The Most-Watched Netflix Films Of All-Time
People love to spend their time watching Netflix, as is evidenced by Netflix's hours-watched database, but what are some of the most-watched Netflix films of all time? We've compiled a list of them for all of you Netflix fiends out there, to see which ones you've watched in their entirety, which you've still yet to watch—and one that you wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole.
Here are the most-watched Netflix films of all time, receiving the largest number of viewing hours in their first 28 days on the streaming service.
Red Notice
This 2021 action-comedy movie featuring Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and Gal Gadot is really a high-stakes action film featuring Interpol agent Urvashi Das (Gadot), FBI agent Paul Hartley (Johnson) and esteemed art thief, Nolan Booth (Reynolds), who is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice after stealing one of the world's most precious artifacts.
The high-stakes race to catch Booth and retrieve the artifact, as well as the star-studded cast, had Netflix viewers lapping up Red Notice in droves: a total 454,200,000 hours of viewing and 230,000,000 people watched.
Don't Look Up
As two low-level astronomers discover a comet is heading toward earth, threatening to destroy the planet, they must take to the media after being ignored by their superiors. This comedy/sci-fi flick features Jennifer Lawrence as a doctoral candidate, Kate Diabasky, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Michigan State University professor, Dr Randall Mindy. Among the film's star-studded cast are also Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill, playing the President and her son, respectively.
Don't Look Up's tone of people who know what they're talking about being ignored by those in power features as an allegory to climate change and the political indifference to the issue. This was not missed by watchers of the film on Netflix, of whom there were 171,400,000, watching over 408,600,000 hours of the movie.
Bird Box
This A Quiet Place, but for your eyes, was a fascinating take on the concept of blindness through the lens of a horror movie. Bird Box, featuring Sandra Bullock, depicts a post-apocalyptic world in which few things are known, except that a mysterious creature kills everyone who sees it. John Malkovich, Trevante Rhodes, and Machine Gun Kelly also star in the movie.
The different take on horror flicks was a big hit with Netflix viewers—157,300,000 of them, who watched 325,300,000 hours.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
When Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Kate Hudson and Janelle Monae teamed up to star in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, acting as a sequel to the 2019 movie Knives Out (that also starred Craig as detective Benoit Blanc), you knew it was going to be something different. This mystery movie with a dash of comedy features Benoit Blanc (Craig) reprising his role as lead detective when billionaire friend Miles Bron (Norton) invites Blanc and a host of other celeb friends to his private island, and one of the partygoers turns up dead.
With a cool rendition of Nat King Cole's Mona Lisa, the much-anticipated sequel to Knives Out (2019) totalled 320,300,000 hours of viewing, with over 136,300,000 viewers.
Netflix, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)
The Gray Man
Ryan Gosling stars in The Gray Man, an action-thriller wherein he plays Count Gentry, the Central Intelligence Agency's top clandestine asset, on the run from an ex-spy named Lloyd Hansen, played by Chris Evans—who threatens to expose his identity and agency secrets along with it. Based on The Gray Man novels by Mark Greaney, The Gray Man is to be the first in a series of films.
And, if its initial viewership are to be believed, its first three days on the service saw a stunning 88.55 million hours of viewing, and as of September, 2024, it had grossed 253.8 million hours viewed. Not so secretive, after all.
The Mother
A 2023 action thriller starring Jennifer Lopez would see her take on the role of The Mother, a butt-kicking momma bear fiercely protecting the daughter she left earlier in life. She must team up with Omari Hardwick (playing FBI agent William Cruise) to rescue her daughter from the clutches of an ex-British Special Forces Captain, Adrian Lovell (played by Joseph Fiennes).
Maybe it was the motherly instincts, maybe it was the action and J-Lo's performance, but The Mother did incredibly well on Netflix, amassing 234.7 million hours viewed, watched by more than 250 million people.
The Adam Project
Sci-fi movies seem to do well on Netflix, don't they? That could definitely be said for 2022's The Adam Project, which stars Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldana, and Walker Scobell. This sci-fi flick sees Reynolds star as time-traveling fighter pilot Adam Reed, from the year 2050, who crash-lands in the back garden of his younger self. There, Reed must team up with his younger self to destroy the time machine, built by the pair's father in 2018.
