Red Notice has officially become the most watched movie in Netflix history. According to the streaming service, Red Notice racked up 328.8 million viewing hours — taking over the title from its previous holder, 2018’s Bird Box starring Sandra Bullock.
While Bird Box took four weeks to amass its 282 million hours of streaming, Red Notice reached the top spot in just 18 days. Reportedly, 50 percent of all Netflix users have currently seen the action comedy movie.
Dropping on Netflix earlier this month, Red Notice remains on the in-app Top 10 list in 94 countries, the streamer claims. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot, the movie follows an FBI profiler (Johnson) who teams up with the world���s greatest art thief (Reynolds) to catch another criminal (Gadot). Johnson’s own Seven Bucks Productions produced the film, with Rawson Marshall Thurber at the helm as director and writer.
Originally, Red Notice was slated for release by Universal Pictures before being acquired by Netflix for distribution. At Universal, Red Notice would have likely had a purely theatrical release, at least initially. Instead, the $200 million film had a limited theatrical release by Netflix on November 5, debuting on the streaming platform just one week later.
Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of viewers chose to watch the movie at home. While Netflix doesn’t report official box office numbers for their theatrical releases, Deadline reported in November that the running gross for the movie was “well north of $2 million.” Traditionally, a blockbuster movie of this scale would be expected to earn much, much more. But Netflix is less concerned with initial profits as it is with building loyalty among its viewer base, and in this regard, they succeeded.
Despite lukewarm critical reception, Red Notice’s popularity has all-but-guaranteed a sequel. In late November, Thurber stated that if a sequel were to be greenlit, the “only responsible thing” would be to film two installments back-to-back.
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(These numbers refer to the number of accounts that tuned in during a film’s first 28 days of release. To qualify, ann account had to watch at least two minutes of a movie.)
