Secondly, while Netflix has stated that a user watching at least 70% of a film counts as a view, it is unclear how many of the 45m streams were complete. Firstly, it’s not a figure that’s been independently assessed unlike, say, Nielsen ratings or official box office results. The Bird Box brag has left some industry figures unsure over the number’s veracity. In December, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos claimed that their festive adventure The Christmas Chronicles had the “most impact” of any of star Kurt Russell’s films to date with 20 million watching in the first week. In October’s third-quarter earnings report, Netflix beamed over the results of their “Summer of Love” – a group of in-house romantic comedies that left most critics cold yet left subscribers fully engaged with over 80 million watching at least one of them and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before singled out as a particular hit. While the release of an actual number (45,037,125, to be exact) might be somewhat groundbreaking given their reluctance to do so in the past, it follows on from a number of equally confident, if intentionally vaguer, statements about other 2018 releases. The reaction was so ebullient that it led Netflix to temporarily remove a different blindfold by tweet-bragging that over 45 million accounts had watched Bird Box in its first seven days, the biggest first week for one of their original films to date. The blind when everyone was committing suicide in bird box /FoRBhs4MtZ- SamManning December 29, 2018 Not only did it start trending on Twitter but it soon became an unlikely meme-magnet. While it has become notoriously hard to judge the success of a Netflix drop, given how the platform refuses to release viewership figures, it was clear that within days, Bird Box was an unqualified phenomenon. Cities were strewn with billboards and digital ads, Bullock and director Susanne Bier (hot off award-winning miniseries The Night Manager) made their way around the interview circuit and the film was even given a one-week exclusive engagement on the big screen. Unlike those films however, Netflix granted Bird Box a campaign that rivaled the scale of its cinema-dwelling counterparts. In a way, it seemed like the natural conclusion to a year that saw them spew out The Cloverfield Paradox, Mute, Extinction and TAU, all malformed attempts to prove they can take on the multiplex with genre film-making. The reviews weren’t quite as toxic as those that met Netflix’s last big Christmas bet, the Will Smith-starring fantasy Bright, but they immediately put a stop to any awards chatter and pegged Bird Box as yet another misjudged original gamble. “A toy-chest apocalypse in which the rules of the game are, to all appearances, never understood,” complained the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “These characters feel so crammed together and underwritten that they add up to almost nothing,” wrote the Guardian’s Amy Nicholson. “A wannabe shocker … shortchanged in terms of suspense, scares and thrills,” said the Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy. Then critics caught a glimpse and, well, fear was far from realised. Both promising signs of a prestige project. They also targeted voters with a sneak peek Directors Guild of America screening in New York. Netflix remained confident, despite bad buzz, and nabbed a slot at the AFI film festival alongside awards-friendly titles such as Roma and Green Book. For those unlucky enough to catch a glimpse, their greatest fears become realised. While the John Krasinski/Emily Blunt thriller focused on monsters who used sound to hunt their victims, in Bird Box, a demonic force targets sight. But a last-minute marketing campaign planted seeds of doubt with a trailer that left many calling it an ill-timed, sense-swapped copy of A Quiet Place, released to critical and commercial success earlier in the year. The film, led by Sandra Bullock, was seen as one of the platform’s splashier original offerings of 2018 with a juicy set-up, an in-demand director and a high-profile pre-Christmas release.
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