Here’s How Many People Watched Netflix’s ‘Glass Onion’ (A Lot But No Record)

The Christmas holiday, combined with frigid weather that kept many people indoors, led to big viewership numbers for streaming networks over the weekend, and Netflix benefited.

The streamer debuted the much-anticipated sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery last Friday, and it pulled in great numbers, though it did not set any records. Still, the original was a slow burner at the box office, and Netflix likely has faith that Glass Onion will grow.

The film became the No. 1 movie of the week on Netflix, despite being available for only three of the seven-day measuring period. People streamed the film for 82.1 million hours, and Netflix estimates 35 million households watched Onion, dividing the total hours viewed by the film’s running time (just over two hours).

By comparison, Onion ranked behind the 85.9 million who watched last year’s Unforgivable in its first weekend. That movie had star power, including Sandra Bullock and Viola Davis, and ranks among Netflix’s top 10 of all time. Unforgivable also premiered at a slightly different time of year, earlier in December, when people are less likely to be gathered around the TV.

Onion solidly ranks in the top 10, ahead of such films like The Irishman and The Kissing Booth 2, though Netflix released different metrics to measure film performance for the latter two.

Onion also ranked behind The Gray Man, the Ryan Gosling-Chris Evans film that came out in July and posted 88.6 million viewers initially. It is currently the fourth-most-watched Netflix film of all time.

Because films stay on the streamer indefinitely, they have a long time to improve. This year’s Purple Hearts bowed with less than 50 million viewers over the summer, for instance, but within a month had become the seventh-most-popular Netflix film ever (an online controversy related to the storyline probably helped raise those numbers).

Netflix made an expensive gamble on Knives Out. The popular 2019 comedic mystery starring Daniel Craig that became one of the year’s best-reviewed movies, and the streamer was so impressed with director Rian Johnson’s movie that it spent a reported $450 million to secure two sequels.

It even released Onion briefly in theaters about a month before its streaming premiere. Netflix has insisted that it will focus on streaming and not theatrical releases, but giving Onion a one-week window in theaters certainly helped build buzz for the film.

“Netflix will be judging the film’s performance based on social media buzz, social media discussion about the film, who watches,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “Unless there’s a big uptick in subscribers right after the release, it’s hard to say how it will be judged, those other things are not exactly scientific data. It’s more about creating filmmaker relationships, and having Rian Johnson in your fold is a good thing.”