If you log onto Netflix, you'll always see a top 10 list of what movies and TV shows people in your region are watching that day. However the streamer also has a big overall ranking for its most-watched movies and TV shows of all time, which very rarely sees new names... and a recent change marks an unpleasant new record for the company.
Netflix announced on Tuesday, January 30 that one of its final movies of 2023, Leave The World Behind, has seen a surge of interest and is now the platform's 8th biggest English-language movie... of all time. It now sits above murder mystery Glass Onion and action hit Extraction, and marks one of only two movies from 2023 that made the overall list (the other was The Mother).
Leave The World Behind now sits at 322 million hours viewed in total, which is actually the fourth highest of all of its movies (it sits at #8 in the list as Netflix ranks by views, calculated as the hours viewed divided by the runtime, which stops longer movies dominating the list).
The movie is the second-longest of all the films on the list, at only one minute shorter than Don't Look Up, but it also marks a rather unpleasant record compared to the other entries in the Top 10.
That's the fact that Leave The World Behind is the most poorly-received entry in the list by Netflix watchers, as judged by the Rotten Tomatoes audience scores for all 10 films, where it sits at just 35%. For context the previous lowest, We Can Be Heroes, had a 40% audience score on the site, while the biggest hitters are Glass Onion and Red Notice at 92% each.
The other movies are, in audience ranking score, Bird Box at 58%, The Mother at 62%, Extraction at 71%, The Adam Project at 73, Don't Look Up at 78% and The Gray Man at 90%.
Note, that we're not talking about the critics' score, as these are often dramatically different. Ranking it that way, Leave The World Behind is the second best reviewed, after Glass Onion's 92% (yep, it got 92% in both rankings; it's one of only two of the movies where both scores are within 5% of each other). The lowest that way is Red Notice at a low 37%.
When you consider that Leave The World Behind got 155 critic scores but thousands and thousands of audience ones, though, it does suggest that most Netflix viewers feel this same way.
However the total view count for the movie is over 136 million, so even though people evidently aren't enjoying the film, they're certainly still plowing through it!
Leave The World Behind tells the story of a family who find their vacation interrupted by the owners of the home they're renting from. This intrusion precedes a range of tragic world events that point to an imminent catastrophe. It's a tense and strange thriller that's atmospheric though very long.
Should you watch Leave The World Behind? You have to be in a certain mindset for it, but 136 million Netflix viewers can't all be wrong... even if they're disparaging the movie afterward!
Netflix's overall Top 10 rankings very rarely change, with some of the movies on the list being over five years old, so when a new addition does claw its way onto the list it's a big occasion. At the same time as Leave The World Behind's ascension, the non-English-language TV shows list also got its first big change in a while, with Money Heist spin-off Berlin stepping into the #10 spot.
