Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc (Netflix/PA)
(Picture: PA Media)The second instalment of the 2019 mystery film Knives Out was released on Netflix in the UK on December 23. Since then, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery has whizzed to the top of Netflix’s charts, becoming the streamer’s third most-watched film of all time with 209.4 million viewing hours.
Starring Daniel Craig as private detective Benoit Blanc, this time the story focuses on tech-billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) who invites his friends to his private island for a murder mystery party. But things go horribly wrong when someone actually dies. The stellar cast includes Janelle Monáe, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Madelyn Cline and Kathryn Hahn.
So what are the other biggest Netflix shows and films? We’ve rounded them up for your viewing pleasure. After all, they must be quite good: numbers don’t lie.
English language
Red Notice
This 2021 film starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot is Netflix’s most-watched film - it racked up a massive 364 million viewing hours in its first month.
Written by Rawson Marshall Thurber (who also worked with Johnson on 2018’s Skyscraper and 2016’s Central Intelligence) the story follows FBI profiler John Hartley (Johnson) who reluctantly joins forces with art thief Nolan Booth (Reynolds) in order to catch the real baddie, Gadot’s Sarah Black.
Reviewers, on the whole, were thrilled by the action, but not the actual plot, with one UK newspaper saying, Red Notice “is so concerned with knitting together a mess of double-crosses and false endings that it loses the propulsive drive and excitement of the films it imitates,” and another saying, the “action caper is built for the Netflix algorithm and nothing more”.
The film was originally a Universal Pictures release, before being picked up by Netflix. It became one of the streamer’s most expensive original productions, with a whopping budget of $200 million, but this investment was a gamble that clearly paid off.
Don’t Look Up
Few would have guessed that Netflix’s second most viewed film ever would have been a climate disaster comedy, but after Don’t Look Up was released in December 2021, it garnered 359.8 million hours viewed in its first 28 days.
With a cast crammed full of stars (including Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep - and that’s not the full list) Don’t Look Up tells the story of what happens when a meteor heads to earth. The story is as cynical as might be expected from Vice director and writer Adam McKay: as the scientists trying to spread the news about the imminent threat, they are derided and/or tempted to abandon their mission by the promise of celebrity.
Wednesday
Wednesday, Netflix’s new Addams Family spin-off show, reached one billion viewing hours in December. It was a milestone only previously hit by Squid Game and the fourth season of Stranger Things making Wednesday the third most-viewed show on Netflix of all time.
The show, which follows death-obsessed Wednesday as she attends secondary school and tries to solve a mystery, has catapulted 20-year-old Jenna Ortega (whose breakout role was playing Harley Diaz in Disney Channel’s Stuck in the Middle in 2016) into the limelight, along with her cast mates Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones), Riki Lindhome (Knives Out), and Jamie McShane (The Avengers).
Stranger Things
More than 1.35 billion hours of Stranger Things: Season 4 were viewed in the 28 days after its May-release this year, making the science fiction drama the second most watched Netflix season ever and top of the English-language list.
Set in 1986, eight months after the events of season three, the old gang of Eleven (Milly Bobby Brown), Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) were back and up to equally perilous adventures.
It’s split into three plotlines: in the first, several teenagers die in strange circumstances in the fictional town of Hawkins. In the second, Eleven goes to a secret facility to try and get her powers back, and in the third, it’s revealed that David Harbour’s Jim Hopper (the chief of police in Hawkins) may be alive which sets off a chain of events.
The Standard called the forth season, “Mind-meltingly, stonkingly epic”, while other UK papers said it was, “so perfectly judged it could be the ending for the entire show” and that it was a “fist-pumping finale of every fan’s dreams.”
Stranger Things’ third series is also in Netflix’s top 10 most-watched TV shows of all time (with 582 million viewing hours in its first 28 days). With season five set for a 2024 release, that means there’s plenty of catching up time.
Dahmer: Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
The 10-part series Dahmer caused an uproar when it was released in September, with people arguing that it was unnecessary to sensationalise another serial killer in a glossy drama. The show, which had Evan Peters playing the Milwaukee killer, was supposed to explore the story through the experience of the victims, rather than overly focus on the killer’s murders, but many people said it failed to do so.
“It’s quite possible that ‘Dahmer’ – despite brilliant performances from Niecy Nash, Evan Peters, and the great Richard Jenkins as Jeffrey Dahmer’s father, Lionel – has no real justification for its own existence,” said the New Yorker. In any case, the show, which looks at the life of Dahmer as he became a serial killer, totted up over 850 million viewing hours in its first 28 days after its release.
Bridgerton
It felt like all-out hysteria had taken over the internet when Bridgerton was released in December 2020. The UK was still in a deep lockdown and audiences inhaled the romantic period drama which whisked viewers off to a version of England’s 19th-century high society. In its first 28 days, audiences watched it for a total of 625 million hours, at the time becoming Netflix’s most-viewed English language show.
So could the show carry this momentum into its second season, particularly as the UK opened up? The answer was yes: when Bridgerton’s second series was released in March 2022, it pulled in over 656 million viewing hours.
The second season focuses on Lord Anthony Bridgerton (the eldest Bridgerton child, played by Jonathan Bailey) as he tries to find a wife. And happily, when Kate Sharma and her younger sister Edwina arrive from India, he thinks he may have found a match. Both Lady Whistledown, and the numerous scandals she details in her column, returned for the second series.
