The runaway hit on social media so far in 2019 is Netflix’s The Bird Box. You can’t swing a dead cat without hearing about it. And it has, in its first week alone, gotten 45 MILLION VIEWS.
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LOL!
45 Million views, huh?
A horror/thriller starring Sandra Bullock wandering around in a blindfold…45 million views in one week.
Sure…of course it did! Just ask Netflix, they’ll tell ya!
The problem with those numbers are no one can verify them but Netflix. The same people who told us seasons 1 of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage all got about 3.5 million views each their opening weekend. Now…you’ve heard a lot about the Bird Box…but have you heard more about it that Daredevil, Luce Cage, and Jessica Jones combined? Have you heard four times as much as all of those combined? Because unless my calculator is broken…that is what Netflix want us to believe.
***there’s an interesting article here about how none of the numbers anyone puts out can really be trusted***
Netflix wants us to believe that Luke Cage, the show that crashed their streaming service, has been out viewed by the Bird Box. The Bird Box got FIFTEEN TIMES THE VIEWERS AS LUKE CAGE SEASON 1? Wow…hat’s off to your tech support because they fixed that crashing problem like nobodies business! Why just two years ago you couldn’t even handle 3 million viewers and now here you are streaming the same movie to 45 million in one week.
…cough…
My calculator also tells me that multiplying the average movie ticket cost ( 10.00 ) times Bird Box’s 45 million views…means if it had been a motion picture we’d be talking about an opening week of 450 million dollars.
sure.
Let me put this absolute absurd lie into perspective for people who don’t pay attention to ratings ( and to you click bait sites out there who should have known better than to swallow this…I’m…I’m seriously disappointed in you. It’s you job to pretend you matter more than you do, and yet you don’t spot this???) Think about how popular The Walking Dead was a few years back. At it’s absolute peak…with years of promo and build up, it had a season finale of 14 million.
14 million for TWD at it’s peak…and Netflix says The Bird Box got 45 million?
nah
The Bird box didn’t get 45 million views. It didn’t get ANYWHERE NEAR 45 million views. 45 Million views is one out of every three Netflix subscribers…during the busy holiday season…taking time out of that busy week….to watch a horror movie…staring Sandra Bullock. And this is all from word of mouth on social media…during the slowest time of the year for social media traffic. SMH. How stupid do they think we are?
The series finale of Mad Men got about 4.5 million viewers. The series Finale of Breaking Bad got about 10 million, the series finale of Sons of Anarchy got about 9 million…but Netflix wants us to believe that the Bird Box (which NO ONE EVER HEARD OF TWO WEEKS AGO) got 45 MILLION VIEWS? I can only hope these clickbait sites at least got bribed for spreading this horsesh*t. Please at least tell that. Tell me you got something on the back end for looking like a complete moron.
The Super Bowl is broadcast for free, across the globe to any television that can pick it up…and it gets just over 110 million viewers. If Netflix could get 45 million eyeballs on one movie, in the course of a week, on their streaming service, they would right now be rearranging their entire business strategy because this would be a paradigm shift the likes of which we haven’t seen since the creation of “talkies.”
And that’s just comparing numbers…you don’t even need to know any of that to know they didn’t get 45 million viewers. All you have to do is look at the preview. It’s Sandra Bullock and two kids blindfolded…running from some nebulous enemy. That doesn’t get you 45 million viewers. That doesn’t get you anywhere even close.
I’m just talking reality here…I haven’t see The Bird Box, I hear it’s good. Sandra Bullock is no slouch when it comes to acting…but the world is what the world is. and unless the Mandela affect has stuck me so hard I don’t know where I am, this claim is complete garbage. …Netflix is claiming, I’m repeating to make the absurdity clear, that ONE out of every THREE of it’s subscribers, during the holiday season, tuned into a low action, high suspense, horror movie, with no pedigree, starring an actress who hasn’t had a starring role in 5 years, who is 50 something, who is not showing any skin in the preview, nor do they show the protagonist. That doesn’t sound like a bad movie to me…but it also doesn’t sound like a movie that’s going to get 45 million views in one week. Not on this planet. Not in this culture. Not in this time period. and not on Netflix, whose previous successes were MCU shows, and Stranger Things…Four comic book tv shows and one that might as well have been from a comic book.
