The last twelve months have been a nightmare for pretty much everyone except the bean counters that work for the world’s biggest streaming services, who have been enjoying record viewership numbers across the board since the Coronavirus pandemic took hold. In fact, seven of Netflix’s Top 10 most-watched original movies ever arrived between March and December of last year alone, and the platform has been continuing that winning streak during the first quarter of 2021.
Leading the charge is Anthony Mackie‘s sci-fi actioner Outside the Wire, which was viewed by 66 million households in the first four weeks it was available. While the movie itself was nothing to write home about and delivered a fairly standard militarized shoot em’ up with a cybernetic twist, it was nonetheless a fantastic showcase for the leading man’s action hero chops.
Those numbers would tie Outside the Wire with The Kissing Booth 2 as Netflix’s tenth most popular in-house film of all-time, which is an impressive showing for a pic that wasn’t expected to fly so high, and holds a middling Rotten Tomatoes score of 37% as well. Family comedy Yes Day, meanwhile, managed to draw in 62 million viewers, while Rosamund Pike’s Golden Globe winning performance in I Care a Lot helped the blackly comic crime movie reach 56 million households.
It’s looking like another stellar year is on the cards for Netflix’s lineup of original features, then, and we’ve barely even scratched the surface based on the 2021 sizzle reel that teased the biggest hitters still to come over the next eight months. Outside the Wire is yet another example of a recurring Netflix theme, though, where a project arrives with a bang and generates plenty of buzz for a couple of weeks before instantly fading away, because you won’t have heard anybody mention it at all for a long time.
