According to Netflix, Red Notice is enjoying the most successful launch of any of its original films -- and one of the most successful of any films period. In its first 10 days of release, it was reportedly watched for approximately 278 million hours. For comparison, Netflix's previous record-holder Bird Box was watched for 282 million hours over its first month in release. It's expected that a streaming action-adventure film starring three of the world's most popular movie stars (The Rock, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot) would be a hit -- but is it really as big a hit as Netflix claims it to be?

If everyone who watched the nearly two-hour Red Notice sat through the entire film, then 278 hours comes out to 139 million households watching. That's almost two-thirds of the 213 million households subscribed to Netflix. If one person per household had paid a $10 movie ticket to see Red Notice, its global box office gross would be $1.39 billion, making it the 12th highest-grossing movie of all time and a bigger hit than Black Panther or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. And given that Netflix accounts are often shared with family or friends, two tickets per account would lead to a $2.78 billion gross, the third-highest ever just behind Avatar and Avengers: Endgame.

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But do these numbers really sound believable? Sure, a Netflix film is a lower commitment than actually going to a theater to see a movie, so it makes sense its viewing numbers would be higher than the amount of visible passion for the movie itself, but it is difficult to tell if anyone has been talking about Red Notice. Even Bird Box, the reported success of which raised a lot of skepticism among the entertainment press, had more popular memes and word-of-mouth buzz than Red Notice has had.

Legally, Netflix can't lie to shareholders about viewership statistics, so there's no reason to believe the statistics themselves are false, but they could be misleading. For a point of comparison, let's use the viewership data on Bird Box. That movie was watched for 282 hours in its first month but by only 89 million accounts. If each account watched the movie once, that would come out to 178 million hours, leaving the additional 104 million hours a mystery. It's possible that 52 million households watched the movie twice in a month, but it's just as likely that some of those accounts could have played the movie on loop to game the algorithm.

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If there's evidence to suggest that Bird Box's success was at least partially gamed, then it feels especially likely that Red Notice's statistics could also be gamed. With a $200 million budget, Netflix has a lot riding on the perception of Red Notice as a success. Setting several accounts to just play the movie nonstop for days might as well be part of the marketing.

In the past, Netflix presented inflated images of success by a loose standard of what counted as a "view;" its statistics would treat someone just watching two minutes of a movie or TV show as equivalent to sitting through the whole thing. Switching its primary form of statistics from viewer numbers to hours viewed offers an illusion of greater transparency, but this system can be misleading in its own way.

If you want to spend two or more hours watching Red Notice, it is now streaming on Netflix.

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