The #1 Streaming Movie Has A 6% Rotten Tomatoes Score

May 18, 2023, 8:26pm

Nielsen has released their latest figures for the top streaming movies and TV shows, and there’s a surprising film at #1. According to the third party metric provider, the drama-thriller The Snowman was the #1 movie across all streaming platforms in the United States for the week of April 17 to April 23. For those unaware, Michael Fassbender stars in the 2017 movie which was based on Jo Nesbø’s novel of the same name. A flop at the box office, The Snowman is well known to bad movie fans because it fits the bill very well, as of this writing it has just a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

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According to Nielsen’s new numbers, The Snowman was streamed over 415 million minutes over the course of that week. Since the film clocks in at two hours long, some quick math tells us that the movie was seemingly watched 3 million times by users. To take it a step further, The Snowman only made $6.67 million at the domestic box office upon its release in 2017. Going by the average movie ticket cost at that time, roughly $10, meaning only about 667k people went to see it upon release. We can safely see that (assuming all these figures are accurate) that more people watched The Snowman on Netflix in this one week timeframe last month than did the entire time it played in movie theaters

So how does this happen? Considering the millions that streamers pump into original movies and shows, how does a six-year-old movie that everyone, even the director, agrees is bad, become the most watched streaming movie in America? The most surprising thing about this is that it happens more often than you think.

With every new month, and sometimes in the middle of them, Netflix and other streamer will get a fresh wave of new titles as the license for other movies and show expire in one place and get picked up in another. It’s pretty common for an older film to arrive on Netflix and for subscribers to stream it enough to make a dent in the top 10.

If you want an idea of how much people watch more television on streaming than movies, look no further than the fact that The Snowman failed to make the “Overall” streaming Top 10. According to Nielsen, the #10 most watched piece of content on all of streaming in that week of April was Bluey on Disney+, streamed over 713 million minutes in the same time that The Snowman was watched 415 million minutes. You can see the other Top 10 streaming movies according to Nielsen below.