2021's Red Notice is the most viewed Netflix movie ever, but its Rotten Tomatoes score is unlike Netlix's other top originals. The streaming giant recently announced the mega-hit featuring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot was the platform's first original film to garner over 100 million views, yet it didn't get very positive reviews, so how does that compare to Netflix's top ten original movies?
Netflix announced they expected to spend $17 billion on content in 2021, over $5 billion of which would be allocated to original content. The streaming platform has produced a number of hit shows and award-winning movies, yet there's still a perception that they haven't yet cracked the code to properly compete with the quality of theatrical releases from other big studios. Even so, the platform has served up a number of massive hits, at least per their internal metrics.
While Red Notice is the first to crack 100 million views (measured by viewers who watched for more than two minutes), a few other movies in their top ten have come close. The streamer announced their top original movie content includes Extraction with 99 million views, Bird Box with 89 million views, Spenser Confidential with 85 million views, 6 Underground with 83 million views, Murder Mystery with 83 million views, The Old Guard with 78 million views, Enola Holmes with 76 million views, Project Power with 75 million views, Army of the Dead with 75 million views, and Fatherhood with 74 million views. While they're all in the same ballpark when it comes to subscriber eyeballs, their reviews are far less consistent.
Red Notice's 36 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is tied with 6 Underground for the worst of Netflix's top ten original films. It ranked only slightly better when it comes to the actual average review scores, with 4.7 out of 10, tied with Murder Mystery (which has a 47 percent Tomatometer score), above bottom-ranked Spenser Confidential at 4.6 out of 10 (and 37 percent Tomatometer), while 6 Underground is just above it as 4th worst with 4.8 out of 10.
It's not uncommon for movies with low Rotten Tomatoes scores to still perform well, with multiple billion-dollar box office earners Transformers: Age of Extinction, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon all passing the billion-dollar mark with lower Tomatometer scores than Red Notice, but it's not always the case. 2021's top ten box office earners averaged much higher, and the lowest-scoring movie of the bunch was Eternals with 48 percent. The next lowest were F9 and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, both of which stand at 59 percent Rotten.
Red Notice may not have been much of a hit with critics, but its 92 percent audience score spells a different story for Netflix subscribers. Red Notice's audience score is higher than any other movie in Netflix's top ten, with the next highest audience score being Army of the Dead at 75 percent. With an average audience score of 61 percent for Netflix's top performers (excluding Red Notice), it doesn't appear that audience score is normally the biggest factor in performance, but with such a high score, it surely helped.
The difference between Red Notice's audience score and critic Tomatometer score is 56 points, which is more than double the next highest difference, 6 Underground, at 24 points. There's multiple movies with much higher critical scores and solid audience scores, like The Old Guard at 80 percent for critics and 70 percent for audiences (only a 2 point difference) or Enola Holmes at 91 percent for critics and 70 percent for audiences (a 21 point difference) that would logically be more widely received, they saw 22-24 million views less than Red Notice, respectively. None of these viewership performances are something to be sniffed at, but the turbocharged performance of Red Notice stands apart.
After Red Notice, Extraction is the next highest performing movie with 99 million views, which is only a marginal difference, yet their Rotten Tomatoes scores look nothing alike. Extraction scored a solid, but not spectacular, 67 percent with critics and a similarly solid 69 percent with audiences. Bird Box is next up with 89 million views and is once again unique from Extraction and Red Notice with a slight step down to 64 percent for its critic score and a Rotten 57 percent audience score.
Altogether, seven of the top 11 Netflix original movies are rated Fresh by critics, while four (including Red Notice) are rated Rotten, and seven of the 11 have Fresh audience scores, with another four coming in Rotten with audiences. If that split weren't inconsistent enough to begin with, six are rated Fresh by both critics and audiences, two are rated Rotten by critics and Fresh by audiences, three are rated Fresh by critics and Rotten by audiences, and two are rated Rotten by both critics and audiences.
While the majority of Netflix's top original films are fresh across the board, six out of 11 isn't the strongest correlation, especially when the other permutations are so broadly split. The easiest conclusion to make is that Rotten Tomatoes isn't a major influencer on Netflix viewership, which makes a lot of sense, considering Netflix is so algorithmically driven, the goal of the platform is to match people with content they're interested in, providing a "match" score based on other content viewed by the in lieu of a critical score. Audiences are also far less likely concerned with reviews for streaming content anyway, since the "purchase" barrier is so low. Netflix content is free and instantly available, so the "risk" is lower, and it's almost easier to simply start watching a movie to see if you like it than it is to look up reviews. Conversely, it's much more expensive and time-consuming to go to the theater, where, if the movie isn't enjoyable, you've just wasted time and money.
Fresh Rotten Tomatoes scores may not boost box office as a rule, just as Rotten scores don't automatically make a movie flop, but Rotten Tomatoes claims Fresh movies, on average, perform better than Rotten movies at the box office. While we're only looking at the cream of the crop Netflix performers here, where there's no trend, it'd certainly be interesting to see if the larger library of Netflix original content follows the same rule, or if it bucks Rotten Tomatoes influence in the same fashion as Red Notice and its top performers.
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