These are hard times for Ben Affleck, what with everyone snarking about his tummy and his tattoo and the general manner in which he greets each day with a bone-deep, mournful billion-yard stare. Times are so hard that every positive should be clung to, no matter how minuscule.

So here’s a minuscule positive: it has been announced that Affleck’s film The Accountant was the most rented movie of 2017 in the US. More people rented The Accountant than Moana. More people rented The Accountant than Beauty and the Beast. More people rented it than Rogue One, Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Sure, The Accountant only scraped in at 19th place in digital purchases. If we’re talking physical sales (ie DVDs), it didn’t even crack the top 30. But digital rentals – the cheap, muddy middle ground between “There is no way in hell I’d ever watch this at the cinema” and “I don’t want to wait three years until this turns up on Netflix for free” – is where The Accountant can finally shine.

You’ll notice, of course, that The Accountant is not a good film. It isn’t even a particularly memorable one. Starring Affleck as a man with autism and a machine gun, it opened on a quiet weekend in October 2016 – its meagre competition included Kevin Hart: What Now? and a Harry Potter Imax marathon – gained a middling 52% on Rotten Tomatoes and then quickly dropped out of sight. And yet here we are. A year and a half later and The Accountant is so much of a hit that Warner Bros are developing a sequel.

But The Accountant is not alone. Dig around enough and plenty of other mostly forgotten films begin to stand out as stealth hits. Despite being a repository for some of the finest feature films ever made, back in 2016 Netflix revealed that its most-watched movie of all time was The Ridiculous 6, an Adam Sandler Netflix-exclusive western spoof most notable for looking like the sort of thing you’d watch if you found Grown Ups 2 a little too highbrow.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Netflix number one … Adam Sandler in The Ridiculous 6. Photograph: Allstar/Netflix

Late last year, kiosk-based rental service Redbox revealed its most-rented movies of all time. And, although the number one film – The Hunger Games – was a genuine hit, number three was revealed to be Identity Thief. You know, Identity Thief; the film where Melissa McCarthy does something and then pulls a face and then it ends. You know, it’s that film you literally haven’t thought about once since before it even came out, unless you’re really into Redbox.

Even weirder, in a year when it invested heavily in prestigious fare such as Manchester by the Sea, the most streamed film on the Amazon Prime Video service in Canada last year was Wanted, a solidly mediocre decade-old Angelina Jolie action film that most people now remember for its nightmarishly Photoshopped poster.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Popular on Redbox … Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief. Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstock

Not that this is an entirely bad phenomenon. Quite often decent films will flop theatrically, only to find their natural audience in the home entertainment market. 2012’s Dredd is a perfect case in point. Much better than the Sylvester Stallone movie that preceded it – and a remake of The Raid in all but name – it failed to recoup its budget in cinemas, before effortlessly racking up $10m in DVD sales. Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s far-fetched fantasy movie about the dystopia created when a lowbrow celebrity is elected president, made 20 times more in DVD rentals than it ever did theatrically. Showgirls, written off as tacky and schlocky at original time of release, is now reportedly the biggest-selling MGM DVD of all time.

True, the success of some of these films seems truly inexplicable, but this is heartening nonetheless. It’s a feelgood story. Yes, your dumbly generic Melissa McCarthy vehicle or bland Affleck project might initially be met with a shrug, but give it a second chance and it could finally achieve the attention it deserves. Listen, if they can make a third Johnny English film, anything is possible.