There are countless examples of Netflix adding critically maligned or box-office flop movies and having them become smash hits online, but the world's biggest streaming service has just repeated this feat for a divisive Best Picture Academy Award winner.
When Green Book came out in 2018 it won many awards including several Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTAs and more. And, after being released nearly six years later on Netflix UK on Saturday, February 10, it quickly became one of the most-watched movies on the streamer, currently sitting at the #3 spot.
Set in the 1960s, Green Book is about a successful black pianist (Mahershala Ali) who hires a white driver (Viggo Mortensen) to take him around on an eight-week concert tour around the deep South of the US. The two men initially spar, but both slowly learn from each other about the race and class issues that each other faces.
The movie is inspired by the true story Don Shirley, and his friendship with the bouncer Frank Vallelonga, who was his bodyguard in real life.
Green Book was a critical and commercial success when it came out, but it wasn't quite as popular with critics as most other movies that win Best Picture. On Rotten Tomatoes, it currently sits at a 77% Critics' Score, which makes it the only Best Picture winner to have a rating below 90% since 2004's Crash at 74%. That makes it the lowest-rated winner in two decades, even if its score isn't really 'low' in the grand scheme of things.
Rotten Tomatoes is far from the definitive guide on a movie's influence, especially for older titles. But the fact that it's over 20% lower than the next year's winner (Parasite, the best-rated Best Picture winner of the 2000s with 99%) shows that it stands alone as the lowest-rated movie to win the prestigious award.
However, Green Book did score over 90% in the Audience Score on the same website, which shows that audiences view it just as highly as all the other Academy Award picks. In fact, at 91% in that category, it actually beats Parasite's 90% and sits as the highest-rated Best Picture winner since 2015's Spotlight (drawing with CODA, which also got 91%).
For awards-bait pictures, we often see a discrepancy in critics' and audience's scores, but it's rare for audiences to score a Best Picture higher than the critics!
That all could go to explain why Green Book is doing so well on Netflix right now: the (relatively) middling reviews may have put some people off when it first released, but now word of mouth has spread, people know it's worth a watch.
