It’s ironic that Netflix wants nothing more than to call on a cabal of franchises with the capabilities of rivaling such titans of the industry as Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, only for teen-centric romantic comedies to provide the streaming service’s most reliably popular multi-film sagas, with XO, Kitty picking up where its predecessors left off.
Per FlixPatrol, the episodic offshoot following in the footsteps of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, and To All the Boys: Always and Forever has debuted as the number one most-watched series in 39 countries around the world, even if that still wasn’t enough to usurp the throne Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story has been holding onto with an iron grip.
The feature-length trilogy scored respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 96, 75, and 78 percent to make it arguably Netflix’s greatest-ever IP in terms of consistent acclaim, with XO, Kitty continuing that trend with a strong 79 percent approval rating. This time around, Anna Cathcart’s Kitty Sony Covey takes center stage, and journeys halfway across the world to Korea in order to reconnect with her long-distance paramour to reignite their flailing relationship.
It might be entirely predictable and relentlessly formulaic to a fault, but XO, Kitty nonetheless holds a place in the history books as the first episodic Netflix spin-off to emerge from one of the company’s original films, a status nobody will ever be able to take away. Keep your $200 million epics, then; teen romance is evidently where it’s at.