New thriller, 365 Days: This Day, has topped Netflix's global rankings to become the most-watched movie on the platform right now.
Netflix has published a weekly list detailing its most popular movies over a seven-day period since November of 2021. To do this, the streamer ranks titles based on weekly hours viewed – i.e. the total number of hours subscribers around the world watched each title between Monday and Sunday of the previous week – and Netflix regularly shares four separate lists; two for movies (English and Non-English) and two for TV shows (English and Non-English).
365 Days: This Day has enjoyed a stellar week of viewing figures, clocking up almost 78 million hours in total – that's almost four times the amount accrued by the next entry down, action-thriller Silverton Siege, which has been viewed for just under 20.3 million hours.
Quite often, Netflix's films and shows enjoy such figures on the back of word of mouth popularity or critical praise, with properties often building momentum with subscribers. It must be the former in the case of 365 Days: This Day, because critics utterly despise it...
That's a bit strong, isn't it?
Nope. 365 Days: This Day has managed to score 0% on Rotten Tomatoes – which is quite a feat. That figure puts it in a select list of 41 movies to receive the grade, with Jaws: The Revenge, Highlander 2: The Quickening, Jim Carrey's dreadful thriller, Dark Crimes, and 365 Days – the film to which this new one is a sequel – among them.
Katie Rife of RogerEbert.com described it as "barely a movie", instead calling it "...the emotionally bankrupt id of late capitalism, a brain-dead miasma of choreographed sex", while IndieWire's Kate Erbland called the film's plot "gross, violent, rape-y, misogynistic".
It seems likely, then, that 365 Days: This Day's critical mauling has at least made Netflix subscribers curious enough to watch it...
What on earth are these films?
Loosely based on Blanka Lipińska's trilogy of novels of the same name, 365 Days is a Polish erotic thriller which follows Laura Biel, a young woman holidaying with her boyfriend in Sicily with the aim of saving their relationship. During the holiday, Biel is kidnapped and imprisoned by Massimo, a man who saw her on a beach five years earlier and has been searching for her ever since.
Massimo tells Biel that he'll keep her prisoner for a period of 365 days, a year-long period in which to fall in love with him.
In the sequel, Massimo's grim plan appears to have worked as the pair are now married, but the kidnapper has ties to the mafia, which is complicating their lives.
A third instalment, tentatively titled Next 365 Days, is scheduled for release later in the year.
A win is a win for Netflix...
Lots of people watching something is never a bad thing for a streaming service, but we're sure Netflix would much rather its subscribers be watching their megabucks array of original movies, as opposed to something that sounds like Fifty Shades Of Grey made by the creative team behind The Room.
As TechRadar's own Axel Metz highlighted last week, Netflix is beginning to have a problem with quality control. With recent news of its loss of subscribers and an array of high-profile cancelations, the streamer definitely needs to win new converts and the way to do that is with high-quality, interesting content offerings, not by being the home of problematic erotic thrillers.
Netflix, we're sure, would argue that you can do both, and that the almost 90 million viewing hours 365 Days and its sequel have racked up are not to be sniffed at. It just seems hard to believe that the senior types at the streaming service would want these films to be the ones everybody is talking about...