It’d be nice…I’d like to believe it…I’d like to believe that one out of every three Netflix subscribers could be incited by a movie that is completely new to them, based ONLY on an intriguing premise… but it’s not true.
HERE’S WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING ( And I hate to say “I told you so”…oh wait…I have have no problem saying that.) Let me take you back to August…part of a series of blogs about the comic book crash/super hero fatigue that is coming. Where I rattled off some aspects that are worth keeping an eye on and maybe worth a future blog—
I’m just gonna repeat that last part “competing streaming services whose best chance at competing will be to erode the popularity of super heroes, by any means necessary”
The DCU is bringing all it’s super hero shows and movies into one streaming service. Disney is doing the same with Marvel.
Netflix ( and other streaming services) need to make Super Heroes seem not cool, and out of style, and do so as fast as they can.
Netflix COULD have announced the cancellation of Daredevil , Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage, all at once. But they didn’t. Why didn’t they? Because if they do it all at once it gives it the perception that they just are losing those properties to Disney…but if they do it a little at a time…that looks like it is them making decisions…i.e. deciding that these are not popular enough. It goes from seeming like bad news for them, to seeming like bad news for comic book shows. So that’s what they do, they release some bad news each week for three weeks and…then…low and behold…a brief time later, golly gee, what luck!!! up jumps the Bird Box to bring in 45 Million viewers!!!! (according to Netflix.) Wowie Zowie I guess people ain’t gonna miss those super heroes!
This whole thing is propaganda, Netflix can just pull any numbers out of their ass because no one can verify them. and dumbass clickbait sites fell for it and won’t shut up about.
It is Netflix’s best interest to get people to forget about super heroes to think they are yesterday’s news. That INCLUDES the two they have left…Jessica Jone and the Punisher. It is in their best interest for the last two seasons of each of these to fail…and fail hard. They need to use the last season of each to damage those brands as much as they can. If is FAR better for them to damage those two brands than to make ANY money off of them. ANY success they have with those shows would just be to the benefit of whatever Disney decides to do with them. There is some contract clause where Disney can’t do jack squat with them for two years….but two years in a very short time. And…there is no legal contract that can stop someone over there from quietly writing a full script, getting everything ready and low and behold when day number 731 comes up they are ready to film the whole thing.
Netflix…needs to damage these brands, and make comic book properties seems as out of style as they can. So…it’s no coincidence that a horror movie with a middle-aged white actress who has not had a starring role in years, paddling a row boat blindfolded, has somehow ( according to them) absolutely destroyed the ratings of every single Marvel show they ever had all combined.
It’s also no coincidence that they put out the trailer for season 2 of the Punisher while all this was going on…or that they are releasing that season in a week and a half.
We know Netflix is pretty good at making decent shows and promoting them…we will now get to see how good they are at taking a dive and letting something fail in a public arena.
So…why such a bizarre exaggeration? and why with the Bird Box? After all, Kurt Russel was just in a Santa Claus movie for Nexflix. Why not pretend that one got 45 million views? Kurt Russel has more star power, has had movies over perform in the past, and it’s a Xmas movie at Xmas time. Why didn’t they use this sorry propaganda on that? Because they need to separate themselves from direct competition with the Disney streaming service as much as they can. The need to provide content that Disney won’t go head to head with them on…and that leaves rated R movies…and…that’s about it. That’s what you got. Disney has everything else. Netflix is going to try to be the streaming service for grown ups and so that is why they took a horror thriller with a single mom and tweeted that the whole world loves it and it’s the biggest thing ever. as to why such an exaggeration? Because the truth would be a big fat yawn. Even if It beat Luke Cage season one by double..that would be 6 million viewers. That isn’t going to get you headlines. There are youtube channels that get that many views in a week…a lot of them.
So, is any of this going to work? (shrug) I would guess probably not. But hell, it’s worth a try.
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When Douglas is not complaining, he and his work can be found here
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