Lucifer
DC comic spin-off show Lucifer was first released on Fox in 2016, but was picked up by Netflix for its last three series in 2019. Since then it’s become one of the streamer’s biggest shows, with its fifth season doing best, pulling in a massive 569 million viewing hours in its first month.
The show is about angel Lucifer Morningstar (who is played by Tom Ellis) who was chucked out of heaven, becomes the devil, gets tired of that, and so goes to Los Angeles to run a nightclub. He has a magic power where he can make humans admit their deepest desires, so he becomes incredibly helpful to the LAPD and the mysterious Detective Chloe Decker, when he becomes involved in a murder investigation. After that, they invite him to work with them as a consultant and so the series begins.
The Witcher
The Witcher began as a series of books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, which was then turned into a video game in 2008. The game was incredibly popular and spawned numerous spin-offs, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before Netflix snapped up the rights to turn it into a TV show. Its first season, which was released in December 2019, was a huge success, with 541 million viewing hours in its first month.
The Witcher TV show stars Henry Cavill and is based on some of Sapkowski’s short stories (The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny). It tells the tale of the monster hunter Witcher Geralt of Rivia as he faces his destiny. For those not familiar with the game or the books, the show may take some time to get into: “Netflix’s The Witcher is a show a lot like its protagonist: large, rugged, and not fond of explaining a damn thing,” said one reviewer.
Nevertheless, the series has an ever-expanding fan base with a prequel show The Witcher: Blood Origin, set for release on Christmas day. At the end of October, it was announced that Cavill would be stepping down as Geralt in the fourth season of the show, being replaced by Hunger Games’ Liam Hemsworth.
Inventing Anna
This was the year we were obsessed with con artists, with both New York’s fake heiress Anna Sorokin (also known as Anna Delvey) and Tinder Swindler Simon Leviev on Google’s top 10 most searched people globally. It follows then that Inventing Anna, Netflix’s nine-part miniseries about Sorokin, became one of its most-watched shows, garnering 511 million viewing hours in its first month.
It had Julia Garner playing Sorokin and Anna Chlumsky as Vivian Kent, the journalist who broke the story about the con artist (based on the real-life New York magazine article which was written by Jessica Pressler). Sorokin’s antics make for a fascinating watch and Netflix reportedly paid her $320,000 for the rights to her story. Sorokin was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison in 2019 but was allowed to move to a property, where she is under 24-hour house arrest, in October 2022.
13 Reasons Why
This unhappy teen drama, based on the best-selling 2007 novel of the same name by Jay Asher, is about a girl who dies by suicide and leaves behind a box of tapes where she details her decision. It did incredibly well, with its second season (released in 2018) pulling in a whopping 496 million hours of viewing in its first 28 days.
The show nevertheless received mixed reviews, with some viewers feeling that it was heavy-handed in dealing with its difficult subject matter: “The second season... was often frustrating and included a scene of sexual violence that came across as lurid and exploitative,” said one UK newspaper.
But Selena Gomez, who one of 13 Reasons Why’s executive producers said: “This is happening every day... Whether or not you wanted to see it, that’s what’s happening. The content is complicated. It’s dark and it has moments that are honestly very hard to swallow, and I understood that we were doing something that is difficult.”
Non-English
Squid Game
It makes sense that Squid Game is the most popular TV show on Netflix of all time: if you cast your mind back to this time last year there were few things that anyone else could talk about. The Korean show hit 1.6 billion viewing hours in its first 28 days, and has become embedded in our popular imagination, with its Red Light, Green Light scene tune being sampled in songs, and hundreds of people dressings as the show’s characters for Halloween.
The idea of Squid Game is simple but brilliant (if somewhat sick). A group of individuals, all of whom are in deep financial trouble, are invited to compete in a game show for a huge amount of prize money. The twist? Contestants don’t just lose the different rounds, they are literally killed off. Plus, they have to watch their backs as people become increasingly competitive and their morals take a back seat.
Money Heist
Since its 2017 release, the Spanish show Money Heist has become a global phenomenon, with its third, fourth and fifth series all being listed on Netflix’s most-watched seasons of all time. The heist crime drama’s fifth series garnered as many as 792 million viewing hours in its first month.
The series focuses on criminal mastermind ‘The Professor’ (Álvaro Morte) and his crew as they carry out two carefully planned heists: first, they take on The Royal Mint (seasons one and two) and then in the second they take on The Bank of Spain (seasons three to five). It’s known for twisting and turning - sometimes improbably - and exploring a wide range of topics including love, family, workplaces and social resistance as much as the actual plotting.
One UK newspaper called the Emmy-winning show “a world-changing, cultural juggernaut” while Rolling Stone said, “it gives you a dozen reasons to feel giddy over its sheer audacity”. Definitely binge-worthy, then.
All of Us Are Dead
Korean drama All of Us Are Dead is about what happens when an experiment gone wrong leads to a zombie apocalypse breaking out at a high school. The show is based on a popular webtoon (a digital comic created for smartphone consumption) of the same name which was published between 2009 and 2011. The 12-episode first season of the show hit 560 million viewing hours on Netflix and won several awards in Korea.
Fans can look forward to more zombie mayhem coming soon, as it was announced in June that a second season has been given the go ahead.
