Mary falls off the Netflix Top 10 in week 3
But only globally. It's still popular in the Middle East and a few other places.
On Tuesday, i.e. Christmas Eve, Netflix released its top ten lists for the week that ended last Sunday—and, perhaps surprisingly, their movie about Mary, Joseph, and the birth of Jesus didn’t make the cut this time, at least not globally.
Mary, which had 11,400,000 views in its first week (December 6-8) and 13,200,000 views in its second week (December 9-15), evidently got fewer than 4,900,000 views in its third week (December 16-22), as that is what the #10 English-language film got worldwide that week and Mary landed somewhere behind that.
At a glance, it might look like Mary held steady in its second week and then dropped rather suddenly in week three. But the film was only available for three days during its first week on the chart, so it has actually been declining rather rapidly all along, once you average out the number of views it got within any given week:
Week 1 — 11,400,000 views — 3 days — average 3,800,000 views per day
Week 2 — 13,200,000 views — 7 days — average 1,885,714 views per day
The average daily views dropped 50.4% in week two.
Week 3 — fewer than 4,900,000 views — 7 days — average fewer than 700,000 views per day
The average daily views dropped at least 62.9% in week three.
Mary did manage to stay on ten of the national top ten lists in its third week (after being on 83 national lists the previous week, and on 71 the week before that)—and, perhaps not coincidentally, it ranked highest in Morocco (where it was filmed) and in Israel (which is where most of the principal cast is from):
Morocco — #6 — down from #2 in week 2, same as #2 in week 1
Israel — #7 — down from #3 in week 2, down from #2 in week 1
Türkiye — #8 — down from #3 in week 2, down from #2 in week 1
Lebanon — #8 — down from #3 in week 2, same as #3 in week 1
Qatar — #9 — down from #3 in week 2, up from #5 in week 1
Egypt — #10 — down from #4 in week 2, same as #4 in week 1
Kuwait — #10 — down from #3 in week 2, up from #5 in week 1
Bahrain — #10 — down from #3 in week 2, up from #5 in week 1
Philippines — #10 — down from #2 in week 2, down from #1 in week 1
New Caledonia — #10 — down from #2 in week 2, up from #4 in week 1
Mary did not make the top ten in any North American or South American countries in its third week, nor did it make the list in any European countries unless you count Türkiye (which straddles the line between Asia and Europe but is primarily located in Asia Minor).
The fact that Mary vanished from the global list the week before Christmas is kind of reminiscent of what happened with the docu-series Testament: The Story of Moses, which was one of Netflix’s most-viewed English-language TV shows for three weeks last spring but then fell off the global list the week before Passover.1
Mary’s quick fall is also striking in light of the fact that other Christmas-themed films continued to rank fairly high on the chart. The animated film That Christmas, which premiered on Netflix just two days before Mary, was still #4 on the global chart in its third week—only slightly down from #2 the previous two weeks—and the animated 2018 version of The Grinch has been the #3 or #4 film for three weeks now.
Also worth noting: The Star, an animated version of the Nativity story, was still at #10 in the United States last week (after being #7 the week before). There is no word on how many views it got, as Netflix doesn’t break that info down by country.
As I noted last week, Mary got 24,600,000 views in its first ten days on Netflix, which automatically makes it one of the most viewed Bible movies on Netflix ever.
The only Bible film that had more views than that in the entire 18-month period between January 2023 and June 2024—which is the period for which we have that kind of info, thanks to Netflix’s semi-annual data dumps—is Noah, which racked up 28,700,000 views during the 18-month period in question.
It is possible that Mary pulled ahead of that number in its third week—it would have needed only 4,100,000 more views—but, of course, Noah’s numbers have presumably been going up too since the last data dump’s cut-off in June.
So if Mary isn’t getting enough views to stay in the weekly global top ten any more, I suspect Noah will remain the most-viewed Bible movie of the past two years when the data dump for the second half of this year comes out.
But hey, we’ll see.
And in case you’re wondering: The Star had 14,500,000 views between January 2023 and June 2024—and, as you might expect, it surged around Christmas last year and was, in fact, the top Bible movie on Netflix during the second half of 2023.
I suspect Mary will remain the top Bible movie this half-year, though.
Mary and Testament have at least one other thing in common: Mehmet Kurtuluş, the Turkish-German actor who played Pharaoh in Testament and Bava Ben Buta, the priest who is blinded by Herod, in Mary.