Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Netflix movie Animals.
Some viewers may feel they have seen a story like Animals before. The new Ben Affleck Netflix thriller follows a familiar-looking premise, but it takes that setup into darker territory.
Affleck directs the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray. He plays Mark, a wealthy attorney mounting an independent campaign to become Los Angeles’ next mayor. Although Mark is running without a political party behind him, his personal life is far from clean. After his son is abducted, the crisis exposes the man beneath his polished public image and brings the deeply buried secrets of his marriage to light. Kerry Washington plays his wife.
The Animals cast also features Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz, Luis Gerardo Méndez and Steven Yeun. Affleck initially hoped to make the movie with longtime friend Matt Damon and his former wife, Jennifer Garner, but those plans did not come together. Given the movie’s kidnapping storyline, it is understandable that audiences may wonder whether Animals is based on real events. The answer is no.
Is Netflix’s Animals movie based on a true story?
The 2026 film Animals is fictional. Its characters and central story were created for the movie rather than drawn from actual people or events.
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However, the film shares a major story element with Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom. The book centers on wealthy businessman Douglas King, who is prepared to pay whatever is necessary to rescue his kidnapped son. Then the boy returns home unharmed, and King discovers that the abductors have taken someone else’s child. He must decide whether he is still willing to pay the ransom for a family with no connection to him.
McBain’s novel later inspired Akira Kurosawa’s acclaimed 1963 film High and Low, as well as Spike Lee’s contemporary remake, Highest 2 Lowest. That connection nearly stopped Affleck’s movie from moving forward. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the filmmaker said he abandoned Animals just two weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin after learning about Lee’s kidnapping drama.
“We get very close to shooting, and then somebody said to me, ‘Hey, you know, there’s this other movie that Spike [Lee] and Denzel [Washington] are doing that’s about a kidnapping,’” Affleck recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’”
Affleck apparently had not watched Kurosawa’s High and Low, and he does not view Animals as another direct adaptation of McBain’s King’s Ransom. Instead, he has described the Netflix movie as an original work.
“What I’m really interested in is something wholly apart from, I think, what these other movies are dealing with,” Affleck told Entertainment Weekly, speaking about High and Low and Highest 2 Lowest. He added that, based on his understanding of those films, Animals is different enough to be evaluated on its own merits.