Is Zack Snyder’s ‘Army Of The Dead’ A Netflix Hit? Well, It’s Complicated.

As expected, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead ruled the Nielsen charts (which measures American televisions) in its debut weekend. The “zombie heist flick,” starring Dave Bautista and a host of others as mercenaries sneaking into a zombie-ravaged Las Vegas to steal stuff, earned 913 million minutes on the weekend of May 21. Presuming everyone watched the entire 148-minute movie but also stopped when the credits began at 140 minutes, that translates into around 6.52 million viewings of the film.

Is that good? Well, yes. Is that great? Well, maybe? First, we may have to judge Netflix’s 2020 biggies (Extraction, Spenser Confidential, The Old Guard, Enola Holmes, Project Power, The Midnight Sky, The Kissing Booth 2, The Wrong Missy, etc.) on a Covid curve. When folks can’t leave the house and the entire theatrical summer movie season has been canceled, whatever big movie Netflix happens to be dropping is going to look a lot more appetizing.

As the country opens up and as big movies return to theaters, along with other options for your entertainment time and dollar, we may well see something of a ceiling for Netflix biggies. Netflix projected a sky-high 72 million viewers for Army of the Dead in the first month, and I’ll note that the film is currently not in today’s “most-viewed movies” list. However, if you recall, they prophesized Thunder Force to have around 52 million viewers in its first month.

That superhero comedy “debuted” with 950 million minutes on the week of April 9, which translates to around 9.3 million viewings for the PG-rated comedy. The Melissa McCarthy/Octavia Spenser comedy reportedly wasn’t dislodged from the top spot among movies until Stowaway on the week of April 22. So, the film projected to nab 72 million viewers in a month had a smaller opening weekend, in terms of minutes and total views, than the film with projections of 52 million in month one.

I will be curious to see the post-debut legs for the $90 million zombie flick, and it’s entirely possible that the movie stuck around to a greater degree than the comparatively lower-profile Ben Falcone-directed film. Maybe the Snyder fanbase devouring the film on a loop to make a point. That would be nice, since it would at least mean they care about more than just the Batman/Superman movies (I was on #teamSuckerPunch way before it was cool).

I use Thunder Force as a prime comparison because it got more viewers in opening weekend than Army of the Dead and wasn’t preceded by a deluge of free press and intended to launch a multi-medium cinematic universe. The only reason legs will matter is because Netflix and Snyder want to make more in this universe and because it was promoted (including the aforementioned theatrical release) as the next big-deal Netflix event. That it opened “smaller” during a relatively soft May theatrical season (there were no wide releases on May 21) may also be telling.

It nabbed about the same number of initial viewers as Amazon’s Without Remorse (around 6.8 million views) but was well below Amazon’s Coming 2 America (around 12.8 million complete viewings) and Disney+’s Soul (around 18.5 million viewers over Christmas weekend). However, we have a big-budget original action movie that barely earned more viewers in its opening weekend than, say,  Jason Statham’s Homefront which debuted on January 18 with around 4.7 million viewers. That was almost tied with Netflix’s original Anthony Mackie’s Outside the Wire (around 4.8 million initial viewings of the 115-minute actioner) and Jennifer Garner’s Yes Day (around 4.7 million views of the 89-minute family comedy on its opening weekend).

If the Netflix originals don’t vastly outperform older “missed it in theaters” studio flicks, then that heightens the potential peril for when Netflix’s third-party content mostly migrates elsewhere. They are aware of this and that’s probably why they signed a first pay-tv window with Sony starting next year. I’m not shocked that Army of the Dead (which I’d argue is one of Netflix’s best “blockbuster approximation movies” and which I rather enjoyed watching in its brief theatrical engagement), earned strong but not (by top-tier streaming standards) superlative initial viewership.

Yes, it might leg out. I’d argue its relative quality matters against Netflix’s quasi-reputation as a “straight to video” dumping ground (see also: The Woman in the Window). But we may have a situation where the week’s big Netflix movie, whatever that movie is (Outside the Wire, Yes Day, Thunder Force, Army of the Dead, etc.) will garner a relatively steady viewership, no matter the reviews, publicity or pre-release narrative, just because it’s the big shiny thing on the Netflix front page.

I am reminded of summer 2016, when a deluge of “once were special” franchise flicks (X-Men: Apocalypse, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Independence Day: Resurgence and Star Trek Beyond) flatlined due to just being that weekend’s court-appointed tentpole. At some point, when every week brings a new Netflix “event movie,” coupled by its competition doing likewise, well, the very notion of a big movie on a streaming service will cease to be special. Ironically, the way to distinguish the proverbial wheat from the chaff may just be… a limited theatrical release.