At its core, The Goonies was by no means actually a children’ film — it was a blueprint for maturity, hidden behind pirate jokes and booby traps. It gave us the fantasy of discovering that means in chaos, loyalty in a crumbling financial system, and a wild trip the place trauma and treasure all the time got here as a package deal deal. Goonies by no means say die, positive — however what occurs once they develop up, get PTSD, and begin carrying weapons?
The Goonies
- Launch Date
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June 7, 1985
- Runtime
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114 minutes
These 10 journey movies on Netflix are what occurs when childhood marvel collides with grownup stakes, and so they positively assist construct pleasure for The Goonies 2. They’re messy, high-adrenaline, and emotionally unhinged — similar to Mikey and the gang can be in the event that they saved looking underground catacombs into their thirties. Anticipate morally grey treasure hunters, chosen-family dynamics, historical curses, and the sort of gritty, globe-trotting chaos that turns each map right into a midlife disaster. These aren’t sequels — they’re religious successors, rebooted by life and a barely higher wardrobe funds.
Listed below are one of the best journey films on Netflix like The Goonies.
10
‘Troll’ (2022)
Troll
- Launch Date
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December 1, 2022
- Runtime
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101 minutes
- Director
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Roar Uthaug
Directed by Roar Uthaug, Troll is a Norwegian action-adventure that asks a deceptively easy query: what if the folklore your grandparents warned you about was actual, and actually pissed off? When a large, historical creature awakens within the mountains, scientist Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is recruited to make sense of the chaos, flanked by a ragtag group that features a authorities advisor with an ethical compass and a army process power that doesn’t imagine in myths. Wilmann performs Nora with grounded urgency — a lady who’s misplaced religion in her father’s fairy tales however should now comply with them like a breadcrumb path by way of bureaucratic disbelief. The troll itself isn’t just a monster, however an emblem of forgotten historical past, a fossilized grief shifting by way of an detached world.
The Cavern Simply Obtained Louder
Troll shares The Goonies’ religious DNA in the way in which it treats discovery as each marvel and reckoning. Like the children uncovering pirate gold beneath suburban ruins, Nora should descend — into the previous, into trauma, into caves literal and emotional — to find the reality. Each movies deal with mythology not as ornament however as map: the clues are in bedtime tales, the hazard in ignoring them. And whereas The Goonies gave us treasure hunts with friendship bracelets, ‘Troll’ scales it up — changing slapstick with seismic waves, and booby traps with intergenerational grief. It’s a darker, older sibling, nevertheless it nonetheless believes in a single important factor: that the not possible is usually buried slightly below the floor.
9
‘Dwell Is Life’ (2021)
Set in 1985 rural Spain, Dwell Is Life follows 5 childhood pals who reunite for one final summer time mission: to discover a magical flower rumored to remedy sickness. The plot sounds whimsical — and in some methods it’s — however the movie is soaked in nostalgia and shadowed by mortality. The boys, led by the tender-hearted Rodri (Adrián Baena) and the bravely reckless Álvaro (Raúl del Pozo), are rising up quick — some coping with abusive mother and father, others with terminal diagnoses. Director Dani de la Torre infuses the journey with sunburnt sincerity and tonal vary: one minute they’re bike-riding by way of forests prefer it’s Spielberg nation; the following, they’re confronting the truth that not all tales get joyful endings.
The Treasure Is Time — and You are Already Shedding It
Dwell Is Life appears like The Goonies‘ translated into elegy — a movie that asks what occurs when the map isn’t resulting in riches, however to 1 final second of marvel earlier than the world grows chilly. Like Mikey’s crew, these boys are propelled by legend and loyalty, determined to lengthen a fading childhood. The movie trades swashbuckling for soul-searching, however the bones are the identical: mismatched heroes, secret hideouts, and the aching realization that the journey isn’t simply in regards to the prize. It’s about who you develop into getting there. If The Goonies was a raucous starting, Dwell is Life is the sunset-colored coda — messy, stunning, and courageous sufficient to say goodbye.
