Mary debuts at #4 on the Netflix Top 10

The film ranked higher in the Middle East than it did in North America.

Joseph (Ido Tako) and Mary (Noa Cohen) in Netflix’s Mary (2024).

Just a quick note to say that Netflix’s Mary was #4 on the Netflix global Top 10 for the week of December 2-8, despite being available for only three days that week. (It premiered December 6.) The film was streamed for 21,200,000 hours which, divided by the film’s 112-minute runtime, comes to roughly 11,400,000 views.

For comparison, Netflix’s three-part series Testament: The Story of Moses premiered on March 27 and was viewed for 57,400,000 hours during the week of March 25-31—which, divided by its 256-minute runtime, came to 13,500,000 views.

Testament was available for five days during its first week, while Mary was available for only three days during its first week—so if you divide the number of views or hours by the number of days that each show was available, Testament was streamed for an average of 11,480,000 hours / 2,700,000 views per day during its first window, while Mary was streamed for an average of 7,066,667 hours / 3,800,000 views per day.

Mary is already one of the most-viewed Bible films on Netflix that I know of. Over the course of the three Netflix viewership data dumps that have taken place every six months for the past couple years, only two Bible films have had more views in any given six-month period than Mary has had already, i.e. Noah (in the first half of 2023 and the first half of 2024) and Exodus: Gods & Kings (in the first half of 2024).

I haven’t dug into the country-by-country data much, but Mary was #7 in the U.S. and #9 in my own country, Canada, while in Israel, which is where most of the principal cast comes from, it was #2. (Netflix doesn’t have a listing for Palestine, but in nearby countries like Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan, the film was #3, #4, and #5.)

I hope to say more about Mary in the near future. In the meantime, I interviewed the film’s director D.J. Caruso for Christianity Today, so feel free to check that out.