Netflix’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the service’s No. 4 most popular movie of all time, according to the company’s watch-time stats.
Netflix says the film was watched for 273.2 million hours in its first 24 days of release, putting it solidly in the service’s all-time ranking. By comparison, Netflix’s most-watched movie ever, the action comedy Red Notice, generated 364 million hours in its first 28 days.)
Two weeks ago, Glass Onion just barely bumped out The Kissing Booth 2, a 2020 teen rom-com, to secure the No. 10 spot in Netflix’s all-time ranking for films. But with additional viewing since then, Glass Onion is now solidly in the middle of Netflix’s official popularity chart, according to Netflix’s latest watch-time update.
For the all-time ranking, Netflix counts the hours watched of its films and shows within a title’s first 28 days of release, so Glass Onion can continue to accrue hours toward the ranking for another few days. It needs less than 9 million more hours to overtake 2018’s thriller Bird Box and perch in the No. 3 spot.
For years, Netflix was notoriously tight-lipped about its viewership. Beau Willimon — creator of House of Cards, which initially put Netflix’s original programming on the map — once said the company wouldn’t even share viewership metrics with him.
But within the last few years, Netflix became much more open about the popularity of its shows and movies to help it recruit talent and stoke buzz. First, Netflix added a top trending ranking to its service, so people can see the most popular titles streaming on Netflix in their country on any given day. Then it also started publicly sharing popularity stats for certain titles, publicizing the number of accounts that watched two minutes of a particular title in its first month of release.
In 2021, Netflix launched a website posting weekly charts of its most popular shows and movies, as well as a global ranking of all-time most watched titles. The charts are updated every week and ranked by the total number of hours that subscribers spent watching them.
The rankings kicked off an unprecedented trove of data about what’s popular on Netflix, detailing the most successful titles in the last week not only globally but also for more than 90 individual countries. It’s the most transparency Netflix has ever adopted for its viewership, which will take on new significance as Netflix ramps up advertising on special cheaper tiers of its service. But the information’s also meant to help subscribers get a better grip on what’s most popular on the world’s biggest subscription streaming service.
