The Most Watched Netflix Movies of 2022

With days left to go in 2022, Netflix has revealed the titles that were the biggest hits of the year. It is an … interesting list.

As Netflix does with all of their lists of highly-watched content, they measure popularity by the amount of hours of a title viewed in its first 28 days of availability for streaming. (After that, I guess, you could watch 120 million hours of Marmaduke and it won’t make a bit of a difference.)

By and large, the year’s biggest hits on Netflix were all about stars: Big-time Hollywood talents like Chris Evans, Ryan Reynolds, Kevin Hart, Adam Sandler; basically people who are brands unto themselves. You see their face on the top of your Netflix account and that alone gives you some idea of what you are going to watch. Which makes sense — people turn on Netflix, they look at what comes up and they decide whether or not it’s something they think they would like.

Here’s the full list of the most popular movies on Netflix in 2022:

The list is exclusively English-language films. The most watched movies in languages other than English include Troll from Norway, All Quiet on the Western Front from Germany, Black Crab from Sweden, Through My Window from Spain, and The Takedown from France.

Absent from the list is Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which will likely pass a lot of these movies when all is said and done, but only debuted on Netflix a few days ago and thus wasn’t included on this list. (In just those first few days of release, subscribers already watched 82.1 million hours of the film.)  Also absent from the list are just about all of Netflix’s would-be awards contenders this year, including Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo or the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde or the musical. They had a lot more success this year with star vehicles. Don’t be surprised to see even more of those types of films in 2023.