10 Netflix movies that drew the largest audiences ever

Netflix $NFLX does not report ticket sales, opening weekends, or Nielsen-style ratings for its original films. It publishes one number instead: total hours viewed in a title's first 91 days on the service, released through its Tudum site and its periodic engagement reports. The 91-day window is the company's own cutoff, chosen because most of a film's audience shows up early and then falls away. Divide those hours by the runtime and you get the view count Netflix now lists beside each title.

That single metric is the closest thing to an official record of the most-watched Netflix movies, and it rewards a particular kind of film. A Netflix original arrives in more than 190 countries on one day, with no staggered rollout and no competition for screens. It then sits on the homepage of every subscriber account, pushed by autoplay trailers and app notifications. No theatrical release has ever had distribution like that. The leaderboard that results is dominated by star-driven action thrillers — Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, Chris Hemsworth, Ryan Gosling and Mark Wahlberg all appear. A few mysteries, satires and slow-burn thrillers break through alongside them.

A few scope notes are worth setting out. The ranking below covers English-language films. Netflix tracks non-English films and television series on separate lists using the same 91-day measure, and those titles do not compete with these for position. The company has also recalculated figures over time as it standardized how older releases are counted, so exact hour totals can shift between updates.

What has not shifted much is the top tier. The same cluster of films has held the upper positions for years. Several arrived when Netflix was concentrating its film marketing on a handful of big releases a year, an advantage later originals have had to split across a much longer slate. Here are 10 of those films, the hours they drew and what put each one where it sits.

Illustration: Quartz

Red Notice drew 364.02 million hours of viewing in its first 91 days, the largest total Netflix $NFLX has reported for any English-language film. The 2021 heist comedy took the top spot in the company's all-time ranking soon after release, and nothing has pushed it off since.

Rawson Marshall Thurber wrote and directed it. Dwayne Johnson plays an FBI profiler and Ryan Reynolds an art thief, and the two end up pursuing a rival criminal played by Gal Gadot. The object of the chase is a set of three jeweled eggs said to have been given by Mark Antony to Cleopatra, and the hunt runs through Rome, Bali, Argentina and a Russian prison.

The budget was reported at roughly $200 million, the most Netflix had spent on a single film at that point. There were no ticket sales to weigh that against. A theatrical release of the same size would have been judged by its opening weekend within days of arriving. Red Notice was judged by hours instead.

Reviews were poor. The film holds a low critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, far below its audience score. The distance between those two numbers, and between both of them and the viewing total, shows what the 91-day window actually captures: how many accounts started a film and stayed with it, not how it landed with the people writing about it.

Scale worked in its favor. It arrived in more than 190 countries on Nov. 12, 2021, with no staggered rollout and no theatrical run to clear first. Subscribers opening the app in any of those markets found it waiting near the top of the home screen, a kind of global same-day placement theatrical releases rarely get.

Netflix has since committed to two further installments with the lead cast returning. That makes Red Notice one of several originals converted into a franchise on the strength of its debut numbers rather than its reception.

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Don't Look Up ranks second among Netflix $NFLX's English-language films with 359.79 million hours viewed in its first 91 days. The total trails the all-time leader by a little over four million hours.

Adam McKay wrote and directed the 2021 satire. It follows two astronomers who find a comet headed for Earth and cannot get anyone in power to act on it. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a Michigan State astronomy professor who comes apart on cable news. Jennifer Lawrence plays the doctoral candidate who spotted the object. Meryl Streep plays a U.S. president weighing the midterms against planetary defense, and Jonah Hill plays her chief of staff, who is also her son.

Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry host a morning show that treats the discovery as light filler. Mark Rylance plays a tech billionaire who wants to mine the comet for minerals.

The release date worked in its favor. Netflix added the film on Dec. 24, 2021, when subscribers are home, off work and scrolling the homepage. The company has repeatedly used that late-December stretch for high-profile titles, and a two-hour-18-minute ensemble comedy fit the slot.

Reviews divided. Some critics singled out the cast and the film's aim at media distraction and political inertia, reading the comet as a stand-in for climate inaction. Others judged the satire heavy-handed and its targets too easy. The argument carried onto social platforms and kept the title in conversation for weeks after launch.