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8
‘The Sea Beast’ (2022)
The Sea Beast
- Launch Date
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June 15, 2022
- Runtime
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115minutes
- Director
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Chris Williams
Chris Williams’ animated epic The Sea Beast appears like a watercolor retelling of each maritime delusion ever whispered at sea, however its emotional core belongs to a stowaway and a swordsman. Karl City voices Jacob Holland, a legendary monster hunter with sq. shoulders and quiet scars; Zaris-Angel Hator performs Maisie Brumble, a scrappy orphan who sneaks aboard his ship and challenges all the pieces he thinks he is aware of about heroism. The animation is painterly and fluid — assume Moana meets Grasp and Commander — and the world-building is huge, stuffed with Leviathans, sea-bound folklore, and institutional propaganda disguised as bedtime tales. However the movie’s strongest weapon isn’t its motion — it’s its emotional intelligence.
Distrust the Map, Befriend the Monster
Like The Goonies, The Sea Beast is about rewriting the story you’ve been handed. Maisie and Jacob are a traditional intergenerational pair: one idealistic, one jaded, each looking for one thing simply past the horizon. Simply as Mikey believed in a world of treasure and friendship regardless of each grownup’s cynicism, Maisie believes in monsters who’re extra misunderstood than malevolent. The booby traps listed here are ideological — and the actual treasure is empathy. It is a movie about unlearning, about questioning the legends handed down by way of establishments, and about how a toddler’s perception can chart a brand new course for a whole world. If The Goonies taught us to comply with the clues, The Sea Beast asks us to query who wrote them within the first place.
7
‘Enola Holmes’ (2020)
Enola Holmes
- Launch Date
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September 23, 2020
- Runtime
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123 minutes
Millie Bobby Brown brings a sort of screwball depth to Enola Holmes that makes the movie really feel each totally trendy and gorgeously anachronistic. Because the teenage sister of Sherlock Holmes (performed with dry detachment by Henry Cavill), Enola is all power and instinct — a Victorian detective-in-training who talks to the digital camera like she’s letting you in on the world’s best-kept secret. Directed by Harry Bradbeer, the movie zips by way of coded messages, lacking moms, and sophistication revolution with fizzy momentum, carried nearly completely by Brown’s efficiency. It’s not afraid to be foolish, nevertheless it’s even braver in letting its heroine be lonely, indignant, and fully too good for the world she’s been born into.
A Magnifying Glass for the Goonie Soul
At its core, Enola Holmes faucets into the identical chaotic, individualistic spirit that powered The Goonies: children who don’t look forward to permission to go on the journey — they write it themselves. Enola, like Mikey, is propelled by delusion and reminiscence, utilizing household legacy as each gasoline and impediment. The place The Goonies gave us a map and a pirate ship, Enola Holmes offers us puzzles and secret societies — completely different props, similar story. Each imagine within the energy of intuition over authority, of curiosity over conformity. And whereas Enola doesn’t have a ragtag gang to assist her by way of the tunnels, she brings all that power along with her — the fierce, joyful defiance of a child who nonetheless believes in a world price fixing.
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6
‘Goosebumps’ (2015)
Goosebumps
3
/5
- Launch Date
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August 5, 2015
- Runtime
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103 Minutes
In Rob Letterman’s meta-horror journey Goosebumps, Jack Black performs a fictionalized model of R.L. Stine — a reclusive writer whose terrifying creations by chance come to life when a gaggle of teenagers opens one among his manuscripts. The movie follows Dylan Minnette’s Zach, a moody new child in a small city, and Odeya Rush’s Hannah, Stine’s mysterious daughter, as they staff as much as wrangle an outbreak of sentient monsters starting from big praying mantises to vengeful ventriloquist dummies. Black’s Stine is concurrently menacing and endearing, a goth Willy Wonka whose creativeness is each reward and curse. The tone is delightfully chaotic: one half horror parody, one half coming-of-age romp, all wrapped in a crisp, CGI-glazed Saturday matinee power.
