While attending a recent conference in New York, Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos reported that, in the week since it debuted, the streaming giant’s new original film The Christmas Chronicles—which stars Kurt Russell as a roguish but tenderhearted Santa—has exceeded 20 million views. “If every one of those [20 million streams] was a movie ticket purchase, that’s a $200 million opening week,” Sarandos gloated. “Even movies that go on to $1 billion don’t typically do that in the first week.”
Sarandos’ brag is a false equivalency, since the majority of those viewers probably didn’t purchase a Netflix subscription just so they could watch The Christmas Chronicles, and there’s absolutely no way that many people would’ve pried their bums off the couch to go see it IRL if it’d been released in theaters. But still—20 million views. In one week. Assuming most of those viewers weren’t repeat offenders, like the 53 Christmas Prince diehards who Netflix data-mined and brutally called out last year, that’s a ridiculous number of people. And I am among you, my festive brethren—I have seen all four of Netflix’s new seasonal offerings: The Holiday Calendar, The Princess Switch, A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding, and the aforementioned Christmas Chronicles.