Good for Netflix. This was something that really happened and, it wasn't used in a gratuitous manner, it wasn't over the top and, in the grand scheme of things, was used entirely in context of the scenes in the movie.
Netflix licensed the footage of the disaster from the stock image vendor Pond 5 and used it in “Bird Box” in an early TV news montage to set up its horrific premise. The Sandra Bullock-led thriller is about monstrous entities that compel any human who sees them to quickly try to kill themselves. To survive, they don blindfolds.
