Climate change satire ‘Don’t Look Up’ sets Netflix viewership record

Adam McKay’s climate change satire ‘Don’t Look Up’ is right up there on top of Netflix’s global viewership chart for December 27-January 2, clocking 152.29 million hours globally during the week.

Figures released by Netflix, and reported by ‘Deadline’, show that at a time when apocalyptic films are breaking world records, the Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence movie is the streamer’s third-most-watched film of all time (in just its first 28 days), behind only the Sandra Bullock-helmed ‘Bird Box’ and Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds andGal Gadot crime caper ‘Red Notice’.

It has also become the film that has attracted the most viewing hours for a movie in a single week in Netflix’s history. Just on Wednesday, director McKay tweeted that he was “straight up flabbergasted” by the viewing numbers the film was receiving.

Netflix doesn’t release day-to-day data, but ‘Don’t Look Up’, according to ‘Deadline’, is likely to be encroaching upon ‘Bird Box’ territory and could soon take the all-time record away from ‘Red Notice’.

‘Don’t Look Up’ also has Meryl Streep, playing a goofy American President, Cate Blanchett as a celebrity talk show co-host who lusts after the DiCaprio character, Dr Randall Mindy, a professor of astronomy at the Michigan State University (MSU).

British Indian actor Himesh Jitendra Patel, last seen in ‘Tenet’, also appears in the film as the boyfriend of the Jennifer Lawrence character, MSU astronomy doctoral candidate and comet discoverer Kate Dibiasky.