The duo of Reynolds and Garner, combined with the interesting take on the traditional time-traveler movie, saw Netflix viewership reach a stunning 233,160,000 hours and saw it hailed as "the E.T. of our generation".
Netflix, The Adam Project (2022)
Extraction
Chris Hemsworth stars as Tyler Rake, an Australian black ops mercenary with nothing to lose, hired to rescue the kidnapped daughter of an Indian billionaire in Dhaka, Bangladesh. An impressive amalgam of action with an intriguing subplot on the realities of life in a criminal underworld swallowed by drug-trafficking and arms dealing sees the "extraction" of the billionaire daughter become anything but simple for our beleaguered action hero.
Extraction was watched an astonishing 231,340,000 hours and is the eight most-watched Netflix original of all time.
Purple Hearts
Staying on-point with a military theme, Purple Hearts (2022) stars burgeoning American singer and actress Sofia Carson and British co-star Nicholas Galitzine in a romantic drama about a struggling singer/songwriter (Carson) who marries a wounded Marine so they can receive military benefits and pay off mounting debts.
Though you might not think that such a fraudulent-laden plot line would do well with Netflix viewers, they absolutely loved it. So much so that it accrued 228,690,000 viewing hours. It was the third most-watched movie of 2022 on Netflix.
The Unforgivable
A 2021 drama starring Sandra Bullock, based on a British miniseries? That's Unforgivable. This post-prison drama sees Bullock take on the role of Ruth Slater, a recently-released convicted murderer of a sheriff, whom she killed whilst he was attempting to evict her and her sister from their run-down apartment. After serving her time in prison, Slater begins her life anew and searches for her younger sister, Katie, who was five at the time of the incident.
Mired in intrigue and mystery, the plot of The Unforgivable centers on the rekindling of a relationship between two estranged sisters, under the dark cloud of a stalker (the sheriff's son), who plots his revenge. Bullock's performance and the dark, sinister plot earned the movie 85.85 million viewing hours during its first weekend. It went on to obtain a stunning 214,570,000 viewing hours in total.
Netflix, The Unforgivable (2021)
The Irishman
The Martin Scorsese epic The Irishman (2019) was one of the greatest films in recent memory, particularly one of the greatest to ever be released by Netflix. Detailing the life of crime families and gangsters, The Irishman stars Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, Scorsese himself, and Harvey Keitel.
Needing no introduction with that star-studded cast, the movie quickly amassed millions of viewing hours: 214,570,000 in total, and was watched by more than 26.4 million households in its first week on Netflix.
The Kissing Booth 2
Here's the UK rom-com sequel to The Kissing Booth (2018), which starred Molly Ringwald and Joel King, and was all about a teenage girl who meets her crush at a Spring Carnival kissing booth (shock/horror). This 2020 follow-up saw the movie take a new turn as our returning cast adapts to the challenges of a long-distance relationship, as Jacob Elordi's character (Noah Flynn) leaves for Harvard University while Elle Evans (Joel King) is finishing up her senior year of high school.
This teen romance film did reasonably well on Netflix, considering its somewhat limited audience—maybe we all secretly love a good romantic film? It amassed 209,250,000 viewing hours on the site.
Netflix, The Kissing Booth 2 (2020)
6 Underground
2019 might have been the year that Ryan Reynolds became an action movie fan/star. 6 Underground is a Netflix production starring Reynolds and Dave Franco, along with Melanie Laurent and Corey Hawkins. After bearing witness to the atrocities of a brutal regime in the central Asian Republic of Turgistan (a fictional place), Magnet Johnson (Reynolds) fakes his own death to form a vigilante squad dedicated to taking down terrorists and evildoers everywhere they rise.
Despite not performing well critically, scoring only a 4.8/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, the film did draw in 205,470,000 hours of viewing on Netflix in the first month of its release.
Spenser Confidential
This 2020 crime comedy starring Mark Wahlberg, Winston Duke, Alan Arkin, and Post Malone is exactly the sort of slapstick action-comedy that Wahlberg likes to make. Starring in the titular role as Boston Police sergeant Spenser, Wahlberg must fight against a system of corrupt police officers to hunt down the murderer of his old police captain, John Boylan, who Spenser assaulted on the job, resulting in his imprisonment.
