Every week, Netflix reveals its Top 10 lists, ranking its most-viewed movies and TV shows. While many of these top titles are expected, others can surprise; here’s where we try to make sense of those seemingly random hits.
“I read this post on Reddit” is always a risky way to start a conversation, but here I go… I recently saw a Reddit thread from a few years ago where a poster suggested that Netflix create an entire category on its homepage to showcase content that’s leaving the platform soon. Typically, on streaming, with so many original titles being cranked out weekly, it’s the new arrivals that audiences anticipate and can’t wait to dive into, but I spend a lot of time scrolling the Top 10 and am always surprised by the seemingly random movies, usually from the early-to-mid 2000’s, that are popping, only to realize that they got a major bump because they were leaving the site.Â
The fact that these movies, like the 2006 political thriller The Sentinel, starring Michael Douglas and Kiefer Sutherland, or Eddie Murphy’s 2007 comedy Norbit, both appeared on the Netflix Top 10 English-language movies list in the past two weeks seemed surprising at first. I’m not judging the quality of the movies here, just the pure randomness of the spike in viewership: Why this movie, why now? Until I realized they received their traffic boost from the fact that Netflix started threatening to take them away. It reminds me of cleaning out my kid’s toy boxes and pulling out the talking Ben 10 watch he hasn’t used since 2017 with the intention of donating it, only for him to spot it and feel the immediate need to play with this near-obsolete toy again. If there’s a psychological term for this, I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s real, and Netflix is making it work for them.
The fact that audiences are so drawn to content that’s about to be taken away gives that Reddit poster’s idea some real merit. I don’t worry much about titles that are leaving the platform because I assume they’ll show up somewhere else at some point. But whether it’s because of procrastination, loss aversion or pop culture FOMO, the Leaving Soon tag works. Both Norbit and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, which left the platform last weekend along with all the other Mission: Impossible titles, had nearly 4 million views last week, enough to place them in the No. 8 and 9 spots, respectively, on the Top 10 list.
Netflix doesn’t keep the list of expiring titles a secret — it makes this information available on individual title pages and sends complete lists of removals to tons of sites that publish this information. But you have to know where to look, and it doesn’t make a comprehensive list of these titles accessible on its main interface. Given how often expiring movies get a boost from their imminent departure, maybe that one post I saw that time on Reddit is worth taking advice from.