Netflix fans over the moon as modern sci-fi classic is added: 'This is how 2025 should start'

Netflix fans are going wild after the streamer added hugely popular film Interstellar to the platform on January 1.

Christopher Nolan's space epic, which stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts on a mission to save Earth, was initially released to cinemas in 2014.

Set in a dystopian future where Earth is suffering from catastrophic blight and famine, Interstellar follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for mankind.

As they carry out their mission to find a new home for humanity, their loved ones back on a dystopian Earth are ravaged by blight and crop failure and age at a rapid pace.

And to make matters worse, the planet they venture to experiences 'time dilation' due to its close proximity to a supermassive blackhole, meaning 23 years have passed by the time they get back home.

In one tear-jerking scene, McConaughey's character watches his children grow up via video messages sent to the team's distant ship many lightyears away.

Taking to X, formerly Twitter, social media users and Netflix subscribers rejoiced as they celebrated the movie's availability to stream.

One said: 'Oh wow, Interstellar on Netflix just made my New Year's Day! Time to dive back into that epic space adventure!'

Another wrote: 'Finally getting to rewatch the docking scene on my TV instead of through YouTube clips for the hundredth time - this is how 2025 should start.'

'This is the good news I needed today', a third penned. 'My favorite film.'

Echoing a similar sentiment, a fourth posted: 'Interstellar is on Netflix. Didn't think I'd cry this early in the year.'

'That's great news!' added a fifth. 'Interstellar is a cinematic masterpiece, and it's awesome that more people will have access to it now.' 

The blockbuster, which has made a staggering $740.7 million at the box office, currently holds a 72 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Following its release in 2014, it was nominated for five Oscars, winning Best Visual Effects.

Speaking about how the film came to be, director Nolan said he 'jumped' at the opportunity to get involved.

He told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015: 'The project was originally developed by Lynda Obst.

'She's great friends with Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist at Cal Tech, and their dream was to make a science-fiction film where the more outlandish concepts were derived from real-world science.

'They originally developed the film with Steven Spielberg at Paramount and they hired my brother to come up with a story and a script.

'He and I talk about everything, whether or not we're working on it together, so I'd been hearing about it over the four years he worked on it, and I really felt that there was an extraordinary opportunity there to tell a very intimate story of human connection and relationships and contrast it with the cosmic scale of the overall events.'

Nolan added: 'So when I had the chance to get involved, I wanted to jump on it because I feel that those kinds of opportunities are very few and far between, where you really see what something could be, in terms of what the balance is between the emotional side of the story and the scale of the thing, the vastness of what the story tries to encompass.'