Heart of Stone is Netflix’s #1 movie, but has anyone seen it?

❘ Updated: 2023-08-16T13:20:45

Netflix

Heart of Stone fever is in the air, if Netflix’s top 10 chart is to be believed – but the question remains: with all those millions of views, has anyone actually seen it?

Netflix seems to be on a constant roll of hit back-to-back blockbusters (if you can even call them that in a streaming context). For every month, there’s a new original movie or series that drops on the platform and climbs the chart, occupying a space on the podium for weeks before making room for next not-so-big thing.

Let’s do a quick accounting of 2023’s output: in January, we had You People; in February, there was Your Place or Mine; in March, Murder Mystery 2 was released; and in other months, we’ve had the likes of The Mother, Extraction 2, and The Out-Laws.

With the exception of Tyler Rake’s sequel, has any Netflix movie this year occupied the mass consciousness is the same way as Barbie or Oppenheimer? We’ll go even further: is anyone even talking about Heart of Stone, despite its eye-watering viewership after its premiere?

Heart of Stone is a good example of Netflix amnesia

Heart of Stone has the ingredients of a hit: Gal Gadot, our lame duck Wonder Woman, leading an action-packed Mission Impossible-esque movie (it even has Dead Reckoning’s producers) alongside Jamie Dornan, with practical stunts (apart from the uber-CGI ones), twists and turns, and fertile ground for a larger franchise.

Then came the first blow: a 30% Rotten Tomatoes score and, arguably even more indicative, a 58% audience rating (the latter metric is often inflated by tribalistic fans, so if that popcorn is spilled, it doesn’t bode well for the film). Yet, it doesn’t seem to matter: according to Netflix, the movie racked up just over 33 million views in its first three days globally.

It’s a far smaller premiere compared to Gadot’s first and biggest Netflix original, Red Notice, which amassed 77.3 million views, while the likes of The Gray Man, Extraction 2, The Mother, and The Adam Project all floated around the 40/50 million mark. But Red Notice is the perfect go-to for the same question: people may have watched it – perhaps they dipped in, because who knows how Netflix actually defines a “view” – but have they seen it, experienced it, or spoken about it?

Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot, and Dwayne Johnson in Red Notice

Quentin Tarantino shares this apathy towards movies on streamers. “What even is a motion picture anyway anymore? Is it just something that they show on Apple? That would be diminishing returns,” he told Deadline.

“I mean, and I’m not picking on anybody, but apparently for Netflix, Ryan Reynolds has made $50 million on this movie and $50 million on that movie and $50 million on the next movie for them. I don’t know what any of those movies are. I’ve never seen them. Have you?”

Heart of Stone is the latest in a stream of projects that’ll lead to the streaming era’s implosion: high-budget movies and shows that come and go with little acclaim and fanfare. It’s not just Netflix: Secret Invasion had a budget of $212 million, and after backlash and intense mockery of its finale, it may as well have never happened at all with how little it’s mentioned; and Citadel, Prime Video’s so-called spy phenomenon, scrubbed away any memory of it with each new episode.

Heart of Stone will be Netflix’s number one for a while, until it fades into the ether and the algorithm pushes something else on you, which you’ll absentmindedly watch with glazed eyes before unwittingly waiting for the next thing. Obey, consume.

Heart of Stone is streaming on Netflix now. You can check out our other hubs below: