How Billie Eilish's Apple TV+ Documentary Stacked Up On Streaming Compared To Beyoncé And Taylor Swift

Beyonce, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift in their documentaries
(Image credit: (Disney/Apple))

The last year has been a surprisingly great one for fans of the music industry’s biggest names. This past weekend, Apple TV+ released an incredible and unfiltered look at 19-year-old No Time To Die singer Billie Eilish with The World’s A Little Blurry. The documentary intimately tracked Billie’s explosive turn into becoming a teen icon, but how did it do compared to other recent streaming movies focused on Beyoncé and Taylor Swift?

Beyoncé and T-Swift recently worked with Disney+ to express their distinct creative visions, and they were each huge hits in their own ways. Beyoncé’s movie, Black Is King, served as a visual album for her work on the music in the The Lion King remake. Swift’s surprise documentary, Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, gave her listeners insight into her quarantine album folklore. Between the Disney+ films and Billie Eilish, Beyoncé’s film had the best opening weekend… because Beyoncé.

Per new data from 2 million Reelgood users, a streaming guide that allows its users to access its streaming services in one place, Billie Eilish’s The World’s A Little Blurry could not overthrow the “Crazy In Love” singer with her summer hit, Black Is King. However, the new Apple TV+ movie did score the No. 2 spot, outranking Taylor Swift, Blackpink and Ariana Grande in the top 5 music documentaries across all streaming services.

It’s unsurprising that Beyoncé would get top rank, but Billie Eilish falling close behind shows that the pop star has carved out a prominent status for herself, not only in music, but among streamers looking for something to watch at home. It also shows how massive K-pop girl group Blackpink ranks these days, considering both Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift were below them in numbers. The data is based on the “opening weekend” numbers between the Friday to Sunday when each music documentary came out.

Billie Eilish soared into major stardom in 2019 when her first album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, included the major radio hit “bad guy.” The Los Angeles native went from having a tight knit community of fans to a global audience, including Orlando Bloom and Justin Bieber. Her documentary serves as an up-close-and-personal look at her rise to fame, and the personal struggles she deals with amidst it all. Check out the trailer below:

In a year that has had artists such as Billie Eilish cancelling their tour dates, music documentaries such as The World’s A Little Blurry have given audiences a new way to connect with their favorite musicians. Streaming services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ do not tend to release their metric numbers, so we don’t know exactly how many people tuned into these projects, but they’ve definitely been event films for streamers. Which of the top 5 was your favorite recent music documentary? Vote in the poll below.

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Sarah El-Mahmoud
Staff Writer

Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.