Top 10 Most-Watched Movies on Netflix in History
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Netflix is continuing its trend of revealing viewership numbers for its movies. Photo KnowInsiders |
Netflix is continuing its trend of revealing viewership numbers for its movies, at least when they’re big and successful. The streamer revealed that Army of the Dead is the latest addition to its new top 10 most-watched original movies list, which it released in full to Deadline.
This is the second year in a row that Netflix has released the numbers for its biggest movies, and it turns out there have been quite a few changes since we saw the list in July of last year. Among the movies that came out in the last year to make the list are The Old Guard, Enola Holmes, Project Power, and The Midnight Sky, which is tied with Army of the Dead when Zack Snyder’s zombie movie was released last week. Unfortunately, this means that The Irishman is no longer on Netflix’s sixth most watched original movie of all time. Sorry to Martin Scorsese.
Here’s the full list along with the number of viewers each movie had
1.Extraction (99M views)
2.Bird Box (89M)
3.Spenser Confidential (85M)
4.6 Underground (83M)
5.Murder Mystery (83M)
6.The Old Guard (78M)
7.Enola Holmes (76M)
8.Project Power (75M)
9. The Midnight Sky (72M)
10. Army of the Dead (72M)
Check out full details about the films
1. Extraction – 99 million views
It’s Hemsworth in an action-packed adventure through the streets of Bangladesh. Gun fire, explosions, humour, he gets shirtless. What’s not to love?
Chris Hemsworth’s best roles to date have tapped into his charm. His turn as a handsome but clueless assistant in the Ghostbusters reboot was a revelation, and Thor: Ragnarok wisely replaced the somber aspects of the god of thunder with a puppylike eagerness. Unfortunately, the new Netflix action movie Extraction rates at a zero on the star’s charm scale. The mini-Marvel reunion — director Sam Hargrave was stunt coordinator on several Marvel films, Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo wrote the script, and he and Anthony Russo are producers — relies on action and violence, drowning Hemsworth’s natural charisma in blood.
In Extraction, Hemsworth plays a mercenary named Tyler Rake. When Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the teenage son of a drug lord (Pankaj Tripathi), is kidnapped, Rake is called into Dhaka, Bangladesh to rescue him. The job, however, is a set-up. Lacking the money to pay Rake, the drug lord’s second-in-command, Saju (Randeep Hooda), plans to kill the mercenary once Ovi is safe and sound. When the kidnappers, rivals of Ovi’s father, redouble their efforts to get the boy back, Rake and Ovi are put between a rock and a hard place with no choice but to fight their way out.
2. Bird Box – 89 million views
Bird Box, Netflix’s new high-profile thriller, is a mixed bag. There’s a lot that grabs you, and then there’s the ending, which is unfortunately so farcical that everything that came before it immediately sucks out the air in Bird Box’s metaphorical balloon.
Directed by Susanne Bier (After the Wedding, AMC’s The Night Manager) and adapted from Josh Malerman’s 2014 novel of the same name, Bird Box unfolds across two timelines: The first, in which Malorie (Sandra Bullock) attempts to shepherd Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Boy (Julian Edwards) through a post-apocalyptic landscape — while all three are blindfolded; and the second, several years earlier, explaining the circumstances that led them to their journey in the first place.
3. Spenser Confidential – 85 million views
Another buddy cop comedy to add to Mark Wahlberg’s collection. Funny at times. Keep an eye out for Post Malone. Spenser Confidential begins with Wahlberg, as Spenser, landing in jail after beating up his police captain (Michael Gaston). Sure, he was trying to figure out why his captain was covering up a murder, but nobody but Spenser cares about that. The same holds true when he gets out of jail five years later (after a send-off prison brawl with Post Malone). Though Spenser initially plans to get the hell out of Boston and live out the rest of his life in peace, a movie about Mark Wahlberg leaving Boston for a quiet suburban life would never get made. When his old captain is murdered, and it becomes clear that the series of events that landed him in jail is hardly over, he takes matters into his own hands.
4. 6 Underground – 83 million views
Ryan Reynolds plays another Reynold’s caricature that was funny in Deadpool but not so much in this. Ngl, I turned it off after 30 minutes. Armageddon and Pain & Gain are the two foundations upon which I’ve built my Michael Bay apologist house. Armageddon is genuinely ridiculous fun, as NASA recruits everyman Bruce Willis to go into space and stop an asteroid from colliding with Earth. And Pain & Gain, where bodybuilders played by the Rock, Mark Wahlberg, and Anthony Mackie kidnap Tony Shalhoub in an attempt to extort him, is not only a perfect satire of American excess, it suggests Bay might be self-aware about his reputation for excessive action. They’re exceptions to the usual rules for Bay movies, which can be an endless grind of “heavy on the explosions and light on everything else” Transformers action. But they’re distinct enough to suggest that Bay, given the license and freedom to escape the studio system, would be capable of producing something more.
5. Murder Mystery – 83 million views
As suggested by its title, Murder Mystery centers on a murder mystery. Billionaire Malcolm Quince (Terence Stamp) is dead, and it’s down to Nick (Sandler) and Audrey Spitz (Jennifer Aniston) to figure out who did it. The specifics vault the story into the realm of comedy: Nick and Audrey are taking an extremely belated honeymoon, and are the sole American tourists aboard the yacht upon which Quince is murdered, having been invited aboard by the dashing, mysterious Charles Cavendish (Luke Evans). Everybody else on the boat is somehow related to Quince, and the fact that the Spitzes aren’t makes them the prime suspects.
6. The Old Guard – 78 million views
Based on the comic book of the same name, Charlize Theron is a badass in this movie. We reckon it's a good watch.
