Glass Onion now one of the 10 most-watched Netflix films ever

After Glass Onion became a rousing success with a small theatrical preview in November, director Rian Johnson was hoping for an extended stay in theaters. However, Netflix decided to ride the wave of hype into the intended release on their streaming service close to Christmas time. On December 23, Netflix premiered the follow-up to the 2019 whodunnit, Knives Out, and it was an instant hit.

The Netflix Top 10 website lists Glass Onion at the top of their viewing list for the past two weeks since its release. In the first week, the Daniel Craig comedy debuted at number one with a recorded 82,140,000 hours being viewed. The subsequent week had the ensemble Rian Johnson mystery at number one again, with 127,250,000 hours viewed. In the same week, the preceding film, Knives Out, had also cracked the top 10 at number 3 with a total of 16,760,000 hours viewed. Notably, it’s now the 10th most-viewed Netflix movie ever, and seems set to climb the list of titles over the next few weeks.

When Glass Onion was previewed in theaters, it opened in a limited capacity, showing on around 700 screens. That Thanksgiving holiday, it made an impressive $13-$14 million at the box office. Both director and star Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig wanted a theatrical presence, and Netflix obliged in this way but stuck to their release plan even with the possibility of making even more millions with an extended run. Glass Onion was also seemingly used as a guinea pig to gage what kind of financial reaction an exclusive run in theaters could generate for Netflix, and what kind of impact it would have on subscriber numbers, as both a positive or a negative.

In its first week in the top 10, Glass Onion was one of four movies that was not Christmas related. As it was followed by The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Bullet Train would be the only other non-Christmas-related film. After the holiday subsided and a new year came upon us, the second week Glass Onion topped the viewing list; it would show that viewers went back and revisited the original Knives Out as well as seeing a bevy of new titles make the list, including Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical. Noah Baumbach’s White Noise (which got a very mixed review from our own critic) logged a relatively modest 14.75 million hours viewed, which was good enough for fourth place.