The Sandra Bullock-starring horror movie has left critics cold but since its release, it’s become a magnet for memes and racked up the platform’s best film numbers ever

There was a sense of dread surrounding Netflix’s release of survival horror Bird Box, and not just because of the terrifying premise.

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The film, led by Sandra Bullock, was seen as one of the platform’s splashier original offerings of 2018 with a juicy set-up, an in-demand director and a high-profile pre-Christmas release. But a last-minute marketing campaign planted seeds of doubt with a trailer that left many calling it an ill-timed, sense-swapped copy of A Quiet Place, released to critical and commercial success earlier in the year.

While the John Krasinski/Emily Blunt thriller focused on monsters who used sound to hunt their victims, in Bird Box, a demonic force targets sight. For those unlucky enough to catch a glimpse, their greatest fears become realised. Netflix remained confident, despite bad buzz, and nabbed a slot at the AFI film festival alongside awards-friendly titles such as Roma and Green Book. They also targeted voters with a sneak peek Directors Guild of America screening in New York. Both promising signs of a prestige project.

Then critics caught a glimpse and, well, fear was far from realised.

“A wannabe shocker … shortchanged in terms of suspense, scares and thrills,” said the Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy. “These characters feel so crammed together and underwritten that they add up to almost nothing,” wrote the Guardian’s Amy Nicholson. “A toy-chest apocalypse in which the rules of the game are, to all appearances, never understood,” complained the New Yorker’s Richard Brody.

The reviews weren’t quite as toxic as those that met Netflix’s last big Christmas bet, the Will Smith-starring fantasy Bright, but they immediately put a stop to any awards chatter and pegged Bird Box as yet another misjudged original gamble. In a way, it seemed like the natural conclusion to a year that saw them spew out The Cloverfield Paradox, Mute, Extinction and TAU, all malformed attempts to prove they can take on the multiplex with genre film-making.

Unlike those films however, Netflix granted Bird Box a campaign that rivaled the scale of its cinema-dwelling counterparts. Cities were strewn with billboards and digital ads, Bullock and director Susanne Bier (hot off award-winning miniseries The Night Manager) made their way around the interview circuit and the film was even given a one-week exclusive engagement on the big screen.

While it has become notoriously hard to judge the success of a Netflix drop, given how the platform refuses to release viewership figures, it was clear that within days, Bird Box was an unqualified phenomenon. Not only did it start trending on Twitter but it soon became an unlikely meme-magnet.

VON TOO WAVY😎 (@NikeIsMyLogo23) "Could you see us being together"



Me: pic.twitter.com/VbadnRdJWv

katie walter (@katiewalter02) me after watching birdbox pic.twitter.com/DsuLUcyzzc

SamManning (@SMIII25) The blind when everyone was committing suicide in bird box pic.twitter.com/FoRBhs4MtZ

The reaction was so ebullient that it led Netflix to temporarily remove a different blindfold by tweet-bragging that over 45 million accounts had watched Bird Box in its first seven days, the biggest first week for one of their original films to date. While the release of an actual number (45,037,125, to be exact) might be somewhat groundbreaking given their reluctance to do so in the past, it follows on from a number of equally confident, if intentionally vaguer, statements about other 2018 releases.

In October’s third-quarter earnings report, Netflix beamed over the results of their “Summer of Love” – a group of in-house romantic comedies that left most critics cold yet left subscribers fully engaged with over 80 million watching at least one of them and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before singled out as a particular hit. In December, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos claimed that their festive adventure The Christmas Chronicles had the “most impact” of any of star Kurt Russell’s films to date with 20 million watching in the first week.

The Bird Box brag has left some industry figures unsure over the number’s veracity. Firstly, it’s not a figure that’s been independently assessed unlike, say, Nielsen ratings or official box office results. Secondly, while Netflix has stated that a user watching at least 70% of a film counts as a view, it is unclear how many of the 45m streams were complete.

“I’m a huge fan and proponent of Netflix, but to believe that nearly one-third of all of their subscribers not only watched 70% of the movie but did so in the first week of it being on the site is all but unfathomable,” an anonymous producer told Business Insider over the weekend. “I want to believe it but just can’t. It’s not a watch for the faint of heart, after all.”

Play Video 1:21 What is the Bird Box challenge and why is Netflix worried? – video explainer

But regardless of the potentially troublesome nature of this number, the film’s immediacy of impact is undeniable. In less than a month, Bird Box has already become part of the public lexicon in a way that would have been infinitely harder to achieve with a cinema-only release, provoking more chatter than last month’s big screen hits combined. The film’s viewership is so large that Kim Kardashian’s tweet asking if anyone had yet seen it, just 10 days after release, was the subject of widespread ridicule. Fans have even turned the house featured in the film into a tourist attraction, showing up in droves to take blindfolded selfies.

Reactions reached a new fever pitch with the “Bird Box challenge” which has seen fans blindfolding themselves before taking on various tasks from petting dogs to playing basketball to, most worryingly, driving. It all led to the official Netflix account tweeting: “Can’t believe I have to say this, but: PLEASE DO NOT HURT YOURSELVES WITH THIS BIRD BOX CHALLENGE.”