Beyond the Lights writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood sets up her newest film (and her first potential action franchise) The Old Guard at the start of a baton-pass between veteran warrior Andy (Charlize Theron) and young Marine Nile (KiKi Layne). The characters and the tight-knit group they travel with, including Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), are immortal souls who use their healing superpowers for the greater good, rescuing mere mortals from many varieties of doom. It’s a thankless job: mortals used to want to burn people with powers at the stake. The modern equivalent is dissecting them to find a potential cure for all human ails. Worse, at some point, even the immortals can lose their abilities. Turns out they’re still human after all.
7. Enola Holmes – 76 million views
Milly Bobby Brown stars as Enola Holmes, the youngest sibling of famous detective Sherlock. A fantastic film with a great cast including Henry Cavill and Helena Bonham Carter. The film, directed by Harry Bradbeer and adapted from a book series by Nancy Springer, centers around Enola, the younger sister of Mycroft (Sam Clafin) and Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill). Enola lives in the family home with their mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter). Together, they play sports, practice martial arts, engage in strategy games, and generally do everything that women in the Victorian Era aren’t supposed to do. When Eudoria disappears without a trace, Enola’s world is turned upside down, as Mycroft, now her guardian, takes umbrage with her upbringing thus far and tries to commit her to a finishing school. Horrified by the idea, Enola runs away, but on her quest to find her mother, gets caught up in a different mystery.
8. Project Power – 75 million views
The idea behind the new Netflix movie Project Power is incredibly potent. In the world of the movie, superpowers aren’t something you’re born with, or gain via a bite from a radioactive spider. They come from pills that activate the user’s hidden power for five minutes. What’s more, nobody knows what superpower they’ll have until they take the pill — at which point, a few unlucky users just explode into a mess of blood and guts.
The high of taking the drug — called Power — is represented by Requiem for a Dream-esque splashes of color and cells that last for split seconds, an effect that’s a handy metaphor for Project Power itself. Directed by Catfish’s Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman from a script by The Batman’s Mattson Tomlin, Project Power’s burst of color comes from its central conceit and Joost and Schulman’s sense of style. It’s bright and attractive, but it fizzles out quickly. Tomlin’s idea is innovative, but the story he tells with it is tired.
Project Power protagonist Robin (Dominique Fishback) is a collection of clichés: She’s a high schooler and would-be rapper who deals drugs in order to care for her ailing mother. She works with Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a cop, to help him keep an eye on who’s buying what, as well as to supply him with Power. While the police are cracking down on Power use and distribution in the city, Frank sees the drug as leveling the playing field against criminals, since it makes him bulletproof. And Art (Jamie Foxx), a mysterious former soldier, crashes into both of their lives when he kidnaps Robin in an attempt to get to Power’s source.
**READ MORE:
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9. The Midnight Sky - 72 million views
George Clooney directed and starred in The Midnight Sky, a sci-fi about a scientist trying to discover another habitable planet after Earth begins to die.
Clooney’s film tied with Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. It’s long, but a fun ride full of zombie-induced gore and violence if you’re wanting a movie that you don’t need to think about for the night.
Though set in the year 2049, the sci-fi drama isn’t part of some Blade Runner cinematic universe. A catastrophic event has made earth’s atmosphere unbreathable, leading humanity to resettle on the far-off planet K-23. Rather than traveling with the other evacuees, the weathered scientist Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney) secludes himself at the Arctic Circle’s Barbeau Observatory to cope with a terminal disease. Augustine spends his final days drinking whiskey while administrating life-extending blood transfusions. Three weeks into his stay, he discovers a quiet little girl who might have been forgotten by the evacuees. His problems are further compounded by the impending return of the space station Aether and its unaware crew to Earth. In hopes of averting another crisis, Augustine, while caring for the girl, races to warn the incoming crew of the planet’s dangers. The ticking clock makes The Midnight Sky a post-apocalyptic survivalist space film whose narrative is so overloaded that the emotional weight offers zero gravity.
10.Army of the Dead - 72 million views
Following the unrestrained freakout, Snyder’s thriller dons the clothes of an epic heist flick: Months after the fall of Vegas, a rich hotel owner with government ties, Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), enlists a group of mercenaries to infiltrate the overrun sin city. In the basement of his former hotel sits $200 million worth of tax-free money, locked away in a nearly impenetrable safe. Leading the team is the hulking Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), who saved the Secretary of Defense from the Vegas catastrophe and earned a medal, but is now flipping burgers in a low-rent diner. He assembles a rag-tag group of former acquaintances and new faces for the mission, including his estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), and together, they head out on what seems like a near-suicide mission. They have to secure the money within 48 hours, because the U.S. is about to drop a nuclear warhead on the forsaken city.
This film represents Snyder’s second foray with the undead: Dawn of the Dead, his 2004 remake of the George Romero classic, is coincidently prescient about the events of 2020. In his Dawn of the Dead, an unknown virus sweeps across the country, leading a disparate group of people to quarantine in a mall while the plague takes hold. Taking his cue from 28 Days Later, Snyder used fast-moving zombies as the primary fright. For Army of the Dead, he takes the next logical leap by crafting two types of flesh-eaters: shamblers (the mindless kind) and alphas (the highly advanced kind). An early scene shows a muscular, intelligent Patient Zero zombie escaping from an Area 51 transport convoy. Fast-forward to the film’s present day, and Vegas isn’t the leader-zombie’s prison, it’s the kingdom of his alphas. These sophisticated creatures open the door for elaborate action sequences, visceral kills, and robust amounts of gore.
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