The Booby Entice Is a Typewriter
What makes ‘Goosebumps’ a religious cousin to The Goonies isn’t simply the kids-on-a-quest format — it’s the fusion of adolescent awe and life-or-death urgency. Just like the Goonies, these children uncover that journey usually comes disguised as catastrophe. The monsters are stand-ins for all of the unknowable fears of rising up — loss, change, loneliness — and the one manner by way of is collectively. Stine, very like One-Eyed Willy, turns into each the impediment and the information, a determine of legend hiding simply down the road. And like Mikey and pals, Zach and Hannah survive not by way of energy, however by way of scrappy intuition and the invention that tales — particularly the messy, scary ones — are price dwelling.
5
‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’ (2024)
In its newest reincarnation, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire takes the nostalgic scaffolding of proton packs and slime and builds one thing surprisingly earnest atop it. Paul Rudd leads a brand new era of ghost-fighting misfits, joined by returning forged members and recent faces like Mckenna Grace, whose efficiency as Phoebe Spengler offers the movie a melancholic pulse beneath the spectacle. Set in a frost-covered New York underneath supernatural siege, the movie is each catastrophe film and household saga — a ghost story wearing sci-fi outerwear. It’s foolish, sure, but in addition unusual and honest in the way in which solely this franchise dares to be when it remembers it’s not about ghosts — it’s about grief, legacy, and determining the place you belong within the story.
From Booby Traps to Ecto Traps
What connects Frozen Empire to The Goonies isn’t simply its ensemble dynamics or haunted basements — it’s the sacred perception that misfits save the world. Phoebe is a Goonie by one other title: a genius child carrying a flashlight into the darkish, hoping information and just a little luck will probably be sufficient. The movie’s motion sequences are candy-coated, however its emotional engine runs on chosen-family chaos, useless grandpas, and the concept weirdness is a superpower. Similar to The Goonies, it’s about discovering hidden rooms, making up the plan as you go, and studying that what saves you isn’t energy — it’s realizing who’s operating into the hearth with you.
4
‘Rim of the World’ (2019)
Directed by McG with all of the reckless power that suggests, Rim of the World is a component alien invasion thriller, half Gen Z coming-of-age story advised by way of a layer of snack-dust and trauma. 4 misfit teenagers — Alex, ZhenZhen, Dariush, and Gabriel — are stranded at a summer time camp in the course of an extraterrestrial assault and tasked with delivering a key that would save the world. The children are textbook archetypes, however performed with a shocking quantity of coronary heart: Benjamin Flores Jr.’s Dariush deflects ache with bravado, Jack Gore’s Alex is bookish and haunted, and Miya Cech’s ZhenZhen says extra with silence than most characters say in a monologue. The movie is brash and uneven, however beneath its meme-joke pacing is one thing earnest — a narrative about trauma, belief, and the bizarre readability of dealing with annihilation collectively.
Aliens, Angst, and the Finish of the World
‘Rim of the World’ doesn’t simply borrow from The Goonies — it virtually slaps a jetpack on the blueprint and launches it into orbit. Like Mikey’s gang, these children don’t look forward to adults to repair the issue; they resolve it by getting misplaced, getting messy, and staying bizarre. There’s a BMX power to all the pieces, from the dialogue to the pacing — and whereas the stakes are international, the story stays intimate: about children attempting to outline themselves within the ruins of what they thought childhood can be. Like The Goonies, the movie works greatest when it remembers that the actual journey isn’t from Level A to B — it’s from stranger to pal, from worry to motion, from hiding to turning into the sort of one who runs towards the chaos.
3
‘Okja’ (2017)
Okja
- Launch Date
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June 28, 2017
- Runtime
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120minutes
- Director
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Bong Joon Ho
Bong Joon-ho’s Okja is a genre-defying journey that follows Mija, a younger Korean woman performed by Ahn Search engine optimization-hyun, as she travels throughout continents to rescue her genetically engineered superpig from the clutches of a corrupt multinational company. Tilda Swinton performs a twin function because the eccentric CEO and her colder twin sister, whereas Jake Gyllenhaal turns in a bonkers, ethically deranged efficiency as a fame-addled zoologist. However it’s Mija who anchors the chaos — decided, livid, and shockingly succesful within the face of late-capitalist cruelty. The movie toggles between rural serenity and concrete grotesquery with razor precision, by no means letting you neglect that marvel and horror can coexist — typically in the identical body.