“It’s going to take a very careful consideration about how it translates,” director Bier said to the Hollywood Reporter of the film’s wildfire reaction. “Classical measurement has either been box office or awards. This defies all of it. But creating a phenomenon is bound to translate into something.”

So what is it about Bird Box that’s led to such unprecedented success?

Based on a novel by Josh Malerman, the rights to Bird Box were originally purchased by Universal in 2013 before it was even published. Mama director Andy Muschietti, who would go on to direct It, was attached and Arrival’s Eric Heisserer was onboard to adapt. But the project fell apart and the script was then included in 2014’s Black List, an annual roundup of the best unproduced screenplays knocking around Hollywood. Fast forward to 2017 and after one of the project’s original producers joined Netflix, the film was suddenly brought to life.

It was reportedly made for less than $20m, a far more modest investment than some of the platform’s more high-profile titles (Bright cost $90m while Outlaw King was made for a reported $120m), and given the consistency of the horror genre at the box office, the film would have undoubtedly made a tidy profit on the big screen. But as one analyst pointed out on Twitter, if those 45 million subscribers all bought a ticket to see it in the first week, it would have made roughly $411m in seven days, over $20m more than what The Force Awakens achieved in the same period.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trevante Rhodes and Sandra Bullock in Bird Box. Photograph: Merrick Morton/Netflix

But that’s really the inarguable key to why Bird Box hit so hard because no matter what the release date, it’s close to impossible imagining that such a large amount of people would have gone out and purchased tickets to see it. Netflix hasn’t released figures for Bird Box’s exclusive big screen engagement for the week before its streaming release, a likely sign that the numbers weren’t quite so impressive.

As a consumer, the in-home premiere of a film with a snappy high-concept and an appealing A-list lead would seem like an early Christmas gift, requiring no greater commitment than pressing play. Bullock is a notoriously picky actor, even more so after her Oscar win for The Blind Side in 2013 and her cannily chosen projects since have mostly proved just how wide her appeal remains. In 2013, she scored two major hits with Gravity and The Heat and while 2015’s Our Brand is Crisis was an Oscarbait misstep, her lead role in last year’s Ocean’s 8 was a resounding success, at least commercially, with almost $300m in the bank.

While some pundits have suggested the film’s success is a direct result of her star appeal, it’s worth sharing the wealth with her ensemble, an almost algorithmically constructed cast of easy-to-place faces, picked with considerable skill. There’s Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes, American Crime Story’s Emmy-winning Sarah Paulson, veteran Oscar nominee John Malkovich, Get Out’s Lil Rel Howery, rapper-turned-actor Machine Gun Kelly, two-time Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver, British stage and screen star Tom Hollander and Jurassic Park’s BD Wong. It is a diverse, impressive cast with broad appeal and the constant unfolding of cameos makes it a hard film to switch off.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cast of Bird Box. Photograph: Ilya S Savenok/Getty Images for Netflix

Another key to the film’s mammoth consumption lies in Netflix’s lack of certification. During the film’s brief big screen release, it was rated R for violence, bloody images, language and brief sexuality, which would have restricted its audience and in turn, box office. But without parental supervision, Netflix is unburdened by such a hurdle, allowing anyone to watch, regardless of age.

What will Netflix learn from such a landmark release? For starters, the dissonance between critical and public reaction to Bird Box implies that their products, if pitched right, can be critic-proof. This was already somewhat proved by their decision to renew Friends From College for a second season, one of 2018’s most poorly reviewed shows, and a confirmed sequel for Bright.

A long-running complaint about Netflix’s ever-increasing selection of original movies is how many of them feel unceremoniously dumped and soon lost within an endless scroll. Bird Box’s extravagant marketing campaign, the budget of which is of course being kept a secret, has shown that pitching a streaming release as if it’s a big screen contender can pay off handsomely, keeping it in the memory of viewers for longer than just the day that it’s launched. The company’s awareness of the value of their viewing statistics to help figure out what future projects are worth betting on suggests that Bird Box will have an indelible effect on what’s in store and the algorithmic assembly of the film suggests that such strategising is what led to its existence in the first place.

Bird Box landed in the same month as Roma, the critically adored drama from Alfonso Cuarón that’s predicted to land Netflix its first best picture nomination and perhaps even a win. The almost simultaneous release of both act as a close-to-perfect distillation of what the company is trying to achieve: arthouse acclaim and mainstream dominance. Both also launched on the precipice of Netflix’s biggest year to date with Martin Scorsese’s new gangster drama The Irishman starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, Jake Gyllenhaal’s art world thriller Velvet Buzzsaw and Steven Soderbergh’s Panama Papers drama with Meryl Streep and Gary Oldman, to name just a few. It’s an impressive slate for any studio and while the established big-hitters, from Disney to Warners, have been doggedly keeping their blindfolds on since Netflix entered the fray, unwilling to view a streaming platform as a serious challenger, 2019 might see them reluctantly taking them off to face the terrifying truth that lies ahead.