Denzel Washington is an Oscar winner and a major star in Hollywood by any metric, but he’s not unusually seen as a box office juggernaut. While several of his movies have been unqualified hits theatrically, his most recent outing, The Equalizer 3, which reunited Washington with Man on Fire co-star Dakota Fanning, was only the tenth biggest domestic box office of his career. However, there is one place it is currently number one: Netflix.
Netflix’s numbers for the first week of 2024 are out, and they show that the most-watched movie in the English language for the week was The Equalizer 3. It beat out the number two film, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon - Part One (which is part of the director's exclusive Netflix deal and had been the number one movie on the streamer for the two previous weeks), by more than three and a half million views. It’s an impressive stat and that much more so considering the movie wasn’t a huge hit in theaters.
The Equalizer 3 had a solid opening over Labor Day Weekend in 2023, and it did open in first place, but the fact that the number two movie that weekend was Barbie, which had been out for nearly two months at that point, gives you an idea where the domestic box office was at that point. After that first weekend, the film fell off the face of the world like so many other movies, and I’d wager a lot of people didn’t know the movie even existed or were just reminded about it after forgetting it existed.
This is far from the first time that a movie that wasn’t a massive smash in theaters found an audience on Netflix. There are a lot of movies that clearly are not enough to get people out of the house and to the theater, but are still interesting enough that people will give them a try when they’re just there while the potential audience is sitting on the sofa.
It’s a trend that we’re seeing all over the industry. At this point, it seems clear that with the various streaming services and the fact that every movie is going to show up on one of them eventually, a lot of people are just waiting for that to happen and skipping the theater for movies they might have gone to see otherwise.
That said, Denzel Washington has a new movie that might become one of his biggest money makers ever, as he is in the Gladiator 2 cast. The sequel to a movie that was both a Best Picture winner and a box office smash has a lot of potential. The film is currently on the 2024 release schedule for this November, and if that doesn’t work out, then I guess there’s always streaming.
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