Mary rises to #3 on the Netflix Top 10
The film was viewed on Netflix more often in its first ten days than most Bible films have been in the past two years.
It’s official: Mary is one of the most-viewed Bible films on Netflix in recent years, and possibly ever.
The streaming platform released its top ten lists for December 9-15 yesterday, and the movie about the mother of Jesus was #3 among English-language films worldwide, with 24,700,000 hours streamed and 13,200,000 views for the week (if you assume, as the Netflix formula does, that everyone who streamed the film watched it right to the end).
Add those figures to the 21,200,000 hours / 11,400,000 views that Mary got the week before, when it was available for only three days, and it seems the film got a total of 45,900,000 hours / 24,600,000 views during its first ten days on Netflix—which is more than just about any other Bible film has had over the past two years.
Netflix has been releasing viewership data every six months for the past year plus, and in the 18-month period between January 2023 and June 2024, the only Bible film that got more hours and views than Mary has had so far is Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which got 65,600,000 hours / 28,700,000 views within those 18 months.
And if you look just at views rather than hours, Mary has already passed the 20,000,000 views that The Chosen Season 1 got during that 18-month period, and it has nearly caught up to the 26,300,000 views that the three-part docu-series Testament: The Story of Moses got between its premiere last March and the end of June.
As for the country-by-country data, Mary made the top ten in 83 countries this week. Here is how it ranked in a few places that I’ve been keeping an eye on:
United States — #6 (up from #7 last week)
This country’s top ten also had The Star, an animated version of the Nativity story, at #7 (new to the list). It was not in any other country’s top ten this week.
Canada — #10 (down from #9 last week)
Brazil — #2 (up from #5 last week)
This country’s top ten also had Redeeming Love, a semi-modernization of the book of Hosea directed by Mary director D.J. Caruso, at #10 (down from #4 last week). It was not in any other country’s top ten this week.
Israel (where most of the principal cast is from) — #3 (down from #2 last week)
Jordan — #3 (up from #5 last week)
Egypt — #4 (same as #4 last week)
Lebanon — #3 (same as #3 last week)
Saudi Arabia — #4 (up from #7 last week)
It will be interesting to see how long Mary stays on the list. Testament, the other major biblical show released by Netflix this year, was #2 on the English-language TV chart for two weeks, then dropped to #9 in its third week, and then fell off the global chart altogether—though it continued to rank quite highly in some countries.
As ever, we shall see.