Even though the company spends billions each year on big-name content backed by sizeable budgets and A-list stars, international originals have regularly tended to outperform their Hollywood counterparts on Netflix in terms of both quality and popularity, with Danish romantic drama A Beautiful Life merely the latest in a long line of examples.
Despite being predictable and formulaic to a fault, the saccharine tale of a young fisherman with a singing voice capable of propelling him to superstardom has debuted as the fourth most-watched movie on the platform’s global most-watched charts after securing a Top 10 spot in 60 countries around the world, per FlixPatrol.
Mononymed star Christopher leads the cast as Elliot, who catches a big break when he’s discovered by a music producer, who ends up partnering him up with her estranged daughter. From there, you can pretty much guess exactly how things are going to play out beat-for-beat, but it’s already become clear that Netflix users are a great deal more interested in the journey than the destination.
Impressively, A Beautiful Lie‘s strong showing right out of the gate means that only one of the streamer’s six top-viewed features on a global scale is an American-backed production, with Jennifer Lopez’s The Mother standing as the outlier amongst German war thriller Blood & Gold, Spanish horror Tin & Tina, Swedish sex comedy The Year I Started Masturbating, and raucous German romp No Hard Feelings.
Seven spots, six genres, five nations, and a lot of happy customers; Netflix might be irritating its user base with rampant cancellations, but the buffet of disparate content remains alive and thriving.