Top 10 Popular and Most Watched Netflix Movies, Revealed

Netflix did something they'd never done this week by revealing the most popular films and TV series on their platform. At this year's Code conference, Netflix co-CEO and chief content officer Ted Sarandos shared some data which is usually kept private, and the results were very interesting.

Netflix has been more forthcoming about its viewership figures in recent years but is still very protective about which statistics it shares publicly. One reason may be that just 3% of Netflix’s most-watched content is produced by the company, according to an industry estimate. That’s despite the company’s ability to give its original shows and movies more prominent placements on the platform’s interface.

The most popular film on Netflix is Extraction. The 2020 action flick starring Chris Hemsworth has been watched by 99 million Netflix accounts. At the end of the quarter when the movie was released, there were about 193 million Netflix subscribers according to company financial statements. That means that more than half of all accounts watched at least two minutes of Extraction. (Netflix counts a “view” as soon as an account watches two minutes of a show). Here is the 10 most- watched movies that are revealed by Netflix.

1. Extraction - 99 million

Photo: Netflix

Action movie fans needn’t worry that Netflix’s Chris Hemsworth-starring vehicle Extraction wastes much time on such niceties as character development. When first seen, his character is nursing a hangover while lying outside with a couple buddies. To clear his head, he makes a death-defying leap off a cliff and then calmly meditates for a few minutes at the bottom of a lake. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about Australian mercenary Tyler Rake — yes, that’s his name — other than that he’s clearly struggling with private grief and numbs his physical and emotional pain with copious amounts of OxyContin. Oh, and that he eventually kills somebody with, you guessed it, a rake.

While the characters played by such previous action stars as Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have had a clever quip to accompany that moment, the strong and silent Tyler Rake lets it pass without comment. It’s indicative of the tedious solemnity of the screenplay written by Joe Russo (co-director, with his brother Anthony, of such Marvel hits as Captain America: Civil War and the last two Avengers movies), based on his own graphic novel, that seems determined to make the proceedings as dramatically turgid as they are physically frenetic.

2. Bird Box - 89 million

Photo: Netflix

At the start of Susanne Bier’s apocalyptic thriller Bird Box, Sandra Bullock’s face fills the screen, daring the camera to break eye contact. Her Mallory is stern and commanding – Bullock’s in drill sergeant mode, not America’s sweetheart – and she doesn’t care about sounding kind. Outside, there are creatures who will kill you with a gaze. The audience never sees them ourselves, but we catch glimpses of their presence: the leaves rustle, the birds squawk and the unlucky victim’s pupils glaze over, turning red and watery as the viewers instantly kill themselves with the closest weapon: a window, a car, a desk – whatever’s handy, bloody and smash-y.

“If you look, you will die,” Mallory orders. Two small children stare back in silent fear. She’s spent five years surviving this plague-beast-Armageddon-whatsit, most of them trapped in this house. She’s outlasted the rest of her random roommates, a grab-bag of people who, like her, blundered into the first open door the morning most of the planet got massacred, a baby carriage rolling down the street as though Bird Box wants Battleship Potemkin to make room. Now, she has to shepherd these kids out of their home, into a rowboat, and down a dangerous river – blindfolded. For days. Sighs Mallory: “It’s going to feel like it’s going on for a long time.”

3. Spenser Confidential - 85 million

Photo: Netflix

Ex-cop Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) is leaving Boston for good after a 5 year-stint in prison. But before he can, two of Spenser’s former colleagues turn up murdered. Spenser reluctantly enlists the help of promising amateur MMA fighter Hawk (Winston Duke) to help him investigate and bring the culprits to justice.

Perhaps the only surprising thing about Spenser Confidential, the latest Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg collaboration, is that it’s less an exercise in jingoism in the same manner as Lone Survivor and Patriots Day, and skews more toward parody of the bloated machismo that drove such movies. Adapted from Robert B. Parker’s ready-for-airports book series with nearly 50 entries, Spenser Confidential unfortunately can’t back up its intentional evocation of the likes of Lethal Weapon, but there are bright moments here and there: witness Wahlberg throwing Post Malone through a bookshelf.

Like The Other Guys before it, Spenser is centred around an intentional parody of a Mark Wahlberg character, a loud and aggressive but ultimately well-meaning fool who often falls short in would-be acts of hyper-masculinity. As Spenser’s roommate and partner Hawk, Winston Duke continues to cultivate his charming, gentle giant persona, even if Berg doesn’t hand him much to do. The relationship between the central pair is only mildly adversarial, as Hawk simply goes along with Spenser’s wild, loose cannon investigation.

