The Netflix algorithm knows best?
Just a reminder to everyone out there, Netflix seems to know what we want even if we don’t know it ourselves. According to Variety, they’ve struck rating gold with their new Will Smith offering, Bright, that just premiered on the service. Nielsen estimates that over 11 million tuned in for the fantasy/buddy-cop feature in just three days.
Does that mean it is a significant hit? Well, that is actually hard to quantify given the metric that Nielsen uses for Netflix. Since Netflix doesn’t actually release ratings because they aren’t regulated by the same standards typical broadcasters follow, it is impossible to get exact numbers. What is known is that it did less business than Stranger Things Season 2, but more business than the recently released second season to the hit series, The Crown.
If it were as simple as to multiply the audience for Bright with the monetary average of ticket prices across the nation, it would be easy to imagine Bright earning upwards of a $100 million opening weekend. That would put in the same camp of many of the year’s biggest hits, including eclipsing the opening the weekend of Justice League. That isn’t easy to estimate though because many Netflix users already have an account and didn’t buy-in just to watch David Ayer’s new film. The subscription cost only covers one user as well, there is no idea of just how many people were watching from that one stream at any given time.
Even before Bright launched on the service Netflix had an idea of how many users were interested in the feature. It has been heavily advertised to the users of the service over the past few weeks and users were able to watch a trailer and add the movie to their queue preemptively. That allowed Netflix to give the green light to a sequel to the $90 million dollar picture before launch. Our own Rob Hunter reviewed Bright and found it mostly agreeable even if the general consensus is quite poor on the film. That doesn’t matter much to Netflix which seems to have found a winner with David Ayer’s Bright.
Related Topics: Bright, Netflix