The Academy nominated Don't Look Up for best picture at the 2022 Oscars. It also drew nominations for original screenplay, film editing and original score. Few films near the top of Netflix's viewership chart have reached the best picture field. The rest of the upper tier is dominated by genre pictures that awards voters passed over.

Its placement shows what the hours-viewed figure captures. A dialogue-driven comedy with no franchise behind it and no chase sequences drew nearly the same audience as Netflix's costliest action originals.

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Bird Box drew 282 million hours of viewing in its first 91 days, and the 2018 thriller starring Sandra Bullock still ranks among Netflix $NFLX's most-watched English-language films years after it premiered.

Susanne Bier directed the adaptation of Josh Malerman's novel about an unseen presence that drives anyone who looks at it to suicide. Bullock plays Malorie, a mother steering two children down a river blindfolded. Trevante Rhodes, Sarah Paulson and John Malkovich appear as survivors sheltering with her in the flashback sections. The blindfold became the movie's visual shorthand and the hook for nearly every meme that followed.

Release timing shaped the result. Bird Box landed in December 2018, when Netflix was still better known for licensing other studios' catalogs than for financing features of its own. Netflix said 45 million accounts had watched the film within seven days, the strongest opening the company had reported for one of its own titles at that point. That reach strengthened the internal case for the budgets behind its later $200 million action releases.

The film also produced one of the first viral trends attached to a streaming title, with viewers posting clips of themselves walking, driving and cooking blindfolded. Netflix published a warning in January 2019 asking people not to injure themselves imitating the movie.

One caveat applies to the hours figure. Netflix measured viewing differently in 2018, reporting how many accounts had started a title rather than how many hours it accumulated. The company adopted the hours-viewed standard in 2021 and restated earlier releases under it, which is why a 2018 film sits on the same leaderboard as titles that premiered years afterward.

Critical reaction split, with praise for Bullock's performance and complaints that the ending eased the tension the premise had built. Netflix returned to the property in 2023 with Bird Box: Barcelona, a Spanish-language companion film directed by Álex and David Pastor and set during the same event.

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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery drew 279.74 million hours of viewing in its first 91 days, the highest total for a mystery film on Netflix $NFLX's all-time English-language list. It arrived on the service in December 2022 as the second entry in Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc series and the first made for streaming.

Daniel Craig returned as the Southern-accented detective, this time called to a private Greek island owned by a tech billionaire played by Edward Norton. The guest list doubles as the suspect list. Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista and Leslie Odom Jr. fill out the ensemble, following the casting approach of the 2019 original, which Lionsgate released in theaters before Netflix acquired the sequels.

Netflix paid a reported $469 million for the rights to two follow-up films, one of the largest deals the company had struck for a movie property. The agreement handed it a mystery series with an established lead character and a structure viewers already recognized.

The rollout also broke from the pattern. Most Netflix originals skip cinemas entirely or book a handful of screens. Glass Onion instead played a one-week limited theatrical engagement in late November 2022 before its December 23 streaming debut. The film went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay.

Reviews ran warmer than those for most films near the top of the viewership chart. Critics singled out Johnson's plotting, the layered construction of the central puzzle and Craig's performance. Glass Onion is one of the few titles in the upper ranks where critical reception and hours viewed pointed in the same direction.

A third Benoit Blanc film, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, followed under the same agreement, with Craig again in the lead. Netflix has applied that approach across its highest-performing originals, ordering further installments of films that post large 91-day totals rather than building each new release around an untested idea.

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The Gray Man drew 254.8 million hours of viewing in its first 91 days on Netflix $NFLX. That put the 2022 spy thriller among the platform's biggest action originals, and it arrived carrying one of the largest budgets Netflix had committed to a single film.

Anthony and Joe Russo directed, moving from Marvel Studios and Avengers: Endgame to a streaming release with a reported budget near $200 million. Ryan Gosling plays Court Gentry, a CIA asset code-named Sierra Six, who goes on the run after uncovering evidence of corruption inside the agency. Chris Evans plays Lloyd Hansen, the freelance operative contracted to find him. The role inverted the straight-arrow hero Evans had played across the Marvel films. Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, Regé-Jean Page, Jessica Henwick and Dhanush round out the cast.

