It’s rare to find a franchise so universally panned by critics and yet so successful when it comes to viewing figures, but the Netflix cringefest masquerading as an erotic thriller known as 365 Days trilogy has managed this feat spectacularly well.
Based loosely on a trilogy of novels by Blanka Lipińska, 365 Days, and its sequels 365 Days: This Day and The Next 365 Days, follow the story of Laura Biel (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) as she travels to Italy for her birthday and gets entangled with an Italian mafioso named Massimo, played by Michele Morrone. Unsatisfied with her current relationship and at the cusp of turning 30, Laura is at a crossroads in her life. That’s when the mysterious Massimo makes her an offer she can’t refuse… quite literally.
What ensues is filled with intense drama, sex fantasies, and the intermittent bout of bad acting. And here we were beginning to assume that any filmmaker would be hard-pressed to make an erotic movie worse than the Fifty Shades franchise.
Still, all of this didn’t make 365 Days any less popular when it came out in 2020. The movie quickly shot to the top of Netflix’s most-watched movies in multiple regions, including the U.K, and the U.S., and it remained there for quite some time. The first movie’s success spurred Netflix to make two sequels (365 Days: This Day and The Next 365 Days), shot back-to-back, and both released in 2022. The sequels didn’t garner the success of the first movie and were also critically panned, but they were still watched, whether for sheer amusement or even unironically.
Now, there have been rumors of a fourth movie ever since The Next 365 Days came out in August 2022, but is there any truth to the incessant scuttlebutt?
Is Netflix making a ‘365 Days’ 4 movie?
As far as we can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a sequel in the works. It’s true that Netflix almost always referred to the third movie as the “next installment” in the franchise, but as of January 2024, the streamer has neither confirmed nor greenlit a fourth movie. Even the cast has been vague about a comeback, with Massimo’s actor Michele Morrone teasing a return on Instagram by writing: “The end of something is always a little bit sad… but.. who knows…”
Since the end of the third movie left things open to interpretation as to where Laura and Massimo’s relationship stands, Netflix might opt to make more movies, especially considering the fact that the story has all but forsaken the source material.