Over this past weekend, Bad Boys For Life crushed at the box office, and it did so without franchise director Michael Bay. The director of the previous two installments did not return for the threequel, but that’s okay, because those looking for Bayhem can find it with his latest Netflix movie, 6 Underground. Which, like Bad Boys, is proving quite popular. It turns out that 6 Underground has been streamed by a lot of people.
6 Underground debuted on Netflix back on December 13 of last year, and it looks like a lot of the streaming service’s subscribers were convinced to press play on the film. In a shareholder letter (via The Hollywood Reporter), Netflix announced that 83 million member households streamed the big-budget action-comedy starring Ryan Reynolds in its first four weeks of availability on the service.
That 83 million figure indicates a serious degree of popularity and interest in 6 Underground among Netflix subscribers, but as is always with the case with Netflix, the streamer’s viewership figures require a bit of parsing out. That’s because Netflix only shares what it wants to share and its measurements are not independently verified by a third-party.
Netflix has just changed its audience metric, and the company now counts a ‘viewer’ as someone who watches at least two minutes of a movie or a show. In the past, a viewer was counted as anyone who watched at least 70% of a movie or a show. The figures for 6 Underground are based on the new metric.
So the threshold has been lowered significantly, but Netflix says that the two-minute marker treats all content equally, regardless of its length. The belief is that this is a better and fairer way of determining whether audiences made the active choice to watch something.
It’s also worth noting that that 83 million figure only refers to households, so multiple viewers on the same account still only count as one. As such, when you factor in that and that lots of people may have watched this movie with others all gathered around the television, even more people could have seen the Bayhem on the small screen. Regardless, it is clear that a lot of people streamed 6 Underground.
That is good because 6 Underground did not come cheap. The globetrotting action-comedy, which follows a group of people who fake their deaths to become secret agents and take on impossible missions to right the wrongs in the world, cost a reported $150 million to make. So although it’s always difficult to know exactly how Netflix gauges a title’s success and whether it was worth the investment, a viewership of 83 million members in just four weeks has got to make the streamer happy.
While that sounds like a lot, it actually doesn’t make 6 Underground Netflix’s biggest movie. That title still belongs to Bird Box. But it still looks like a win for the Michael Bay film.
6 Underground is now streaming on Netflix. Check out our 2020 Netflix Premiere Schedule to see what else is headed to the streaming service this year.
