Hidden Strike, a buddy-action-themed Chinese-American co-production pairing John Cena with 69-year-old Jackie Chan, which sat on the shelf for five full years due to diplomatic issues, failed to deliver the goods for suddenly struggling Netflix, debuting to only 37.8 million viewing hours and 22 million views for the week of July 24-30.
Though the film, themed around two special forces guys blowing stuff up, managed to lead Netflix’s English-language films category this week, Hidden Strike arrived already way down in the count with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 17%, and some reviews calling the title “brain dead.”
Hidden Strike's global debut was already delayed due to COVID-19 in 2020 before star Cena made remarks that offended the Chinese government — he simply referred to Taiwan as a “country.”
The fact that Netflix acquired — probably very cheaply — a box-office action turkey and wrung at least some juice out of it is probably the good news.
Netflix’s biggest English-language show last week was The Witcher, with the three final season-three episodes dropping July 27. The results — 59 million viewing hours and 7.8 million total views — were even more middling than when the first five season-three installments premiered back on June 29 and drew roughly half as much audience as Witcher: S2’s premiere did.
As Next TV has detailed at length recently, overall viewing on its global platform is down, but streaming of local language shows has been brisk this summer.
Korean romantic-comedy King The Land: Season 1 also continues to perform well in its seventh-consecutive top 10 week, gaining another 64.5 million hours viewed to lead all Netflix shows and movies last week.
Actually, the season four premiere of Brazilian crime series Sintonia led Netflix's foreign language TV series list for the week based on the metric Netflix now prioritizes — Sintonia had 6.4 million total views vs. 4 million for King the Land.
Sintonia also wracked up 42.2 million viewing hours, nearly 20 million hours more than the debut of its third season.
German sci-fi thriller Paradise topped the list of international films with only 16.1 million viewing hours, but it had 8.1 million views.
Next TV reported last week that viewing of international content this summer was up 43% vs. last year.