The gripping action scenes and Wahlberg's natural gift for comedy made Spenser Confidential a hugely popular film on Netflix, leading to 197,320,000 viewing hours and the confirmation of a sequel in the works.
Netflix, Spenser Confidential (2020)
Enola Holmes
Starring Millie Bobby Brown in the titular role, along with Helena Bonham Carter and Henry Cavill, Enola Holmes (2020) is a mystery thriller that borrows from the success of the Sherlock series and franchise. Enola Holmes is the sister of famed detective, Sherlock Holmes, who must become a detective herself after the disappearance of their mother. But the search quickly turns into a larger mystery, one that must be solved, lest Britain fall.
The popularity of Enola Holmes is doubtlessly aided by the popularity of Sherlock, but still, the movie garnered 189,900,000 viewing hours and was the most-watched film over its first five days on Netflix. It also spurned a sequel, Enola Holmes 2, that was released in 2022 on Netflix, with the company confirming that a third film's screenplay has been reviewed and production is to begin.
Army Of The Dead
Post-apocalyptic zombie movies generally aren't my thing. But apparently, they are for tens of millions of Netflix viewers. Army Of The Dead (2021) stars Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, and Omari Hardwick as a band of mercenaries who are planning to rob a casino in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Sounds ridiculous? Why yes, that's the point!
Army Of The Dead is mindless popcorn-shoveling cinema, but it certainly was popular—with 186,540,000 viewing hours to its name.
Netflix, Army of the Dead (2021)
The Old Guard
The Old Guard is a 2020 superhero movie that came out at a time when superhero movies were all the rage. We're talking Wonder Woman: 1984, Birds of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn), Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, and so many more.
But The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron, details the adventures of a mercenary group with immortal powers, who must fight for their own survival after their identities are revealed. Outperforming most of the other shows on Netflix, The Old Guard saw an impressive 185,710,000 viewing hours amassed—I mean, it was the middle of the pandemic and we didn't have anything else to do.
Murder Mystery
Murder Mystery (2019), starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, perhaps should have come up with a more... well, creative title than to spell out the plot of the movie. Nevertheless, the movie is all about NYC cop Nick Spitz and his wife, Audrey, who travel on vacation to Europe, in an attempt to reinvigorate their marriage.
The mystery-comedy movie sees Nick and Audrey framed for the murder of a billionaire aboard his yacht. Working together to clear their names in the murky world of an unfamiliar justice system and sinister plotters determined to hide that it was they who murdered the billionaire, Murder Mystery was a success on Netflix, bringing in an impressive 169,590,000 viewing hours and obtaining a sequel that was released on Netflix in 2023.
Netflix, Murder Mystery (2019)
Troll
The Norwegian epic monster movie of the year, Troll (2022) , starred Ine Wilmann, Kim Falck and Mads Pettersen, following a ragtag group of people working to stop an ancient troll who's been wreaking havoc in Norway after a drilling operation in a mountain resulted in an eruption which killed workers and released the Troll.
The Netflix production was hugely successful, receiving 155,560,000 viewing hours and spurring the release of Troll 2, which is set to begin production later this year.
Blood Red Sky
The vampire movie, Blood Red Sky (2021) stars Peri Baumeister, Graham McTavish, and Dominic Purcell as Peri's character (Nadja) must fight against transatlantic hijackers who take the plane she and her son are traveling on hostage. Unbeknownst to the terrorists, led by Purcell, Nadja is actually a vampire. She must take back control of the plane from the hijackers and land it safely in the UK.
Blood Red Sky performed well on Netflix, against other vampire movies of the year, drawing in 110,520,000 viewing hours. The German film was watched by over 50 million people during its first month, making it the most successful German original title to-date on the streaming service.
Jerry Seinfeld's Film Flops On Netflix
Unfrosted (2024) is a film directed by Jerry Seinfeld, written by Melissa McCarthy and starring Hugh Grant, Amy Schumer, and Christian Slater—so, you'd expect it to be, you know, entertaining and quirky and moderately popular. Set in 1963, the film tells the story of cereal giants Kellogg's and Post, who race to create the Pop-Tart.
While hitting notes of comedy and notes of serious corporate competition, Netflix viewers just didn't er... warm to the Pop-Tart comedy. It only received 7.1 million views in its first week, making it one of the lowest-viewed titles on Netflix in the first week of a release.
