Glass Onion Surpasses The Gray Man on Netflix’s All-Time Top 10

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery has hit another milestone: Glass Onion has officially surpassed Netflix’s 2022 blockbuster action franchise-starter The Gray Man on the charts for Netflix’s all-time Top 10 movies. As you can see below, Glass Onion currently has more than 273 million hours viewed in the first 28 days of its release on Netflix, far surpassing The Gray Man’s 253.8M hours viewed in its first 28 days. 

While Glass Onion continues to be a nice win for Netflix, who acquired Rian Johnson’s mystery-detective film series for a hefty price in a bidding war ($469 million for two sequels to Knives Out). At the same time, the streaming service also paid heavily ($200M) to turn Mark Greaney’s book series into a blockbuster film by Avengers: Endgame directors The Russo Bros. In both cases Netflix’s gambling has paid off: not only did The Gray Man and Glass Onion both score big viewerships over sustained weeks of time, but they both also generated enough buzz to warrant sequels. 

For comparison, both Glass Onion and The Gray Man fall square in the middle of the Top 10 Most Popular Films (English) on Netflix. Glass Onion’s 273M hours viewed in the first 28 days is well below the top film, which is still Red Notice (364M hours viewed) and breakout horror-thriller hit Bird Box (282M hours viewed). That said, Glass Onion is still placing above some impressive competitors, like Chris Hemsworth’s actioner Extraction (231M hours viewed), and even the height of “cinema,” Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (214M hours viewed). 

As stated, Glass Onion is just the second of the Knives Out films that Netflix has in the works. Knives Out 3 – or rather, the third movie in the Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) detective series – is already in pre-production, with Rian Johnson already teasing how excited he is for the next chapter: 

“What was exciting about doing [Glass Onion] was the notion of trying to emulate Christie with a completely new story,” Johnson explained. “I’m starting to work on the third movie now, and that’s also what’s got me creatively jazzed: I don’t have to replicate the last movie at all. The goal is to strike out in a completely new direction tonally and thematically.”

You can stream The Gray Man and Glass Onion on Netflix.