Having become virtually bulletproof from critics, Netflix has settled into a groove of sending out exclusive and expensive original titles that more often than not take an absolute pasting from critics, but can be relied upon to succeed where it really counts by racking up significant viewing figures.
This week, the streaming service has offered a two-for-one deal, with its number one most-watched English-language movie and TV show both suffering from near-identically terrible reviews, which has obviously done nothing to dissuade subscribers that sinking their time into either – or both – was worth it.
On the feature-length front, trashy thriller Locked In may have failed to defeat equally-mundane French actioner Wingwomen to claim the overall top spot, but 28.8 million hours viewed and 17.8 million views still put it miles ahead of every other new arrival to have hit the library over the last week bar one.
Meanwhile, Shawn Levy’s bungled adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See easily crushed the episodic competition on every front, notching 37.6 million and 9.8 million across the aforementioned metrics. The two couldn’t be more different in virtually every way, but one thing they do share is a terrible Rotten Tomatoes score.
Locked In has topped out at 24 percent on the aggregation site, barely ahead of the World War II epic’s 23 percent. Just as panned as each other, they’ve done what the majority of tedious Netflix originals do anyway, and wasted no time in reaching the summit of the charts.