and an unexpected stroke of luck landed Robbins's original film in the hands of Netflix as a rare spec sale years after he wrote it. Between the thriller's April 24 release date and the first weeks of May, 2026, the film climbed its way to the number one spot on Netflix's English film list and hung on there for two weeks.
Action hero Theron—who continued to perform her own stunts through the film's publicity, even scaling a Times Square billboard—brought a grizzled edge to the cat-and-mouse dynamic of the characters. "This is less the story of a woman lost in the wilderness and learning how to fight back than a wearied adventurer facing off against a hunter," said Brandon Yu in a review for The New York Times.
"I probably broke every screenwriting rule that I was ever taught in film school," Robbins told Jack Giroux in an interview for What's on Netflix. Breaking down the film, visually, to its most essential parts—man vs. woman vs. nature—Robbins thought in terms of choreography, editing, and shots.
Robbins's turn to the survival thriller during the pandemic was no coincidence. "At that time, we were watching life and death in this terrifying way, and I found the survival story really hopeful," Robbins told Giroux. "It was a really hopeful [story] of resilience and what is possible if you really, really want something really badly."
So is Robbins's story of producing Apex, now streaming on Netflix.
