It remains a huge turning point for Hemsworth, though, who has struggled outside of the Marvel universe (his many flops include Rush, Men in Black: International, Ghostbusters, Bad Times at the El Royale, Blackhat and In the Heart of the Sea) and together with the success of Chris Evans’ Apple drama Defending Jacob ( reportedly their second-biggest show to date), it suggests that our more newly crowned A-listers would be wise to stick to streaming. The combination of a star name and an action-heavy premise would surely have made Extraction a hit regardless but the scale of its numbers reflects an audience craving flashy escapism during a difficult time. Over a month into lockdown, with Netflix viewership inevitably soaring, the arrival of a snazzy new release was transformed into a major event. The film, which sees the Thor star play a black market mercenary, was launched on 24 April this year, a date that has theatrically become known as the start of the summer season (last year Avengers: Endgame was released on the 22nd), a prime slot that this year, with cinemas closed, drove blockbuster-seekers online. While the success of the Chris Hemsworth-led Bangladesh-set action thriller Extraction is an impressive win for all involved ( a sequel is on the way), it’s one that needs a certain amount of couching.
Two things to note: the following stats refer to the first four weeks of release and while post-reveal, Netflix has now claimed its new graphic novel adaptation The Old Guard will reach 72m households within its first four weeks, it’s only been out for 10 days so it’s not being included here. This week after a quarterly earnings call, the site’s 10 biggest ever original film hits were revealed to Bloomberg, an intriguing dump of information that tells us as much about what isn’t included as it does about what is.
But the platform still only shares data when it’s positive and the data is based on a viewer now only watching at least two minutes of a title (compared with the previous measurement of 70%).
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While the streamer still refrains from subscribing to any official, independently measured ratings service, such as Nielsen, tweets and company updates have shared the numbers behind particular success stories and more recently the site added film and TV specific top 10s, updated every day.