French heist drama Lupin stole its way to the top of Netflix’s viewership charts for the first quarter of 2021.
Series Fate: The Winx Saga and Who Killed Sara? also racked up sizable view counts, as did feature films Yes Day and Outside the Wire.
The company says 76 million member accounts worldwide watched at least a couple minutes of the series over its first four weeks of release. (Netflix’s viewing metric counts two minutes of viewing time of a series or movie — long enough to show “the choice was intentional,” as the streamer puts it — as a view.) That’s a slight upward revision from Netflix’s initial projection of 70 million views, made less than two weeks after its Jan. 8 debut.
The 76 million figure is one of the biggest raw view counts ever for a Netflix series: Only Bridgerton (82 million) and The Witcher (76 million) have matched or bested it since the streamer switched to its two-minute view standard in late 2019.
Netflix had 207.64 million subscribers in the first quarter, meaning about 36.6 percent of member accounts worldwide viewed Lupin. The subscriber growth puts it a little behind The Witcher (45 percent) and Bridgerton (40.3 percent) in terms of the fraction of subscribers who checked out the show.
Other series Netflix highlighted in its quarterly report included fantasy drama Fate: The Winx Saga (57 million views globally), Mexican thriller Who Killed Sara? (55 million), the recently renewed Ginny & Georgia (52 million), Firefly Lane (49 million) and Cobra Kai (45 million). The company noted Who Killed Sara? became the most popular non-English-language title in the United States over its first four weeks of release.
The most watched movies of the quarter spanned a diverse group. Outside the Wire, a sci-fi action pic starring Anthony Mackie as an android officer who works with a drone pilot (Damson Idris) to stop a global catastrophe, topped the list with 66 million views in the four weeks after its January release.
Up next was the Jennifer Garner dramedy Yes Day (62 million). The movie, adapted from the children’s book of the same name, also stars Edgar Ramirez and Jenna Ortega. It debuted in March. Among February offerings, black comedy I Care a Lot, starring Rosamund Pike as a con artist, boasted 56 million views, while threequel To All the Boys: Always and Forever drew 51 million views.