At the end of the July 4th weekend Chris Pratt thanked fans for making The Tomorrow War the number one movie in America. That's a fairly standard thing to hear from the star of a big movie release, but it usually comes alongside the announcement that the movie saw a particular box office result. The Tomorrow War had no box office of any kind in America as the movie was released exclusively on Amazon's Prime Video platform. So was The Tomorrow War really the number one movie in America?
That's hard to tell for sure but there is some evidence to support the claim. While Amazon has not revealed any official viewership numbers for The Tomorrow War, Deadline is reporting that the film was seen in 2.41 million households over the four day weekend, according to third-party analytics firm Samba TV. These numbers aren't official and so we can't even be sure how accurate they are, and even if they're right on the money it can be a little tricky to compare The Tomorrow War to other films.
As far as how The Tomorrow War stacks up to other Amazon films, we have some ability to compare. Michael B. Jordan's Without Remorse did 2.3 million views over its opening three days, putting it somewhere on par with Tomorrow War, since it had an extra day to get to 2.41 million. Amazon has previously said that Coming 2 America was its most watched original film, but there are no numbers, official or otherwise, to back that up.
If we try to compare The Tomorrow War to box office releases, the number one movie in America by that metric on the July 4th weekend was F9, which brought in $29 million. We don't actually know how many people that represents. If we assume an average ticket price of $10. then that would mean 2.9 million people saw F9 over that weekend, putting it ahead of The Tomorrow War. The average movie ticket price is America is actually a little less than that, so the number of viewers is likely higher.
Whether or not The Tomorrow War was truly the biggest movie in America over the weekend or not, there's no denying that the movie was big. If 2.41 million people had bought tickets to see it that would have resulted in a solid box office sum, especially in the current environment. And what's more, while the movie may not have broken viewership numbers for the weekend, a lot more people have likely seen it in the days since released. When Netflix releases numbers it usually goes by how many people viewed it in a month.
Because streaming films are always available, people don't feel quite the same urgency to watch that they do with theatrical releases, but they do watch. Even movies that don't have the best word of mouth still get seen, because if you have access, why not? Critics didn't all love The Tomorrow War but lots of people are still watching and making their own judgements.