4. 6 Underground - 83 million

Photo: Netflix

“6 Underground” is about an eclectic billionaire (Ryan Reynolds)—it’s implied he invented the vibration you feel when you get a text or call—who has faked his own death to go underground and lead a team of similar mercenaries, people who are able to go off the grid to do the jobs that world governments refuse to do. In a film that’s clearly designed to be the start of a franchise, their job is nothing less than a military coup, deposing the vicious leader of the fictional country of Turgistan and replacing him with his more peaceful brother. To do so will mean murdering dozens of people in high-powered action scenes that are all vaguely reminiscent of things Bay has done in films like “Bad Boys II” and “Transformers” (he even gets a chance to use the robot sound in his climax). Just know that nothing is simple, everything will involve explosions, and the body count will crest three figures.

The team, known only by their numbers—Reynolds is #1—also includes a deadly CIA spook (the movie’s best performer by far in Melanie Laurent, who can bring depth even to something like this and I would totally watch in a spin-off series), a wisecracking hitman (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a sky-jumping kid who is introduced running down the outside of the Duomo (Ben Hardy), a former sniper battling PTSD (Corey Hawkins), and a woman with so little character that I couldn’t really tell you her specialty (Adria Arjona). The excellent Iranian actor Payman Maadi (“A Separation”) plays the brother who the team has to exfiltrate and place in power.

5. Murder Mystery - 83 million

Photo: Netflix

Adam Sandler’s monstrous eight-movie deal with Netflix arrived as both a blessing and a curse for those who had actually endured any of his last eight self-produced theatrical releases. While it allowed most of us to simply pretend he had stopped working (points for anyone who’s even aware of what Sandy Wexler is), it also allowed him to continue making the same films that even his most impassioned fans had stopped buying tickets for. His streaming output has been predictably, punishingly unfunny up until now, and one would safely expect the same from his latest, which reunites him with Jennifer Aniston, who starred with him in 2011’s execrable romcom Just Go With It.

But while that film couldn’t capitalise on its big star pairing, their second attempt, the crudely titled Murder Mystery, is a far more satisfying experience, a surprisingly nimble summer comedy that finds both Aniston and Sandler at their most charming. They star as a married couple living a rather staid life in New York: he’s Nick, a cop pretending he’s a detective while she’s Audrey, his unaware hairdresser wife who pines for more romance. He owes her a European honeymoon and on their 15th anniversary, he finally caves and the pair head abroad for a much-needed getaway. But after Audrey befriends a suave playboy (Luke Evans), they find themselves invited to a luxurious yacht party hosted by a billionaire (Terence Stamp) who soon turns up dead, leaving the couple as prime suspects.

6. The Old Guard - 78 million

Photo: Netflix

Who wants to live forever? So asked Freddie Mercury on the soundtrack to 1986’s Highlander, a film to which The Old Guard owes no small debt. That existential quandary lies at the heart of this Netflix original thriller, adapted by Greg Rucka from his and Leandro Fernández’s 2017 comic-book series. Charlize Theron’s Andromache of Scythia (Andy to her friends) is a millennia-old warrior weighed down with undying ennui. Having spent most of recorded history up to her elbows in gore, she has witnessed the same old squabbles, the same inhumanity, and wonders if there’s any point to it all. But, after taking a year off (the immortal equivalent of a bank holiday) to contemplate, she and her ageless teammates (Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli) reluctantly return to their calling as guns for hire. This time, though, the perennial quartet’s refusal to expire is captured on film, exposing their secret and leading to a showdown with the deadliest foe of all: an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company.

With regular swordplay (Andy herself favours a battle-axe), flashbacks in period garb, and a great deal of angsty hand-wringing over the downsides of eternal life (“It’s not what time steals, it’s what it leaves behind; things you can’t forget”), the film doffs a tartan cap at Connor MacLeod with little apology. But where Russell Mulcahy’s film (for all its hamminess) had a sweeping, epic scope that spanned history, The Old Guard is far more constrained. With a narrative anchored firmly in the present, hints at the depth of the immortals’ past are limited to coy allusions about Andy’s age, fragmented glimpses of her raising hell in the Middle Ages, and a rather clumsy scrapbook, complete with awkward Photoshopping alongside Martin Luther King. Beyond these superficial nods, there’s little real sense of who Andy or her companions really are; their experiences brushed past but never truly explored. Schoenaerts’ Booker opens up about how failing to age caused his children to spurn him, and there’s talk of another immortal who one day simply stopped healing and died, which made them all a bit sad. But these nods to emotional scar tissue aren't given sufficient room to breathe — the film too keen to skip over any meaty exploration of character to keep the plot moving. Kenzari and Marinelli’s characters — eternal lovers who met fighting on opposite sides of the Crusades — do have more texture to them, but even this is concentrated in a single, albeit touching, declaration of love in the back of a panel van.