The Treasure Is a Pig, and the World Is the Entice
If The Goonies was about discovering hidden treasure within the wreckage of grownup errors, Okja is its extra livid, emotionally advanced inheritor. Mija doesn’t simply chase a map — she wages struggle on a system. Like Mikey and crew, she believes that love and loyalty are sufficient to rewrite the ending, even when all the pieces round her is designed to say in any other case. The movie could not function caves or booby traps, nevertheless it’s stuffed with the identical wide-eyed chaos and makeshift rise up. Okja is about saving your pal and, by extension, saving your self from turning into desensitized. It’s the Goonie dream with sharper tooth — nonetheless scrappy, nonetheless small-kid-versus-giant-system, however this time, the enormous is carrying a lab coat and a company brand.
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2
‘We Have a Ghost’ (2023)
Christopher Landon’s We Have a Ghost is a supernatural journey with a surprisingly soulful undercurrent. When a household strikes into a brand new home and discovers it’s haunted by a mute, mulleted ghost named Ernest (performed with tragic sweetness by David Harbour), teenage Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) turns into the unlikely bridge between the ghost world and viral fame. The movie blends TikTok-age satire with actual grief, positioning Ernest much less as a menace and extra as a person caught mid-story — a ghost who’s misplaced not simply his voice however his sense of self. Tig Notaro, Jennifer Coolidge, and Anthony Mackie spherical out the ensemble with tonal swerves that transfer from deadpan to deeply felt.
Who Wants a Pirate Ship When You’ve Obtained a Haunted Home?
‘We Have a Ghost’ works as a postmodern Goonies as a result of it understands that the journey isn’t all the time exterior — typically it’s emotional excavation. Kevin and Ernest type the sort of cross-generational friendship that defines The Goonies legacy: constructed on threat, constructed on care, constructed on refusing to let the previous die quietly. The haunted home turns into a metaphor, the ghost a forgotten treasure, and the chase — by way of web fame, police helicopters, and household dysfunction — turns into a high-stakes recreation of rediscovering what issues. Like Mikey, Kevin sees worth within the factor everybody else gave up on. And like The Goonies, this movie believes in second probabilities — for the dwelling and the useless.
1
‘Discovering ‘Ohana’ (2021)
Discovering Ohana
- Launch Date
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January 29, 2021
- Runtime
-
123 minutes
- Director
-
Jude Weng
Set in O‘ahu and directed by Jude Weng, Discovering ‘Ohana follows two Brooklyn-raised siblings — Pili (Kea Peahu), a geocaching-obsessed tween with a fearless streak, and Ioane (Alex Aiono), her skeptical older brother — as they return to their ancestral roots and stumble into an precise treasure hunt deep within the Hawaiian jungle. What begins as a reluctant household journey morphs right into a mythological journey involving secret caves, historical riddles, and spectral guardians. The movie pulses with sincerity: Peahu delivers a breakout efficiency that balances comedic bravado with emotional vulnerability, whereas Kelly Hu and Branscombe Richmond floor the household with quiet intergenerational rigidity. With sweeping island cinematography and a soundtrack that mixes pop beats with native texture, it’s a narrative about reconnection — to tradition, household, and your self.
The Goonies Grew Up, Moved to Hawai‘i, and Discovered Themselves
Discovering ‘Ohana wears its Goonies DNA proudly — and actually, in a single cameo-laced scene — nevertheless it expands the blueprint by rooting the treasure not simply in gold, however in identification. Like Mikey and the gang, Pili and Ioane should decode greater than maps — they need to decipher what it means to belong. The journey unfolds alongside a deeper reckoning with loss, heritage, and the friction between mainland ambition and island historical past. And like The Goonies, this movie insists that bravery isn’t simply climbing into the unknown — it’s listening to what the unknown is attempting to inform you. There are jokes, near-death escapes, and booby traps, positive, however what issues most is the bond — ‘ohana — that emerges whenever you go searching for treasure and discover your folks as a substitute.