The cast shot the whole film in 15 days. Fixing it up took two years.
That lopsided schedule explains a lot about War of the Worlds, the screenlife version of H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel that landed on Amazon Prime Video on July 30, 2025. Producer Patrick Aiello said the budget came in under $10 million. Ice Cube shot his scenes alone, in isolation during the 2020 lockdown, and said “this was the only way.”
A pandemic project
Ice Cube signed on in September 2020. Eva Longoria followed in October, and Universal greenlit the film that month and fast-tracked it into production. Director Rich Lee and the cast worked from separate, individually equipped workspaces, which suited a pandemic-era industry. Universal liked the pitch from Timur Bekmambetov’s side: the look of an event movie at the cost of a contained thriller.
It was a theatrical project at first. Amazon later acquired it, and Aiello said that is why the script includes an Amazon delivery driver. The studio behind the technique, Bekmambetov’s Bazelevs, earlier made Unfriended and Searching. By April 2024 it had emerged that the film was a Wells adaptation. Kenneth A. Golde and Marc Hyman wrote the screenplay, and Jon Natchez composed the score.
How it compares
Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version cost roughly $132 million. The 1953 film was made for about $2 million. The 2025 picture is the cheapest major screen take on the novel, and it skipped theaters entirely, so there are no box office numbers. Amazon does not release viewership figures for Prime Video titles either.
The reviews were brutal. Rotten Tomatoes showed 4% positive from 50 critics, and the film later took the No. 76 spot on the site’s list of the 100 worst movies. The 46th Golden Raspberry Awards gave it five wins, among them Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Actor.
Bekmambetov shrugged it off: “I’ll take three weeks at number one at Amazon Prime over a good review any day.”
