Thunder Force Has Been Replaced As The Most Popular Netflix Movie Of 2021
Move over Thunder Force, there's a new most-popular movie on the Netflix for this year. And it might not be the film you'd expect
This article is more than 2 years old
Superhero films are all the rage these days obviously with new ones coming out nearly every week. So the genre is obviously blowing up, sometimes in new and creative ways. One of those films, Thunder Force, had been the leader in the clubhouse for Netflix over the course of the last year. But it finally just was surpassed by another movie on the platform. Step aside, Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer, you aren’t the most popular folks on Netflix for this year anymore. Now it’s The Mitchells Vs. The Machines taking the top billing.
Through the first five months of 2021, Thunder Force had maintained a steady hold as the most popular movie Netflix had to offer. According to a Netflix points system created by the folks over at Forbes, The Mitchells Vs. The Machines has racked up enough to overtake Thunder Force in just a little more than three weeks. Thunder Force released on April 9th of this year with The Mitchells Vs. The Machines coming out in theaters on April 23rd and then on Netflix on April 30th.
Forbes scoring system for Netflix uses the day-to-day rankings on the platform to assign it a score. It’s fairly simple. If you are number 1 for the day, you get ten points, Number 2 is eight points, and right on down the line. With this scoring system employed The Mitchells Vs. The Machines racked up 201 points to Thunder Force’s 187. According to FlixPatrol which also tracks this, the former is sitting at 7th for Netflix this past week with Army of the Dead sitting it the top spot. It stands to reason the Zack Snyder zombie heist film makes a move at some point as well.
The Mitchells Vs. The Machines is an animated comedy flick that was originally made by Sony Pictures Animation. The plan was for it to come out in 2020 but the pandemic and Covid-related theater closings put a pause on that. It led to the film getting a delayed theatrical release in April. But this was after Sony had sold the rights to Netflix for more than $100 million. That was to cover the loss of revenues at the box office. It meant for a quick theater run but then a quick hop over to the streaming platform.
Of course, this Forbes list and the actual download and streaming numbers are somewhat different things. Overall rankings in the top-10 are a good starting point proxy for how popular a movie is on the platform, but it doesn’t drill down all the way into the actual number of streaming views. Netflix hasn’t released those numbers yet and the official reporting can be few and far between. The last time they let out specifics, Extraction was the all-time most-watched film at 99 million views with Birdbox behind it at 89 million views.
The next time Netflix updates this list it is sure to look different with quite a few hits released on the platform just in the last six months. But for now, with the rankings system used by a couple of different outlets, it’s looking like The Mitchells Vs. The Machines is on a steady march up the rankings.
