‘Bird Box’ Sets A Netflix Viewing Record
There’s a reason so many Bird Box memes have taken over the internet and it’s because the film has been such a hit for Netflix, reaching more audience members than ever. Netflix themselves released a tweet Friday afternoon confirming the Sandra Bullock sci-fi horror flick officially has the best seven-day viewership for an original movie on the platform. According to the streaming giant, Bird Box was streamed by 45,037,125 accounts in the first week. The film was likely watched more than those 45 million times, as the number signifies accounts and not total streams.
“Took off my blindfold this morning to discover that 45,037,125 Netflix accounts have already watched Bird Box — best first 7 days ever for a Netflix film,” the tweet read.
This would mean approximately one-third of Netflix subscribers streamed Bird Box within its first week. The platform boasted having 137.1 million users at the end of September, so for any film to achieve what Bird Box has is quite the achievement. Netflix rarely shares numbers of its performance, so the 45 million numbers must have come as quiet of a shock to the company.
Bird Box is one of the year’s best horror films, and its difficulty to watch hasn’t stopped viewers from hitting play. Sandra Bullock herself admitted how difficult it was to film the movie, and claimed it wasn’t fun at all to do.
Netflix says more than 45 million accounts have watched its just-released psychological horror film "Bird Box." But that figure needs an asterisk https://t.co/sVly2u2vhY pic.twitter.com/hWCST9j7Kx
— CNN (@CNN) December 29, 2018
“It wasn’t fun, but it’s not meant to be fun. But I liked the fact that it did half the work for you. I didn’t have the luxury of being comfortable, and that helped. I didn’t realize that my crabbiness and irritability was stemming from the fact that I was not with my usual superpowers, which are your crutches as an actor: Your eyeballs are things that help you translate the scene and convey emotion. I didn’t have that. [But] there were two times that I had to sort of make sure I could see when I had to fall with the kids. I wasn’t about to put their lives at risk for my Method acting. But it was a powerful sort of realization of what you’re capable of when you don’t have your eyes,” she said in a recent interview.
#BirdBox is Netflix’s biggest opening ever for an original movie – https://t.co/y5hr8AyMyg pic.twitter.com/qzyWZS9P9w
— ComicBook.com (@ComicBook) December 28, 2018
It’s been a big year for Netflix original films, with the releases of Roma, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Private Life, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, and The Ritual. Roma has been given three Golden Globe nominations and is expected to procure at least one Academy Award nod.
