Before Netflix turned it into a franchise, Code 8 was a ten-minute short and an Indiegogo campaign: a Canadian superhero film that swaps capes and skylines for day labour, drug money and police drones.

Code 8 is a 2019 Canadian superhero film directed by Jeff Chan and led by the cousins Robbie Amell and Stephen Amell, and its starting point is a reversal of the usual fantasy. In its world, roughly four per cent of people are born with abilities, and instead of turning them into billionaires in armour, those abilities have pushed most of them to the bottom of the labour market, under the eye of a police force that has armed itself to match.

The film did not come out of a studio development slate. It began as a short of the same name that the Amells released online in 2016 as a calling card for a feature, alongside a crowdfunding campaign that ended up raising millions from tens of thousands of contributors. That origin shapes almost everything about the project: its scale, its Toronto production, and the decision to keep the superpowers working-class.

A city built by Powers, then closed to them

The backstory is laid out with some care. In the early 20th century the public learns that some people have superhuman abilities, known as Powers, and the government responds with a law that obliges every one of them to register. For a while Powers are central to the workforce; they are credited with building Lincoln City, marketed as the city of tomorrow. Then automation and mechanisation arrive, and the same people who poured the concrete are surplus.

By the time the story opens, a crime syndicate called the Trust has flooded the streets with Psyke, an addictive drug made from the spinal fluid of trafficked Powers. The police answer with drone-deployed robots, known as Guardians, and facial recognition software, while the city debates a ban on Powers altogether. Few superhero films build their premise this explicitly out of labour, policing and a drug economy.

Connor Reed, played by Robbie Amell, is a 26-year-old Electric, someone who can generate and manipulate electricity. He looks after his mother, Mary (Kari Matchett), a Cryo whose illness stops her from controlling her own powers, and he cannot afford her treatment. He scrapes by as an unregistered day labourer next to other Powers, which is where Garrett (Stephen Amell), a telekinetic who works for the crime lord Marcus Sutcliffe (Greg Bryk), finds him and offers him a job.

That first job is the robbery of a chemical plant, and it pulls Connor into Marcus’s operation, where he meets Nia (Kyla Kane), a Healer whose ability could change his mother’s prognosis, and where Garrett starts training him to push his power further. On the other side are two detectives, Officer Alex Park (Sung Kang) and Officer Davis (Aaron Abrams), who are tracking where Marcus’s stolen chemicals end up. The scheme escalates towards a raid on a police transport carrying confiscated Psyke, and the film is built around what that job costs everyone involved.

From a ten-minute short to a 100-minute feature

The 2016 short ran about ten minutes and was co-written by Jeff Chan and Chris Paré. It cast Robbie Amell as Connor, Sung Kang as Officer Park and Aaron Abrams as Connor’s friend Freddie, and set up the same premise: a near-future Lincoln City where people with abilities are treated as pariahs and policed by autonomous drones. Stephen Amell could not appear on screen because of scheduling conflicts and voiced a police drone instead. When Chan posted the short online, he described it as a more grounded and human take on the superpower genre, with no costumes and no destroyed skyscrapers.

The Indiegogo campaign that launched with the short asked for 200,000 dollars and passed that target in under 48 hours. By late April 2016 it had reached 2.4 million dollars, and when it finally closed on 31 December 2019 it stood at 3.4 million. The Amells said at the time that going the crowdfunding route let them keep creative control. The finished film acknowledges the backers directly: a four-minute stretch of its closing credits lists some of the 30,810 people who contributed.

Industry money followed. XYZ Films picked up international sales rights at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2017, Laysla De Oliveira was the first additional cast member announced that June, and principal photography began on 1 June 2017 in Toronto. In the feature, Chan directs from his own story, with the screenplay credited to Chris Paré. Behind the camera he kept the short’s core team: cinematographer Alex Disenhof, editor Paul Skinner and composer Ryan Taubert, whose score was released as a soundtrack album by Sony Masterworks.

The Amell cousins on the other side of the cape

Part of the appeal of Code 8 is who is in it. Stephen Amell spent eight seasons as Oliver Queen in Arrow on The CW, and Robbie Amell had played Firestorm in The Flash and led The Tomorrow People before moving on to the Amazon comedy Upload. This is the first feature the cousins headline together, and both are also producers on it. The project casts two actors best known for costumed television heroes as a day labourer and a criminal enforcer, with no suits and no secret identities.

The supporting cast mixes familiar genre faces with Canadian television actors. Sung Kang, known as Han in the Fast & Furious films, returns from the short as Officer Park, while Aaron Abrams, who played Freddie in the short, switches sides to play Park’s partner Davis. Greg Bryk plays Marcus Sutcliffe, a mind reader who is the Trust’s local agent, Peter Outerbridge plays his superior Wesley Cumbo, and Laysla De Oliveira and Vlad Alexis play Maddy and Freddie, members of Garrett’s crew.

What the film is reaching for

On paper, the ambition is clear. Code 8 treats abilities less as a gift than as a class marker, the thing that decides what work you can get, whether a sick parent’s treatment is affordable and how the police look at you. The drug at the centre of the plot is harvested from the bodies of trafficked Powers. The policing tools it imagines, drones, robots and facial recognition, are extrapolations of technology that already existed when the film was shot, which gives its political subtext a near-future rather than fantastical feel.

The premise sits in a recognisable lineage. Registration laws for the gifted have been a staple of X-Men stories for decades, and grounded, street-level science fiction about segregated populations has precedents such as District 9. What distinguishes Code 8 is its modest scale: a Canadian independent production, funded in part by its own future audience, telling a crime story rather than an end-of-the-world one.

Structurally it is a heist film. The engine is familiar: a man who needs money for a sick parent, a crew that recruits him, a series of jobs that grow riskier, and a boss under pressure from someone higher up. Whether the social world of Lincoln City stays in focus once the robbery plot takes over is the question any viewer will weigh, and it is the balance the whole project was designed around.

Release, Netflix and a second chapter

Code 8 premiered at the Sitges Film Festival in October 2019 and opened in cinemas in Canada and the United States in December 2019, with Elevation Pictures distributing in Canada. Its theatrical footprint was small. Its real audience arrived on 11 April 2020, when Netflix began streaming it, and that month it appeared in the platform’s Top 10 list in the United States.

The world kept expanding. In December 2019 a short-form spin-off series was announced at Quibi, with the Amells starring, Chris Paré writing and Jeff Chan directing, but it was left in limbo when Quibi shut down in 2020. Instead, in June 2021 a feature sequel was announced with both cousins returning, and Netflix acquired its global rights. Code 8: Part II was released on Netflix on 28 February 2024, with Robbie Amell, Stephen Amell, Aaron Abrams and Alex Mallari Jr. reprising their roles.

A closing note

Code 8 runs 100 minutes and asks to be judged as what it is: a mid-budget genre film whose most interesting decisions are economic rather than spectacular. Its powers come with rent, medical bills and a registration number, its villains are a drug syndicate and a city council vote, and its production history is a small case study in how a crowdfunded short can grow into a two-film Netflix property. For anyone who arrived through Part II, this is where the rules of Lincoln City were first set down.