Movies That Are Surprising Hits on Netflix

I have a new ritual every Tuesday afternoon: I head to Netflix’s Top 10 website, and I see what weird stuff is popular on Netflix.

Why? I don’t know. I guess I’m just fascinated what movies translate around the world, and which do not. At the present moment, two of Netflix’s homegrown originals are big chart-topping successes: The Adam Sandler sports movie Hustle and the action thriller Interceptor. If you peruse Netflix’s weekly top ten lists, which are available for every country on the planet that offers the streaming service, you’ll see that after those two original hits many of the most popular movies are older titles. Often they’re not even things that were popular favorites when they were originally released in theaters. In some cases, they were out and out flops, both critically and commercially.

For proof, here are ten library titles that are currently very popular on Netflix all over the world (in some cases they are hits in more than a dozen different countries simultaneously). Why did these random (sometimes extremely crummy) films connect with audiences on streaming now? I have no idea. But suddenly, viewers all over the world are consuming millions of hours of a 25-year-old disaster movie about a deadly asteroid. Go figure.