David Farnor | On 06, Jan 2021

Netflix’s The Midnight Sky is projected to be one of the streaming giant’s most popular films to date with 72 million households projected to watch it in its first month of release.

Netflix has increasingly been releasing statistics for its original titles in recent months, as it seeks to demonstrate its prominent position in a competitive streaming landscape. Now, with the peak Christmas streaming period behind us, Netflix has revealed that 72 million households spent the holidays exploring humanity and the cosmos with George Clooney, according to its forecasts for The Midnight Sky’s first 28 days.

That puts it close behind the Chris Hemsworth actioner Extraction, which racked up 99 million views in its first four weeks after release, as well as Spenser Confidential (85 million), 6 Underground (83 million) and Murder Mystery (73 million), but just ahead of The Irishman (64 million).

Of course, those figures are worth taking with a large pinch of salt. Where before, the streaming giant classed a “view” as someone watching 70 per cent of a movie or a single episode of a show. Now, it’s changed its measurements that it says is more accurate. Now, Netflix will count the number of times that an account chooses to watch a title for “at least 2 minutes”, which it deems as “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional”, as opposed to an accidental click.

Nonetheless, the figure caps off a strong year for Netflix’s film arm, after Extraction began 2020 and David Fincher’s Mank and Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 closed out an impressively star-studded 12 months.

The Midnight Sky follows Augustine (George Clooney), a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully (Felicity Jones) and her fellow astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.

“In those moments when The Midnight Sky matches its ambitious reach, it’s a beautifully melancholic meditation on parenthood and loneliness,” we wrote in our review, “but more often than not, it doesn’t quite connect.”

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