When you put 450 million dollars on the table for the rights to two sequels, you naturally expect a lot. But the opening numbers of “Glass Onion” don’t justify Netflix’s mega-investment (yet)…
Netflix not only shelled out 450 million dollars for the rights to two sequels to the whodunit surprise hit “Knives Out” with Daniel Craig as private detective Benoit Blanc – the actual production of “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” then gobbled up another 40 million dollars. That’s quite a budget number, with which the noble crime thriller can seriously compete even with the Hollywood blockbusters from Marvel & Co. that are stuffed full of expensive effects!
But when a streaming service shells out so much money for a franchise, it naturally expects it to subsequently tower above everything else. Now Netflix has published its watchtime figures for the past week, as it does every Wednesday – and it can be seen from them: “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” which was released on Netflix on December 23, did amass enough watched hours in its first three days (namely, about 82 million) to top the current week’s charts …
NO CHANCE AGAINST SANDRA BULLOCK
.. but at the same time also less than, for example, “The Unforgivable” in the comparable period a year earlier. The guilt and atonement drama has a particularly attractive star in Sandra Bullock in the leading role, especially as she has already landed one of the big Netflix hits with “Bird Box”. But of course the English-language debut of “System Sprenger” director Nora Fingscheidt devoured a much, much, much smaller budget.
So the fact that “Glass Onion” lands behind “The Unforgivable” (which is the 8th most-watched English-language Netflix film overall), among others, for its opening is already a bitter disappointment, even if there are factors that still give hope…
CHRISTMAS SHOULD PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE
You have to take into account when exactly the films were released, though: “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” by “Star Wars 8” director Rian Johnson was released on 23 December – and that could have had a double negative effect on the Watchtime figures for the first three days!
People had other things to do: On the one hand, many potential viewers were naturally still in the midst of the holiday rush so shortly before Christmas, which is why a lot of subscribers with a basic interest in the film probably postponed watching it for a few days -☻ the figures for the next seven days could therefore still explode if the audience has a lot of time to watch TV in the week between the years.
Families watch together: On the other hand, Christmas is a time when people sit together in front of the TV more often than average. If, for example, each member of a family of four watches “Glass Onion” alone in his or her room, this results in four times as much watch time as if everyone sat in front of the screen together in the living room (even if the same number of people watched the film in both cases).
ESPECIALLY STRONG COMPETITION
Also, don’t forget: “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” was positioned as the movie every family watches first thing on Christmas with its release date of 23 December, but then “Wednesday” interfered. Instead, the series superhit has shot to the top of many people’s must-see lists – either because they have saved it especially for the holidays, or because they have fallen in love with it and now desperately want to show it to the rest of the clan at Christmas.
We would therefore guess that “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” will not only keep up the numbers of its predecessor, but even increase them considerably. Whether it will end up among “Red Notice”, “Don’t Look Up” and “Bird Box” as one of the top Netflix films (which would actually be the minimum given the exorbitant costs) remains to be seen.
