UPDATE: “Carry-On” has cracked the Netflix all-time top 5. It’s still #1 on the charts, for the fourth week in a row, and has amassed 149M views since its December 13 debut. Expect a sequel to be greenlit in the coming weeks.
In case you’re at all wondering, and I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t, Netflix’s top 10 “most-viewed movies ever” list currently looks like this:
1) “Red Notice” – 230.9M views
2) “Don’t Look Up” – 171.4M views
3) “The Adam Project” – 157.6M views
4) “Bird Box” – 157.4M views
5) “Carry-On” 149M views
6)” Leave the World Behind” – 143.4M views
7) “The Gray Man” – 139.3M views
8) “Damsel” – 138M views
9) “We Can Be Heroes” – 137.3M views
10) The Mother – 136.4M views
What this list only proves is that being at home makes people way too openly comfortable in watching terrible movies. This is a cursed list. How many of these were actual “good” movies? I’ve counted two (and I’m being generous).
EARLIER: Jaume Collet-Serra’s “Carry-On,” an airport Christmas thriller starring Taron Egerton, Jason Bateman, and Sofia Carson, was the most-watched debut on Netflix this year. The film just nabbed 42M views in its first five days of release, which easily makes it the biggest 2024 opening for a Netflix original.
Critics seem to like “Carry-On,” it’s a watchable and decent “Die Hard” rip-off, nothing more and nothing less. That 85% RT rating is certainly much better than most of the Netflix originals unleashed on a weekly basis. The timing of it holiday debut was kind of perfect.
The thriller, which slyly amps up tension, despite its implausible twists, is set at an airport and centers around a TSA agent (Egerton) as he is blackmailed by a mysterious passenger (Bateman) who threatens to smuggle a dangerous package onto a plane on Christmas Eve.
Collet-Serra is decent in my books, and I’m not surprised he’s found streaming success with this one — his style perfectly suits streaming sensibilities. Collet-Serra is responsible for directing some of Liam Neeson’s better actions movies, like “Non-Stop,” “Run All Night,” and “Unknown.”
Nobody expected a 55-year-old NC-17 movie to be one of the surprise box office stories of the fall. Yet here we are, and this absolutely puts a smile on my face.