It’s probably time for Netflix to abandon the idea of interactive film and television content for at least a little while after Choose Love ensured that none of the streaming service’s four most recent ventures into choose your own adventure-style storytelling were worth it.
While the romantic comedy did manage to infiltrate the Top 10 in almost 70 countries after being released last weekend, the company’s own data has painted an altogether more dire picture. In addition to a critical drubbing that saw it plummet to an awful 18 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the viewing figures were equally paltry by both of the metrics used to determine the successes from the failures.
It may have been the highest-ranked new movie on the weekly Top 10 for English-language content, but Choose Love could only finish fourth for the week after accruing a miserly 8.3 million viewing hours and 6.5 million total views. In terms of the former, that placed it almost 5 million behind Gal Gadot’s Heart of Stone, which has been available for almost a month.
Following on from the tepidly-received crime thriller Kaleidoscope, the polarizing Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (that holds the lowest audience approval rating in the entire anthology franchise), and the already-forgotten horror Choose or Die (which ironically doubled Choose Love‘s tally after netting 16 million hours in its first frame back in April of last year), maybe it’s time to stick a fork in this particular experiment for the foreseeable future, because it just doesn’t seem to be working to the level Netflix clearly hoped it would.