Comedy might be dead at the box office, but it is well alive on Netflix.
The streamer by its comedy Twitter handle announced today that the Friday-Sunday viewership for its Jennifer Aniston-Adam Sandler movie Murder Mystery was watched by 30.87M accounts, making it the largest opening weekend for a Netflix film. That breaks out into 13.37M in the U.S./Canada and 17.5M accounts in other parts of the world.
The movie by James Vanderbilt and Kyle Newacheck dropped on June 14. Murder Mystery is a story about a New York cop and his wife who while on a European vacation, get framed and are on the run for the death of an elderly billionaire. Murder Mystery reps Aniton and Sandler’s second movie together after 2011’s Just Go With It which made $214.9M worldwide ($103M domestic) off an $80M production cost.
The first 3 days of the Will Smith 2017 fantasy action movie Bright were reported at 11M. Netflix over the Christmas break said that the first week of the Sandra Bullock thriller Bird Box was watched by 45M global accounts during its first 7 days. Nielsen later verified that 26M U.S. subscribers tuned into Bird Box in its first week.
Last awards season, Netflix won three Oscars for Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma (including best foreign film and director) which hit theaters exclusively in advance for three weeks before hitting the streaming service and continuing in theaters. Deadline broke the news recently that Netflix hired Fox distribution vet Spencer Klein as their Director of Theatrical Distribution. He will be overseeing the theatrical releases of their awards season slate which includes Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, and Noah Baumbach’s untitled Adam Driver-Scarlett Johansson comedy, and more.
