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'Glass Onion' Is Netflix's No. 4 Most Watched Movie of All Time

The whodunit sequel was big -- but not as big as Bird Box.

Joan E. Solsman Former Senior Reporter
Joan E. Solsman was CNET's senior media reporter, covering the intersection of entertainment and technology. She's reported from locations spanning from Disneyland to Serbian refugee camps, and she previously wrote for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. She bikes to get almost everywhere and has been doored only once.
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Joan E. Solsman
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Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, stands with his hands in his pockets and an inscrutable look on his face, with other characters from the film standing in the background behind him.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery began streaming on Netflix on Dec. 23. 

 Netflix

Netflix's Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is the service's No. 4 most popular movie of all time, according to the company's watch-time stats released Tuesday. 

A whodunit sequel to 2019's Knives Out, Glass Onion was watched for 279.7 million hours within its first 28 days of release, the point that Netflix stops counting viewing time towards its rankings. It was less than 3 million hours shy of bumping 2018's thriller Bird Box from the No. 3 spot.  (By comparison, Netflix's most-watched movie ever, the action comedy Red Notice, generated 364 million hours in its first 28 days.)

For years, Netflix was notoriously tight-lipped about its viewership. Beau Willimon -- creator of House of Cards, which initially put Netflix's original programming on the map -- once said the company wouldn't even share viewership metrics with him. 

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But within the last few years, Netflix became much more open about the popularity of its shows and movies to help it recruit talent and stoke buzz. First, Netflix added a top-trending ranking to its service, so people can see the most popular titles streaming on Netflix in their country on any given day. Then it also started publicly sharing popularity stats for certain titles, publicizing the number of accounts that watched two minutes of a particular title in its first month of release. 

In 2021, Netflix launched a website posting weekly charts of its most popular shows and movies, as well as a global ranking of all-time most watched titles. The charts are updated every week and ranked by the total number of hours that subscribers spent watching them. 

The rankings kicked off an unprecedented trove of data about what's popular on Netflix, detailing the most successful titles in the last week not only globally but also for more than 90 individual countries. It's the most transparency Netflix has ever adopted for its viewership, which will take on new significance as Netflix ramps up advertising on special cheaper tiers of its service. But the information's also meant to help subscribers get a better grip on what's most popular on the world's biggest subscription streaming service.