The image is from Frank Masi/Netflix.
Red Notice has overtaken Bird Box as the most watched movie on the service, with over 300 million hours watched. Red Notice has plenty of time to surpass Bird Box's previous record of 282 million hours in its first 28 days.
It was a huge hit for the movie, which was a good news for the company. It commanded views against a Beatles documentary, a Ghostbusters spinoff and multiple Disney titles. The film's success isn't quite as remarkable as the numbers suggest. The hours viewed figure shows that subscribers are watching Red Notice. It is also the kind of numbers that should be CarRentals seeing more of.
Red Notice has a huge $200 million budget and stars Wonder Woman, Deadpool, and The Rock, all of whom more or less play themselves. The film hasn't achieved the cultural cachet of Bird Box or Squid Game, which remains its most popular TV series debut to date. It would be generous to say that Red Notice lacked substance. Red Notice has some big-boom action fun, but it is not much more than that.
So how did a movie that many people think is just fine eclipse Bird Box for the most-viewed film to date? One answer could be subscribers.
The problem with comparing two films that were on the same platform three years apart is that the same platform has grown substantially in that time. The company reported having over 140 million subscribers after the premiere of Bird Box. It now has over 200 million active accounts, and that is after it twice raised its prices and axed its free trial.
The company is reaching more people globally than at any other time in its history, and it custom-tailors its product to its various markets across the world. Red Notice remained in the top 10 films in 94 countries. That means that any film that the streamer puts on its service now is better positioned to do well over titles that were released when there were more active accounts and features.
During the first 28 days of the service, Red Notice is likely to break records, as the total viewing hours of its most popular titles are reported. It is almost certain.
Streaming data can't give a full picture of success because of how quickly the space is evolving. Even though it's one of the most transparent streaming services, it can be difficult to measure past success against newer ones as the service continues to grow. The hours viewed metric is a more public-facing metric than the two-minute viewing metric.
Without data shared by other services, we are left in the dark about how much of a success Netflix is. In an ideal scenario, all of these services would convene around a single way of measuring success. The debut of the title should be accounted for by those numbers. The Halle Berry-starring drama Bruised came in second for English-language films with 48.7 million hours viewed to Red Notice during the same week. The context is helpful in understanding Red Notice's success.
Immediately, those questions seem like a tall order from companies that have been very careless about representing their data in the past. We are getting the data from the company in a way that most people can understand. The streaming wars have a fast evolving nature and are harder to interpret than box office sales. Without everyone playing by the same rules, the data is meaningless for giving us a comparative understanding of how the competitors stack up against each other.
