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Several Unlikely Movies Have Climbed High On Netflix’s Top 10 List

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Just a few days ago, Netflix’s NFLX Top 10 list looked pretty normal. The streaming service’s $200 million The Gray Man sat atop the rankings, with other Netflix productions like The Sea Beast and The Man from Toronto and Persuasion filling out the rest. Sing 2 was in the midst of an incredible Top 10 streak, and blockbusters like 12 Strong and CHiPS were enjoying lots of success.

But today? Today things are very, very different. And you’d be surprised what films are currently dominating the world’s most popular streaming service.

Here’s a look at today’s Top 10 chart for movies:

  1. Purple Hearts
  2. Tower Heist
  3. The Age of Adaline
  4. Men in Black 3
  5. The Gray Man
  6. Sing 2
  7. Spider-Man 2
  8. The Wretched
  9. The Sea Beast
  10. The 15:17 to Paris

Tower Heist? The Age of Adaline? Men in Black...3? Spider-Man 2? Even Purple Hearts, which has been in the #1 spot for five days straight, was a surprise when it dethroned The Gray Man. Those first four movies, however, are aged blockbusters that had seemingly exited the movie zeitgeist. Yet here they are, standing as the films that more Netflix subscribers are watching than any other.

If any of those films were able to steal the top spot from Purple Hearts, it would mark a rare occurrence when a non-animated film what wasn’t produced by Netflix was able to become the most popular movie on the streaming platform. The only notable movie to pull it off this year was the critically derided 2015 film Blackhat from Michael Mann.

Other films that have pulled off the feat in the past include Law Abiding Citizen (a 2009 thriller starring Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (a 2017 fantasy flick starring Charlie Hunnam and Jude Law), and (here’s a super random one) Going in Style—a comedy starring Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine.

This trend tends to take place at the beginning of the month when a wave of new movies floods Netflix. This week alone saw close to 30 new movies become available on the streaming platform, including seemingly forgotten blockbusters like Constantine, Miss Congeniality, The Town, and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Not only that, but all three Men in Black movies became available, only for the third one to compete on the Top 10. The same goes for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series, with Spider-Man 2 being the only one to rank.

Tower Heist and The Age of Adaline were also strange additions to the charts today. The first, a 2011 comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Ben Stiller that earned a surprising 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, only pulled in $78 million at the domestic box office. And The Age of Adaline, a 2015 drama starring Blake Lively, was much less successful with a 55% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a $42 million domestic gross.

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