One of Disney+’s latest additions is already one of the most popular things in streaming. Added to the service in August, Cruella became the most-viewed movie in the land this week, and it wasn’t really even a comparison. A new report from Nielsen Research says more than 813 million minutes of Cruella were watched throughout the week, nearly 300 million more than the list’s second-place finisher in Netflix’s Sweet Girl (2021).
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Netflix then added two more features back-to-back He’s all That and Vivo, with 326M and 276M minutes watched, respectively. Cruella’s performance was so dominant in the movies category, it nearly topped the Nielsen ratings overall, a combination of films and television shows. There, it finished in third place behind two television shows — NBC’s Manifest (currently streaming on Netflix) and Clickbait, a Netflix Original. Still one of the most popular shows on streaming, Manifest logged in over 1.3 billion minutes watched throughout the week.
The earliest streaming data has likely caused applause at Disney HQ, who’s already pushed a sequel to the feature into early development.
“There’s sort of conversations about what that will be. Where this world takes us now, and then I think they’ll be diving into it. We’re in that exploratory phase right now, but they’ve got a lot of ideas that are exciting,” Cruella helmer Craig Gillepsie previously told ComicBook.com. “Maybe a whole other movie,” he added when we brought up Cruella‘s post-credit scene, which teased a set-up for 101 Dalmatians.
He added, “What I loved about the end of Cruella is… I kept calling it the graduate moment. Which, Dustin Hoffman sits at the back of the bus, and then he’s not sure if this is actually what he wanted. There’s that sort of awkward hesitation. It’s the same when she walks into Hellman’s Hall. She’s been striving and fighting for this throughout the whole film, and then she suddenly realizes the sacrifice. It’s like she’s lost Estella. She’s less that part of herself. You know? Now she has this public persona that she has to sort of live up to. That conflict I felt was really interesting, and think by the time she gets to… In my mind, by the time she gets 101 Dalmatians, she’s pretty much gone to the dark side. Right now, there’s a gray area. How she gets to that dark side will be interesting.”
Cover photo by Thiago Prudencio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
