The Umbrella Academy and Murder Mystery have been startlingly popular on Netflix, according to Netflix. On Wednesday the secretive streamer released figures surrounding its biggest shows and movies from October 2018 to September 2019, revealing that both projects handily made the cut with 45 million and 73 million views, respectively, trailing only behind top hits Stranger Things (64 million views) and Bird Box (80 million).
So what does that really mean? “Views,” per Netflix, count so long as someone watched 70% of either a movie or an episode of a series within four weeks of its premiere. As usual the data comes from Netflix itself, not an objective third party like Nielsen, so we’ll have to take its word for it. Since its disruptive entrance into the original-content market, Netflix has refused to share straightforward viewership data with the public, keeping the secrets for its all-knowing algorithm. On Wednesday the streamer shared the stats about its most-watched projects in its quarterly earnings report.
Per the New York Times, the streamer also revealed the top 10 shows and movies of the year. On the movie front, following Bird Box, its Adam Sandler–Jennifer Aniston comedy, Murder Mystery, apparently snagged 73 million views (the film also had the biggest “opening weekend” ever for a Netflix film; 30,869,863 accounts watched it in its first three days, according to the streaming platform). Following that, the rugged Triple Frontier racked up 52 million views; the Noah Centineo vehicle The Perfect Date yielded 48 million; and the newly released Tall Girl, about a tall girl, nabbed 41 million.
On the TV front, the comic book adaptation Umbrella Academy followed Stranger Things with 45 million views; the Spanish-language heist thriller La Casa de Papel had 44 million; and the stalker-centric You tied with the Brit coming-of-age series Sex Education at 40 million views. The list also included Ava DuVernay’s Emmy-winning When They See Us and the endlessly buzzy teen drama Elite.
While it’s hard to suss out an exact pattern from these viewership figures, it is clear that teen-centric fare dominated the TV list, while broader crowd-pleasers swayed movie fans. (Netflix’s high-profile Oscar bid from last year, Roma, was tellingly nowhere to be found.) Horror, whether it’s in theaters or on a streamer, is perhaps the most Teflon genre there is right now, second only to comic book adaptations. The algorithm is plotting as we speak.
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