Netflix reported its earnings for the third quarter on Tuesday, revealing that The Old Guard was its most popular film of the summer. According to a report by Variety, 78 million subscriber households viewed the fantasy-action movie starring Charlize Theron. This statistic makes The Old Guard the latest Netflix Original to reach blockbuster status.
The Old Guard was released on Netflix on July 10 and became the quiet smash-hit of the summer. It is based on a comic book by the same name and was unique in that writer Greg Rucka penned the scripts for both the book and the adaptation. It stars Theron, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli as a team of immortal warriors who have fought in wars throughout the centuries, going back as far as the Crusades. Other stars include KiKi Layne, Harry Melling, Van Veronica Ngo and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
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The movie got a solid 81 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, with a lower 70 percent rating among audiences. As for its impact on Netflix’s bottom line, only the streaming company itself has all the data, and it chooses what to release and what not to release to the public.
Netflix considers a subscriber to have “watched” a show or movie if it played for at least two minutes, and it notes that there could always be more than one person in front of the screen. The company also does some in-house calculations to measure the average time a customer spent watching the production, thus determining its popularity. It reported The Old Guard to be an overall success.
Netflix named other big hits this summer, including Project Power starring Jamie Foxx, which had 75 million viewers, and The Kissing Booth 2 with 66 million viewers. It counts all these metrics in the first 28 days after a production’s release, and it predicts that Enola Holmes will have at least 76 million household viewers by the end of its first month online.
As for The Old Guard, this success might be enough to spawn a sequel. The graphic novel itself had a sequel called The Old Guard: Force Multiplied, published in 2019.
The Old Guard is Rated R, and it is streaming now on Netflix. Stay tuned to PopCulture.com for all the new on Netflix’s upcoming titles.
