Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look dominated Netflix’s top 10 chart in its first week (in the English Film category), racking up 31.1 million views in its first week, beating the second-place film on the list, the Robert DeNiro, Adam Scott, and Michelle Monaghan thriller The Whisper Man, which pulled in 23.2 million views. Worth noting is that GTA 6 handily beat its Netflix competition despite not debuting until Thursday. The reporting period was from August 24-30. All data comes directly from Netflix.
The streamer notes that, “Netflix counts a ‘view’ as one full-runtime equivalent of watch time. Netflix defines a view as the total hours viewed for a title divided by its runtime. So one household watching a 27-minute video twice looks the same in Netflix’s math as two households each watching it once.” They no doubt mention this since YouTube counts a view the moment a video starts to play, and so far, on Rockstar’s official YouTube channel, the GTA 6 Extended Look has 17 million views as of 12pm PT when this story published.
On the TV side, Death of the Pastor’s Wife (19m views) took the top spot on last week’s Netflix Top 10, and Facing El Chapo (20.7m views) topped the non-English film category.
And as it turns out, Rockstar approached Netflix about this Extended Look premiere, not the other way around. For a whole lot more on GTA 6, check out our report of what we got to see at Rockstar North that wasn’t on Netflix, why significant others are already mad about Rockstar’s imminent crime epic, confirmation on a lack of microtransactions at launch, 99 new details we spotted in the extended look, and so much more.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.