Netflix might be shedding subscribers left, right, and center, but a splashy original or two can always be leaned on to draw in a crowd. The streaming service’s renewed focus on international cinema has regularly reaped massive rewards in terms of viewership, with India’s biographical action-driven drama Major the latest to make a significant splash.
As per FlixPatrol, the acclaimed epic currently ranks as the ninth most-watched title on the platform’s global charts, having taken up a residency on the Top 10 in an impressive 13 nations, securing the number one spot in five of them. When you factor that into a hefty 149-minute running time, we can expect director Sashi Kiran Tikka’s to rack up some serious viewing figures.
Adivi Sesh stars as title character Sandeep Unnikrishnan, who was killed in action while fighting against terrorists during the 2008 attacks as the Taj Palace Hotel in Mumbai, with the heroic fallen soldier awarded posthumously awarded the nation’s most prominent peacetime award for gallantry, the Ashoka Chakra.
An 86 percent Rotten Tomatoes score shows that critics were left suitably impressed by the engaging, action-packed, tragic, and altogether harrowing retelling of an awful tragedy, but it’s the 97 percent user rating that stands out. Evidently, audiences and Netflix users alike have been completely enraptured by Major, which was initially released theatrically last month before being launched on Netflix this past Sunday.
A fitting tribute without ever descending into the cloying hagiography that the biopic genre regularly falls into, Major has clearly made a sizeable impact on those to have checked it out either on the big screen or on-demand.
