Gal Gadot spy thriller movie Heart of Stone topped all of Netflix’s content last week with 69.6 million hours viewed and 33.1 million viewing sessions.
Among English-language movies on Netflix, the number of sessions generated by the film ranked second only to Extraction 2, which generated 42.8 million views. Netflix started including this metric in its Global Top 10 rankings back in June.
Overall, Heart of Stone's performance ranked third best overall this year among domestic films for Netflix, trailing only Chris Hemsworth vehicle Extraction 2 and Jennifer Lopez title The Mother.
Scoring only 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, Heart of Stone also further burnished Netflix's paint-by-numbers creative reputation, with critics dropping words and phrases like “sloppy," "forgettable," and "tasteless misfire" into their reviews.
Last week's coverage: ‘Lincoln Lawyer’ Perks Up With Drop of Season 2’s Back Half, but the Viewership Slump Continues — Netflix Weekly Rankings for July 31-August 6
Despite the decent Heart of Stone performance, Netflix's prolonged viewership slump rolled on.
The opioid-crisis-themed, Matthew Broderick-led Painkiller, which was the No. 1 show in what is Netflix's biggest programming quadrant, English-language TV series, only drummed up 35.9 million viewing hours for the week of August 7-13. That does not at all compare favorably to Netflix's top domestic show for the same week on the calendar last year, The Sandman, which generated 127 million viewing hours.
Last week, total viewership for Netflix's English-language series was down more than 50% vs. that year-ago week in August 2022.
Netflix has had greater audience success with local-language shows recently. Last week, Korean romantic drama King the Land continued to perform, leading its category in time streamed with 60.6 million viewing hours.
