Let’s Do the Zack Snyder Math on ‘Rebel Moon — Part Two’ Netflix Viewership

Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver” debuted on Netflix on April 19. Critical pans aside (IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called Part Two “almost as disastrous” as Part One and gave it a D. Perhaps David’s the real “Scargiver.”), the sequel to the 2023 “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire” became the streamer’s biggest film (in any language) for the week of April 15-21. It was watched for 44.2 million hours; based on its 2:04 runtime, Netflix translates that to 21.4 million views.

On the March 6 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Snyder said “Rebel Moon — Part One” was seen by more people (on Netflix) than the smash-hit “Barbie” (in theaters).

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“Say right now, [Part One is] like almost 90 million views… 80 or 90 million accounts turned it on, give or take,” Snyder told Rogan. “They assume two viewers per screen, right? So that’s 160 million people supposedly watching… at $10 a ticket, that’s $1.6 billion. More people probably saw ‘Rebel Moon’ than saw ‘Barbie’ in the theater. That’s how crazy Netflix is — that’s the distribution model that they’ve set up.”

Snyder math — does it hold up? No. Here’s how it (doesn’t) break down.

This much we know is true: In 2019, “Avengers: Endgame” set an opening-weekend theatrical record of $357 million. In Snyder’s interpretation of Netflix’s assumption of two viewers per view, that would mean 42.8 million people watched “Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver” in its first three days. So: Had the film been in theaters and all of those semi-hypothetical viewers each bought $10 tickets, that’s a (totally fictitious) box-office haul of $428 million in 72 hours — more than twice “Barbie’s” opening weekend.

Critics aside, there’s many reasons why it’s certifiable to believe that “Rebel Moon 2” would best the all-time (pre-Covid!) box-office opener by 20 percent. Snyder may be a brand name, but it’s not one to rival peak Marvel — and whoever was waiting for his sequel, they couldn’t rival the masses of fans who had been waiting a decade for the conclusion of the Avengers’ Infinity Saga.

And while two viewers per view may not seem unreasonable, it’s a presumption that Snyder values at over $200 million. It’s one that doubles the already very-unlikely attendance, for the same reason that it’s silly to equate any Netflix performance with would-be box-office results: It is magnitudes easier, by every metric, to watch a movie on Netflix than to invest the time to leave your house and commit three hours to sit in a theater.

Giving credit where it’s due, Snyder’s “Rebel Moon — Part Two” also reached Netflix’s Top 10 in 92 countries and pulled its prequel back onto the global list at number 5. It did well! Snyder now has three consecutive number-1 films on Netflix: the two “Rebel Moon” movies and “Army of the Dead.” He’s had a nice run with Netflix subscribers, but how nice depends on the calculus to which you subscribe.

“Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire” was Netflix’s top movie globally for the week of December 18-23, 2023 with 23.9 million views. It was again number 1 the following week, when it added 34 million more views.

In the first week of January, “Rebel Moon” slipped to second place but added another 11.8 million views. It dropped to eighth the next week with 3.9 million views. After that “Rebel Moon” fell off the top 10 until “Part Two” revived it with another 5.5 million views. (We do not (yet) have viewership stats beyond that.) “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire” has not made Netflix’s all-time Most Popular Top 10 films. At present, the threshold there belongs to “Extraction” with a Netflix-estimated 135.7 million views.

These days, Snyder is choosing to clarify his perspective. When asked by Gizmodo if he was trying to tell Rogan that streaming is more valuable than theatrical distribution, Snyder replied: “Oh, no, I would say it’s kind of the opposite.”

“I was just going by the numbers that I was given by Netflix,” he continued. “People are like, ‘Oh, well, Snyder’s crazy,’ but literally I just am doing [math] with this, not anything else. If now we’re close to 100 million viewers, 100 million views times two is 200 million views… so, people are like, ‘Snyder’s delusional,’ and I am just like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’”

Reps for Netflix did not immediately respond to IndieWire’s request for comment.

While Snyder still believes that more people streamed “Rebel Moon” than saw “Barbie” in theaters, he did not deny that Greta Gerwig’s movie had a larger impact on pop culture. He went on to explain that the two films’ disparate impacts on the zeitgeist is evidence of how much cultural currency movie theaters still have.

“The cultural significance of ‘Barbie’ was happening when it was in the theaters,” Snyder said. “That’s when we all took a bite of the ‘Barbie’ apple, and happily. And so my only point is that I think there is a theatrical zeitgeist. Even though maybe more people have eyes on something, the actual sort of cultural significance is dictated still by the theater.”

“Barbie” made $1.4 billion at the box office, cementing it as the highest-grossing movie ever released by Warner Bros. (the distributor of Snyder’s “Justice League” and other DC movies). “Barbie” has been streaming on Max since December 15, 2023. It has appeared on TV-ratings currency company Nielsen’s Streaming Top 10 list (for movies) in three different weeks; “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire” made the same list two times.

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