With a 7.7/10 rating on IMDb and an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, The Lincoln Lawyer TV show started airing on Netflix in 2022 and has been booming ever since. Many don’t know that the concept started as a novel of the same name written by Michael Connelly in 2005. The usual trend is that the book is the most successful, followed by the film and then the series. But somehow Netflix managed to swap the last two around, making the Lincoln Lawyer TV show more successful than its film adaptation.
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The Movie
Directed by Brad Furman, The Lincoln Lawyer stars Matthew McConaughey in the lead role of Mick “Mickey” Haller, a defence lawyer who works out of his Lincoln Town car, hence where the book, film, and series go their name. In the film, Mick is asked to defend a wealthy realtor accused of assaulting a prostitute. Still, the plot thickens when Haller realises that his client might have more skeletons in his closet than he initially thought.
The film was successful, garnering a 7.3 rating on IMDb and an even better 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and grossing up to $87 million, making it a pretty good success.
The Lincoln Lawyer (2022-present)
Now, 11 years later (going on 12 currently), The Lincoln Lawyer has returned in the form of a successful TV show on Netflix. This time, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo takes on the prominent role of Mickey Haller, who we see has taken a break from the legal world after an accident that left him addicted to prescription painkillers. After dealing with his addiction, he returns to Law after his former partner, Jerry Vincent, is murdered, and Haller inherits his practice. Not all is as it seems, as Haller continues his former partner’s work, and whoever killed Jerry might have found a new target.
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The series has been highly successful up to the present, with a 7.7 rating on IMDb and an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Now I know what you might be thinking: the ratings seem pretty similar, so it’s hard to say that the series is more successful than the movie…or is it?
In 2023, the movie has all but been forgotten. You might think that this is just the fault of time or that the series is more recent, but it might just be that the TV show is just…better.
According to Yahoo! News, The Lincoln Lawyer is currently the most popular show streaming on Netflix. Critics suspect that the reason for the popularity and success of the TV show compared to the film adaptation is that the story isn’t just rinsed and repeated. Instead of rebooting what the world had already seen in the film, the Netflix TV show creators decided to continue the story.
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The film and the show are based on the novel. Still, the Netflix adaptation started its story with the events of the second book in the series, The Brass Verdict (2008), meaning that fans of the book and the original film got to see what would happen next. With the TV show continuing as one of the most popular series on Netflix, fans are excited to see where the story will take them next.
Do you think the Lincoln Lawyer Netflix TV show is more successful than the film adaptation?
Sources: Hello Magazine, yahoo!news, RogerEbert.com