Netflix’s reality competition show based on the number one hit Korean show Squid Games has brought back the Squid Games craze.
With 85.7 million watching hours and 20.1 million views, Squid Game: The Challenge was the most-watched English-language show on the streamer from November 20th to November 26th.
Netflix’s English TV scores haven’t been this good in two months, since the fourth season of Sex Education came out in late September and 108.4 million hours were watched.
But it’s not without controversy; some contestants from the show have said they were hurt and have promised to sue the streamer.
The spinoff also helped Squid Game, Netflix’s most popular show of all time, get back onto the non-English TV charts, where it now ranks sixth with 13.3 million watching hours.
It was easy for Squid Games: The Challenge to beat last week’s number one, The Crown: Season 6, which fell to just 29.3 million viewing hours.
Also, Netflix’s musical comedy Leo, which stars Adam Sandler as Leo the Lizard, a class pet who wants to be free, had its biggest debut ever for an animated film, with 61.7 million watching hours in its first week. This was Netflix’s best movie opening in three months.
The movie was kind of a return for Adam Sandler and Bill Burr, who are both comedians. Their last Netflix comedies had slow starts. Old Dads, Burr’s first movie as a director, came out in October and has been watched 23.1 million times. In August, only 21.3 million hours of Sandler’s movie You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah were watched at its release.
You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah also has a lot in common with Leo’s family. He has children Sunny and Susie and a wife named Jackie Sandler.
Leo had Netflix’s best English-language movie performance since Gal Gadot’s action movie Heart of Stone opened to 69.6 million watching hours the week of August 7–13. It also had more than 34 million views for the week of November 20–26.
Leo beat out The Killer, which was last week’s No. 1 title but lost more than half of its viewers and ended the week with only 17.5 million hours watched.
Best was also better than The Killer.As expected, Christmas.Ever! kept most of its small crowd from last week and ended up with 18.2 million viewing hours. It was the first Netflix show to become a holiday hit.
These are the charts:
