You can usually rely on mid-budget action thrillers to post a good showing on the Netflix Top 10 most-watched list, and there’s always at least one effort from the enduringly popular subgenre to be found in the rankings. However, over the last couple of weeks, the effects-driven blockbuster has experienced a resurgence in popularity among the platform’s 200 million subscribers.
Both Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island have cracked the Top 10 recently, which presumably has a lot to do with the hype surrounding next month’s Godzilla vs. Kong. That being said, that doesn’t explain why Gerard Butler’s awful Geostorm has been dominating HBO Max having done the same on Netflix just a couple of months ago, although the presence of Pixels on the chart can be explained entirely by the fact that it’s an Adam Sandler movie.
In fact, at the time of writing, the single most popular film on Netflix around the world is Space Sweepers, which has been marketed as the first ever big budget sci-fi blockbuster to come out of South Korea. That’s not the only foreign-language epic racing towards the upper echelons of the most-watched list, either, with Chinese supernatural fantasy The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity currently in eleventh place.
The movie was released into local theaters on December 25th last year, but after raking in almost $70 million in less than two weeks, it was pulled entirely after writer and director Guo Jingmin was hit with a series of plagiarism accusations. Netflix had purchased the international distribution rights long before the controversy began, though, and it doesn’t look to have affected The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity‘s ability to draw in a huge number of curious viewers, as it continues to balloon in popularity on the platform.
