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‘Bird Box’ Debuts as a Netflix Best in First Week

If you tuned into Netflix’s latest original film Bird Box over the holidays, you were certainly not alone. While Netflix isn’t known for releasing any type of viewership numbers, they chose to reveal via their Twitter account that over 45 million accounts watched Bird Box during its first seven days on the platform, making it the best opening week ever for a Netflix film.

The film, which starred Sandra Bullock, followed a premise similar to John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, but instead of not being able to speak or make any noise, the characters in Bird Box were not able to use their sight or they’d be killed by some sort of evil entity. While the film was extremely well-acted and quite engaging, it has become quite the joke on the internet, spawning a ton of hilarious tweets and memes.

That extremely high number of 45 million certainly grabbed the attention of the industry and subscribers, leading to Netflix to confirm that someone watching at least 70% of a movie counted as a “view” and multiple viewings under the same account were only counted as one.

Bird Box wraps up an extremely successful year for Netflix, which found sudden hits in romantic comedies such as To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Set It Up as well as Christmas movies including Vanessa Hudgens’ The Princess Switch and the recent Black Mirror interactive film. While originally on the top of the original series food chain, Netflix has somehow found a way to take the film category as well.

Did you watch Bird Box? What do you think the film’s seven-day success means for the future of filmmaking? Let us know!