7. Enola Holmes - 77 million

Photo: Netflix

It is hardly believable that there’s yet another Sherlock Holmes ripoff/spinoff – the genre named by the late critic Gilbert Adair “Shlock Holmes”. But here is Sherlock’s little-known rebellious kid sister Enola, invented in 2006 by the YA author Nancy Springer. Jack Thorne has adapted the first volume in her award-winning series and the director is Harry Bradbeer.

Millie Bobby Brown (from TV’s Stranger Things) plays the imaginative, brilliant, quirky young Enola. She has grown up alone in the country with her enigmatic widowed mother, Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter), who has homeschooled her in science, literature and martial arts – this is after Enola’s terribly grand older brothers, Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin), have left home. But Eudoria herself disappears, leaving gnomic clues for Enola as to why, and then grumpy Mycroft insists on putting Enola in a stuffy boarding school run by Dickensian headmistress Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw). So Enola has to escape, solve the mystery of her missing mum and also come to CGI Victorian London, thwarting a reactionary conspiracy to kidnap a handsome young aristocrat (Louis Partridge) who has a crush on Enola.

8. Project Power - 75 million

Photo: Netflix

When Netflix began promoting its latest entry in the summer-that-never-was blockbuster stakes, Project Power, it was hard to suppress an eye-roll of weary puzzlement at the fanboys eager to slam it as lame and derivative. Sure, it has conceptual similarities to the Bradley Cooper vehicle Limitless, to DC Comics property Hourman, to Image Comics’ War Heroes. Let’s even throw in a touch of X-Men, The Matrix, Firestarter and Jacob’s Ladder. But seriously, so what? Is it even possible for a superpower movie to be truly original anymore? In fact, what makes Project Power entertaining is its canny combination of familiar ingredients in a textured real-world milieu that gives it fresh flavor.

Well, that and the dynamic execution of co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and their crack stunt and VFX teams. Not to mention a trio of magnetic leads that start out in opposing corners but soon discover common ground, sparking up some enjoyable chemistry. The title is a tad generic, but Project Power is fast-paced, pulpy fun, with plenty of big action set-pieces and enough sly humor to conjure the escape of the multiplex.

9. Army of the Dead - 75 million

Photo: Netflix

Zombies have changed, and so has Zack Snyder. Back in 2004, his stylish, energetic debut — a remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead — announced the arrival of a singular blockbuster voice, and the reanimation of the long-dormant undead. (This time, they can run!) After spending so long in the moody, washed-out super-soap opera of the DCEU, it’s refreshing to see Snyder reignite his first love with this romp of a genre mash-up, that lets Snyder loose with his most gleeful indulgences, almost as much as his worst excesses.

He doesn’t dally. The first explosion clocks in at around the three-minute mark, and from there it is a cascade of gloriously gratuitous gore and gunfights. The opening salvo — few make balletic, slow-motion opening-title sequences quite as expertly, or slowly, as Snyder — efficiently establishes the premise, in which a zombie outbreak engulfs the city of Las Vegas, with all its affiliated vices (strippers, Elvis impersonators, Liberace-style singers, a tiger) doomed to hunt for brains forever.

There’s not enough space here to cover all of them, suffice to say that in the horror tradition, don’t get too cosy with any of these characters. But credit must go to Dave Bautista as the battle-scarred Scott, who provides a droll war-weariness (“Yeah, we’ll probably die,” he admits in the opening act) and — along with Raúl Castillo and Omari Hardwick — helps to meet Snyder’s strict testosterone quota. Kudos, too, to Tig Notaro, whose late addition cigar-chomping helicopter pilot is a highlight.

10. Fatherhood - 74 million

Photo: Netflix

The pandemic got men around the world talking about fatherhood, specifically what it means to be a dad in 2020 and 2021. So the timing of Kevin Hart-starrer Fatherhood is significant. The Netflix film – based on the real-life story of Matthew Logelin – gives Hart a chance to show off his serious side once again after The Upside.

Fatherhood follows Matthew Logelin whose wife passes away shortly after the birth of their daughter. Logelin is faced with not just grief but also new parent challenges he must work through as a single father.

Though audiences are not given much of a window to connect with Logelin’s late wife Liz, her loss resonates through much of the film as it should, particularly when he takes on the typically maternal tasks of doing his daughter’s hair for school.

Said daughter is played by Melody Hurd, who is ‘one to watch’; the young actor tackles the complex role of a growing girl who has never met her mother and is very close to her father. Playing Maddy, her chemistry with Hart is tangible, meeting his parental concern with her sassy wittiness. It is through the more heart-wrenching moments that Hurd truly shines. If you do not watch for Hart, do watch for Hurd.

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