Glass Onion Unpeels On Netflix With A Sizeable Premiere
Following its first weekend on Netflix, which coincided with both Christmas and Hanukkah, we now know the impressive number of hours people spent watching "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery" on the streaming service.
The second film in Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" series, "Glass Onion" follows Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc, who attends a murder mystery party hosted by a tech billionaire (Edward Norton) on a remote island near Greece. But as the evening progresses, it becomes clear that something other than fun and games is afoot. Filling out the ensemble cast are Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson, and Leslie Odom Jr. as the billionaire's sycophantic inner circle, along with Janelle Monae as a woman with more than enough reason to hold a grudge against him.
Already a compelling premise, "Glass Onion" had the further advantage of following up on 2019's "Knives Out," the first movie to introduce audiences to Blanc with a tightly wound murder mystery of its own. With that film having spawned a minor renaissance in whodunit flicks over the past several years, the sequel was sure to draw a crowd, and now the figures are in to prove its success.
Glass Onion tops the Netflix charts over the holiday weekend
According to Variety, "Glass Onion" topped Netflix's weekly film rankings over the holiday weekend, garnering 82.1 million hours of watch time according to the streaming service. For context, that's 9,372 years' worth of Daniel Craig talking in a Southern drawl. Extrapolating on that data, Netflix further estimates that 35 million households streamed Rian Johnson's latest feature.
The figures were likely bolstered by the film's Christmas weekend streaming release, which ensured that many families were at home, looking for the perfect movie to pass the time on the holidays. Additionally, "Glass Onion" saw a limited theatrical release in November, which brought home $13 million at the box office (via Box Office Mojo).
While it's impossible to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the opening weekends for "Glass Onion," which was made for streaming, and the original "Knives Out," which saw a traditional theatrical release, the 2019 film pulled in an opening weekend haul of $26.7 million when it arrived in theaters during the Thanksgiving weekend of that year.