Chris Williams’ ‘The Sea Beast’ Was Netflix’s Sixth Most Popular English-Language Film Of 2022
Netflix has revealed their most popular films and series of 2022, and Chris Williams’ The Sea Beast ranks as the sixth most popular English-language film of the year.
Released on July 8, The Sea Beast cracked Netflix’s global weekly Top 10 list in its first week, debuting in the number one spot with 33.5 million hours viewed. It was Netflix’s only animated feature to debut in the top spot in 2022, and stayed there for two weeks.
During its third-quarter earnings report back in October, Netflix announced that The Sea Beast had seen the platform’s biggest release of an original animated feature to date. Over its first 28 days, the film was viewed for 165 million hours.
It’s worth noting that Netflix is the only major streamer that offers so much data about its original titles. That means that in the big picture, we have nothing with which we can compare these films. How do 165 million viewer hours match up to Minions’ $939.4 million box office? There is no good way to compare the two.
Produced by Sony Pictures Animation, The Mitchells vs. the Machines was Netflix’s most-watched animated release of 2021, but between then and the release of The Sea Beast, the company changed its tracking methodology, so we don’t really know how the two films stacked up against one another in terms of viewership.
Not an animated series, but featuring an entirely animated half-episode, The Sandman season one, adapted from Neil Gaiman’s classic graphic novel series by the same name, made the streamer’s series list as the eighth-most-watched title of 2022.
Two weeks after the entirely live-action season one premiered on August 5, Netflix shadow-dropped a special two-part bonus episode of the show. One-half of that episode was an animated adaptation of the stand-alone Sandman comic A Dream of a Thousand Cats, helmed by Dutch artist Hisko Hulsing (Undone, Junkyard). Cartoon Brew spoke with Hulsing about his episode, how he got the gig, and adapting an iconic piece of literature.
