Coffee & Kareem to Spenser Confidential: the 13 most-watched movies on Netflix this year – plus what the critics said

Jul 15 , 2020

The good, the bad and the reviled from Netflix – Coffee & Kareem, The Last Days of American Crime and Spenser Confidential. Photo: Netflix

The good, the bad and the reviled – Netflix Originals like the action movie Extraction and the comedy Spenser Confidential have been huge … but so has the animated hit The Willoughbys

When Netflix began displaying daily top 10 lists of its most popular titles on the service in February, it acted as a way to highlight some of its original content.

From the Chris Hemsworth action movie Extraction to the animated The Willoughbys, Netflix’s original movies have surged up these lists over the past few months.

Streaming search engine Reelgood provided weekly rundowns of the most popular movies on Netflix since March, based on the streaming giant’s own daily lists. Netflix counts a view if an account watches at least two minutes of a show or movie – so it’s not like everyone sat through the whole thing.

To understand the movies that have been Netflix’s biggest hits, we looked at the 13 movies that appeared most frequently on the US lists. Then we ranked them by their Rotten Tomatoes critic scores to see how they fared with the press. We only included movies that appeared on the list for three or more weeks … but we made an exception for some movies that appeared fewer times but hit the No 1 spot.

It wasn’t just Netflix originals that did well. When last year’s Adam Sandler drama Uncut Gems debuted on Netflix in May, it shot up the popularity charts; 2011’s The Help was also popular for a few weeks last month, though critics offered other movies to watch on Netflix about race from black creators, as protests against racism and police violence spread across the US (The Help was directed by Tate Taylor, who is white).

The most popular movies on Netflix so far this year ranged from animated hits like Despicable Me to critically reviled movies like Netflix’s The Last Days of American Crime, which has a 0 per cent critic score (and it’s not the only movie with that score to show up on the list).

Without further ado, below are the 13 most popular movies on Netflix so far this year, ranked by critics.

13. The Last Days of American Crime (2020, Netflix original)

Highest ranking: 1