The screenplay adapts Mark Greaney's 2009 novel, the first in a series that had already run to more than 10 books by the time the film reached Netflix. A long-running source series offered a ready supply of plots for future installments.

Much of the production was based in Prague and Los Angeles. The film's central set piece unfolds in a Prague square, where Gentry, handcuffed to a bench, is pinned down by gunfire as a runaway tram tears through the plaza. Netflix gave the film a one-week run in cinemas in July 2022 before releasing it on the service.

Reviews were mixed. Several critics wrote that the budget was visible in the action while the plot of betrayal and pursuit followed familiar lines.

The timing carried weight for Netflix. The company had reported subscriber losses in two consecutive quarters that year, and a widely watched original gave it a counterpoint to questions about its spending. Within weeks of the release, Netflix confirmed a sequel with Gosling returning as Gentry and a separate spin-off film, expanding the property before the first film's viewing window had closed.

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Spenser Confidential drew 199.65 million hours of viewing in its first 91 days, placing the 2020 action comedy inside the top tier of Netflix $NFLX's all-time English-language film rankings. Mark Wahlberg stars as a former Boston police detective who leaves prison and starts digging into the killings of two officers.

Peter Berg directed, extending a working partnership with Wahlberg that already included Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day. The screenplay draws on Ace Atkins' continuation of Robert B. Parker's long-running Spenser detective novels, keeping the characters while reworking the story into a police-corruption case. Winston Duke $DUK plays Hawk, an aspiring fighter who shares a room with Spenser and becomes his reluctant partner. Alan Arkin plays Henry Cimoli, the gym owner who takes both men in. Production was based in Boston and the surrounding area, and the city's neighborhoods, accents and local-news texture carry much of the film's identity.

Release timing worked in the film's favor. Netflix put it out on March 6, 2020. Within two weeks, theater chains across the U.S. and much of Europe had shut their doors and lockdown measures were spreading. Subscribers had more hours at home and far fewer entertainment options, and a broad studio-style comedy sitting near the top of the Netflix homepage absorbed a large share of that attention.

Reviews were mixed. Much of the response centered on the back-and-forth between Wahlberg and Duke rather than on the mystery itself, which unfolds in familiar beats. The viewership total points to what the service's audience reaches for on a given night: a recognizable leading man, a premise that needs no setup and a runtime under two hours.

Wahlberg kept working with the service afterward. He headlined Me Time opposite Kevin Hart in 2022 and The Union with Halle Berry in 2024, both released straight to Netflix with no theatrical run. The pattern reflects a broader approach at the company, which has repeatedly built multi-film relationships with established stars rather than assembling each project from scratch.

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Carry-On climbed into Netflix $NFLX's most-watched film rankings within weeks of its December 2024 release. Netflix's own engagement disclosures placed the thriller among the platform's top-performing original films of that period.

Taron Egerton plays an airport security screener who is blackmailed into letting a dangerous package pass through his checkpoint on Christmas Eve. Jaume Collet-Serra directed, applying the confined-space instincts he brought to Non-Stop and The Shallows. Most of the film unfolds inside a single Los Angeles airport terminal across a few hours of screen time. Egerton's character works a baggage scanner while Jason Bateman's character issues instructions through an earpiece. Sofia Carson plays his girlfriend, who also works at the airport, and whose safety becomes the leverage.

The scale is small by design. There are no international locations, no extended chase through a foreign capital and no franchise scaffolding of the sort Netflix assembled around its action tentpoles. The tension comes from proximity — two men standing a few yards apart, one of whom cannot acknowledge what is happening without setting off the thing he is trying to stop.

Timing worked in the film's favor. Late December is one of the heaviest viewing stretches of the year for streaming services, and Carry-On arrived with a story set on the night the calendar was about to deliver.

Reviews were broadly favorable, and much of the attention went to Bateman playing against his comedic register as a calm, menacing operative. That reception sets Carry-On apart from several higher-ranked titles on Netflix's all-time chart, which pulled large audiences despite tepid notices.

The speed of the climb also reflects how much the service itself has changed. Films released in 2018 and 2019 accumulated hours against a smaller global subscriber base over the full 91-day window. A 2024 title reaches a far larger account base on day one. Recent releases can post in a few weeks the kind of totals that once took a full quarter to assemble.