Noah Baumbach's adaptation of Don DeLillo's 1985 dark satirical novel White Noise produced its own kind of airborne toxic event on Netflix over the weekend, debuting to a miserable 14.8 million viewing hours in its first three days of release.
Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle in a comedic-drama about a family grappling simultaneously with the existential and the mundane amid and following a deadly chemical spill, White Noise was even beaten out by a three-year-old movie, Knives Out, for the week of Dec. 26 - Jan. 1.
It was Knives Out sequel The Glass Onion, which surged to 127.3 million viewing hours in its second week of release, that was Netflix's most watched program last week, among both films and TV shows. Folks also tuned into the original Knives, which finished as the third most watched English language film with 16.8 million viewing hours.
Addams Family spinoff Wednesday continued to rank atop Netflix TV series, capturing 104 million more viewing hours in its sixth week of release.
Wednesday ended up being Netflix's biggest freshman series hit of 2022.
Meanwhile, limited-series The Witcher: Blood Origin -- an origin-story spinoff to Netflix's successful Witcher series -- recovered from a rather inauspicious start a week prior with 64.2 million viewing hours.
Among foreign/local language fare, season 2 of Japanese sci-fi action-drama Alice in Borderland popped out with 74.3 million viewing hours.
Still, it was the spectacular flameout of Baumbach's White Noise that caught our attention. Aggregated at a lukewarm 63% on Rotten Tomatoes, the film re-teamed Driver with Baumbach, who worked together three years ago on Netflix's more warmly received A Marriage Story, which debuted a time when Netflix wasn't handing out its viewer metrics.
Beloved by some, befuddling to others, White Noise is a tedious read that isn't for everybody. Critics -- and perhaps viewers -- didn't think Baumbach made it any more accessible.
"The structural problems [with DeLillo's novel] remain: there’s a campus comedy, a disaster flick, and a crime caper that never cohere," wrote the Chicago Reader's Dmitry Samarov.
