The Killer, a David Fincher-directed psychological drama starring David Fassbender as a self-motivational hitman trying to overcome a job gone disastrously wrong, debuted to 55.7 million viewing minutes, scoring Netflix's best movie opening in three months.
The Killer touted something kind rare in a Netflix movie — solid critical backing, with The Smiths-infused film, also starring Tilda Swinton, scoring 86% among the navel-gazing set on Rotten Tomatoes.
Also tallying more than 27 million views or the week of November 6-12, The Killer had Netflix's biggest English-language movie performance since Gal Gadot action film Heart of Stone premiered to 69.6 million streaming hours back on the week of August 7-13.
Last week's rankings: Should We Re-Title It, 'All the Shows They Didn't See'? — Netflix Weekly Rankings for Oct. 30 - Nov. 5
But Netflix remains in a prolonged viewing slump, based on the streaming company's own metrics for its top shows.
In June, Netflix replaced engagement (hours viewed) with initiated program "views" as the metric for which it ranks its four top 10 categories each week: English-language films, non-English-language films, English-language TV shows and non-English-language TV shows.
It's not a perfect comparison anymore, but when we added up the minutes viewed for each of Netflix's four categories last week, and compared it to the comparable week from last year (November 7-13, 2022), we found that overall viewing was down 31%.
Streaming in Netflix's biggest category, English-language TV series, was less than half of what it was a year ago, according to our Next TV tally.
Among English-language TV shows, World War II-based historical miniseries drama All the Light We Cannot See grew its audience narrowly from its premiere week, leading all Netflix English-language series for the week of November 6-12 with 38.7 million viewing hours and 10.1 million views.
No Netflix movie or TV show besides The Killer managed to meet or surpass at least 40 million viewing hours. For the week of November 7-13, 2022, seven shows met or surpassed that mark.
