Hit Man was the most-watched streaming original of the week. The Richard Linklater film hit 1.5 billion minutes watched in its first seven days on Netflix.
The film, which had a limited two-week run in theaters, was released for streaming June 7. According to Luminate’s weekly viewership rankings in a report by Variety, this translates to 12.6 million estimated views from June 7 through June 13. The number of minutes watched was divided by the film’s runtime.
Hit Man has more than doubled the performance of the next-most-watched film, the French Netflix movie Under Paris coming up second with 594.8 million minutes watched and 5.7 million views.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, receiving rave reviews. It was later picked up by Netflix.
In Hit Man, Glen Powell stars as Gary Johnson, a college professor who becomes a fake hitman for the local police department. He takes down would-be criminals who have their eyes on murder. Gary’s life gets turned upside down when he meets a beautiful “client” named Madison (Adria Arjona), who wants him to kill her estranged husband.
Linklater and Powell – who had previously worked together on the 2006 film Fast Food Nation and later in 2016 on Everybody Wants Some – worked “very independently” on the film, according to an interview with the BBC. The two had “frustrating conversations” when initially trying to garner support.
“They wanted Ron to be a real hitman, something they’d seen before,” he said in the interview. “Anyway, then we made the film, and it got a wonderful response. Netflix was always passionate about it, but the others kinda weren’t, I think they weren’t sure if they could sell it to an audience.”
Lucky for Linklater and Powell, consider the audience sold.
In an interview with TV Insider ahead of the film’s release, Linklater revealed that he is currently not planning for a sequel, though the director remains open to the idea of it.
“It’s a little too new. No one’s even seen this movie yet, so I don’t know,” Linklater said. “Yeah, who knows, but nothing jumped out. We felt like we told this story. But, you know, who knows?”
Hit Man, streaming now, Netflix
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