The Netflix Movies That Helped The Platform Hit A Record 2 Billion Views

Netflix has revealed that its top ten shows and movies attracted a record 1.2 billion views in December last year thanks to a surge in subscribers who had time to watch a slew of new content during the holidays.

It is the first time that Netflix’s top ten has surpassed 1 billion views in a month since it began reporting audience data four years ago. Combined with its previous record of 979.7 million in December 2023 it gives Netflix’s top ten a staggering total of 2.2 billion views across just two months.

Over the fourth quarter of 2024, 19 million new subscribers joined the streamer giving it a total of 302 million. It was Netflix’s biggest-ever quarterly increase and pushed it past the 300 million mark for the first time in stark contrast to its chief competitor Disney+, which lost 700,000 subscribers in the same quarter.

Subscribers flocked to Netflix to find out what would happen in the second season of wildly-popular survival series Squid Game which debuted on December 26. They were also tempted to the platform by original movies with the most popular being Carry-On, an action thriller starring Taron Egerton as a young Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer who is blackmailed into allowing a nerve agent on board a flight during Christmas Eve.

The film soared straight to number one and in just its first ten days had 97 million views. It continued flying high and currently sits in third place on Netflix’s list of the most-watched English-language movies of all time with 166.3 million views. It contributed to Netflix’s record performance in December when its top ten movies and shows in all markets and languages attracted 1.2 billion views as shown in the chart below.

This record was closely followed by the tally in December 2023 when the Netflix top ten was watched 979.7 million times as audiences were again indoors for much of the festive season. Combined with its performance one year later, it gave the platform 2.1 billion views across just its top 10.

Like last year, Netflix’s punchy performance that month was powered by movies. Notably, it saw the debut of The Super Mario Bros. Movie which went on to stay in the Netflix top ten for more than 35 weeks. Viewers also tuned in to watch Zack Snyder’s spectacular sci-fi movie Rebel Moon and the final instalment of British royal drama The Crown.

Less obviously, disaster movie Under Paris helped to drive June 2024 to third place on the list. Despite its implausible premise about a giant shark in a tsunami on the Seine, the French-language horror flick went straight to number one in 61 countries amassing 84 million views by the end of June, making it the fourth most-watched Netflix film in the first half of 2024. The platform also got a boost in the same month from the release of the second part of season three of costume drama Bridgerton.

Measuring the top ten by the number of views rather than the number of hours viewed creates a level playing field for shows and movies as the former tend to be far longer than the latter. There is no question about the accuracy of the numbers.

Netflix distributes more detailed data about the popularity of its content than perhaps any other streaming platform. Highlights appear on logging in to the service which are then used in reports about the best shows by the fan community.

Netflix also releases weekly results for the business community which reveal everything from the runtime of each entry in its top ten to the number of hours and times they have been viewed. In 2021 Netflix started releasing the number of hours that its top ten content is viewed and two years later followed this up with weekly data showing how many times it is viewed.

All of the data can be downloaded, sorted into months and analyzed to shine a spotlight on viewing trends. As the chart above shows, its December 2024 record was not a flash in the pan as last month also landed in the top ten proving that Netflix is still the dream ticket for subscribers.