Dec 28, 2022

Chris Williams -Sea Beast- Becomes Netflix's 6th Most Popular English Language Film of 2022

Netflix announced the most popular movies and series of 2022, and Chris Williams' "Kaiju" ranked as the sixth most popular English-language film of the year.

Released on July 8, "Kaiju" ranked in Netflix's global weekly top 10 in its first week, ranking #1 with 33.5 million hours of viewing; it was the only animated feature to debut at the top spot on Netflix in 2022 and remained there for two weeks.

Netflix announced in its Q3 earnings report in October that "Kaiju" was the platform's largest release of an original animated feature to date. In its first 28 days, the film was viewed for 165 million hours.

Notably, Netflix is the only major streaming operator to provide so much data on original productions. This means that, in the big picture, there is nothing to compare these films to: how do 165 million viewing hours and "Minions"'s $939.4 million box office take match up--there is no good way to compare the two.

"The Mitchells vs. the Machines," produced by Sony Pictures Animation, was Netflix's most watched animated film in 2021, but between that time and the release of "The Sea Beast," the company changed its tracking methods, so we don't really know how the two films stacked up against each other in terms of viewership.

Not an animated series, but featuring fully animated half-episodes, Season 1 of The Sandman, an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's classic graphic novel series of the same name, as the eighth most-watched title in 2022, streaming series list.

Two weeks after the all-live-action Season 1 premiered on August 5, Netflix shadow-dropped a special two-part bonus episode. One half of that episode was an animated adaptation of the "Sandman" monographic comic "A Dream of a Thousand Cats," directed by Dutch artist Hisko Hulsing ("Undone," "Junkyard"). Cartoon Brew asked Hulsing to share his stories, how he got the job, and his adaptation of the iconic literary work.