Netflix’s top-10 films lists Extraction as its biggest movie yet, report says – CNET [CNET]

Netflix‘s ranking of its most popular movies yet is topped by Extraction, the Chris Hemsworth action flick viewership stats, along with others like the apocalyptic thriller Bird Box and action comedy Spenser Confidential. Only one drama made the list, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, as did only one film in a language other than English.  

Netflix shared the ranking of its most watched original movies with Bloomberg Wednesday ahead of its earnings report Thursday, which is sure include more viewership stats for other titles. 

For years, Netflix was notoriously tight-lipped about viewership. The man who created House of Cards, which put Netflix’s original content efforts on the map, once said the company wouldn’t even share viewership metrics with him. But lately Netflix has loosened its lips to help recruit talent and stoke up buzz. 

In addition to sharing viewership stats for top titles every three months as part of its earnings report, Netflix added a top-trending ranking to its service, so people can see what are the most popular titles streaming on Netflix in their country on any given day. 

Netflix’s popularity figures need big disclaimers. For one, they aren’t independently verified, nor are they backed up by detailed data from the company. Netflix is in the unique position that it can cherry-pick highlights, and we don’t have much independent data to verify it. Traditional media companies, on the other hand, have their box office performance independently monitored, and they’re at the mercy of Nielsen ratings as the barometer for TV shows.

Also, don’t compare Netflix’s numbers to metrics like Nielsen ratings or box office figures. It’s tempting to compare how many people watched a Netflix show versus one on regular TV, or to estimate how much money a big movie on Netflix would have made at the box office. But these metrics aren’t even close to comparable because the methods behind them differ wildly.

And at the beginning of this year, Netflix switched to a new viewership metric. Netflix now counts a title as “watched” if you picked to watch it and let it play for two minutes. With some shows or movies, you can turn them off before you even hit the main title sequence and it still counts as view. 

In the case of Extraction, for example, you’d count as a view before the movie even gets to a single line of spoken dialogue. (There are about 10 gunshots before the two-minute mark, though.)

All the following figures are for the titles’ first four weeks of release:

1. Extraction — 99 million accounts
2. Bird Box, a post-apocalyptic movie starring Sandra Bullock — more than 89 million accounts
3. Spenser Confidential, an action-comedy starring Mark Wahlberg — 85 million accounts
4. 6 Underground, a Michael Bay explosion-fest starring Ryan Reynolds — 83 million accounts
5. Murder Mystery, a comedy starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston — 73 million accounts
6. The Irishman, a period epic about the Mafia directed by Martin Scorsese — 64 million accounts
7. Triple Frontier, an action/heist movie starring Ben Affleck — 63 million accounts
8. The Wrong Missy, a romantic comedy starring David Spade and Lauren Lapkus– 59 million accounts
9. The Platform, a Spanish sci-fi horror movie — 56 million accounts
10. The Perfect Date, a teen romantic comedy starring  — 48 million accounts

Netflix has released stats for some of its original series in the past, too.Again, all the following figures are viewership in a title’s first four weeks of release. In some casts, projected total viewership before the title actually reached the four-week mark (which are noted):

• The Witcher, a fantasy series based on an existing franchise of books and video games — 76 million accounts 
• Season four of La Casa de Papel, or Money Heist, a Spanish language heist thriller series — projection for 65 million accounts
• Tiger King, a viral docuseries — 64 million accounts 
• You, the second season of the psychological thriller series — projection for 54 million accounts, based on first weeks’ viewing since its Dec. 26 release
• Love Is Blind, a dating competition series — 30 million accounts
• Season three of The Crown, a historical drama series — 21 million accounts (and Netflix said 73 million accounts have watched The Crown since the series launched)
• Klaus, an animated holiday film nominated for an Oscar — 40 million accounts