Budding actor Idris Elba’s long and storied list of popular projects is a definitive hit on Netflix, per Nielsen ratings data.
The film in question is the Western The Harder They Fall. In addition to featuring an all-star, all-Black cast, the movie was a streaming exclusive that managed to clock in some record-breaking viewership for Netflix.
Deadline reports that the movie, which sees Idris Elba in his best villain role since The Fast and the Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, raked in close to 1.2 billion minutes of streaming views. The outlet also notes that it that ratings announced thus far only factor in people who streamed the show to a TV.
Mobile viewership, which makes up a larger and larger portion of Netflix’s viewing audience every day, will come out as a separate Nielsen report.
The Idris Elba-led film unseated the smash-hit series You which was bumped to second place in the data tallying from Nov. 1st through Nov. 7th. It outperformed fellow newcomers such as Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead prequel, Army of Thieves. It also topped the Nina Dobrev romantic comedy Love Hard, which also debuted as a Netflix original.
idris elba
Idris Elba stars alongside Regina King, Jonathan Majors, LaKeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo and Zazie Beetz. The decision by co-writer, director and the man in charge of the film’s musical score, Jeymes Samuel, to make a Western movie with an all-Black cast was a labor of love.
Speaking to The New York Times, he noted that Black cowboys did in fact exist, but they’ve largely been scrubbed from the history books as a result of Hollywood taking over the movie genre and putting all-white casts in place for decades.
However, while the story of The Harder They Fall is fictional, Time notes that many of the characters are based on real-life, Black cowboys who helped shape the American West.
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