At yesterday’s Vox Media’s Code Conference, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos promised to be more transparent than ever before with the platform’s viewership data, and he immediately followed up on that promise. As per Deadline, the streamer revealed an updated Top 10 list of its most-watched movies ever earlier this year, which was based on the standard metric of a subscriber watching anything for two minutes counting towards that total.
However, Sarandos then unveiled a brand new Top 10 based on cumulative hours watched, which would lean heavier in the direction of audiences watching the film in question from beginning to end. It offers a completely different spin on the Top 10 rankings, one that sees Bird Box dislodge Extraction from the top spot.
The list is almost entirely comprised of the same titles, with The Kissing Booth 2 and The Irishman replacing Project Power and Fatherhood the only outliers. In fact, Martin Scorsese’s epic sits third on the hourly chart, although that’s probably got a lot to do with the fact it’s the longest entry by far at a butt-numbing 209 minutes.
It’s an interesting new wrinkle to the trends and viewing habits of customers around the world; by the previous calculations, if you’d accidentally pressed play on something and left it running for 120 seconds, you’d be contributing towards its total, but the hourly model arguably paints a more complete picture.