Netflix has broken its traditional silence about its viewership numbers to release a list of the top 10 most-watched original films on its streaming service. This list, released in mid-July 2020, features the Chris Hemsworth action movie Extraction at #1, followed by 2018's Bird Box and 2020's Spenser Confidential.
Until recently, Netflix shared almost nothing about its viewer numbers with the public. What little information the streaming service shares is usually revealed as part of the company's quarterly financial results, so it's safe to assume these numbers have been massaged a bit. Netflix also counts anyone who keeps a movie running on the service for a full two minutes as a "viewer," so there's likely a gap between people who started one of these movies and who actually finished watching them.
The top 10 list is as follows, from highest to lowest as measured by number of viewers:
- Extraction, 2020, 99 million
- Bird Box, 2018, 89 million
- Spenser Confidential, 2020, 85 million
- 6 Underground, 2019, 83 million
- Murder Mystery, 2019, 83 million
- The Irishman, 2019, 64 million
- Triple Frontier, 2019, 63 million
- The Wrong Missy, 2020, 59 million
- The Platform, 2020, 56 million
- The Perfect Date, 2019, 55 million
The original list from Netflix was made before the release of the Charlize Theron action film The Old Guard on July 10, which was an immediate success on its debut weekend. If it reaches Netflix's projections of 72 million viewers in its first month, it would hit this list at #6 and knock The Perfect Date to #11.
Netflix has continued to enjoy steady growth over the course of 2020. In its Q2 financial report, released on July 16th, it reported a total of 192.55 million paid memberships worldwide, which was an increase of just over 10 million from March, and of over 41 million compared to a year ago. In a letter to its shareholders, Netflix also reported that following work stoppages due to COVID-19 earlier this year, it has restarted production on its original content, including a new season of The Naked Director, in countries such as Japan, Korea, France, and Germany.
It's worth noting here that all of the movies in Netflix's top 10 had their premiere within the last 20 months, with Bird Box as the oldest film on the list. It's easy to chalk this all up to a combination of Netflix's growing subscriber base and life under the COVID-19 pandemic, as everyone has had a lot of time to burn through their queues lately, but if there's one thing that unifies all of these movies, it's that they're not particularly good fits for the modern movie theater. None of them are sequels, blockbusters, or cartoons, so they might've been thrown out to die in January if they'd gotten theatrical releases at all.
Netflix's next original film is Work It, a coming-of-age dance comedy produced by Alicia Keys, scheduled to debut on August 7th.
Source: Bloomberg