Lift soars high above competition as Netflix's first original hit of 2024
The heist film's closest competition was miles away
2024 might have just started, but Netflix isn’t wasting any time getting new content to its subscribers. After the huge success of last year’s Leave the World Behind, the company had been hoping that another of its original films, Lift, could draw in similar numbers. While the Kevin Hart-led heist film hasn’t reached the same number of people as the earlier release, it is proving to be the first big hit of the year from the company.
It isn’t just Lift that is making waves on the streamer’s charts, though. Plane crash survival thriller Society of the Snow was watched by a similar number of people to Lift for a second week in a row. Together, the two films accounted for more views than the rest of the top ten in both the English and non-English streaming charts combined. Their next biggest competitor, 2005’s Transporter 2, managed less than a fifth of their viewership over the past week.
As Netflix relies more on its original content to draw in subscribers in an increasingly crowded streaming market, hits like Lift are an important part of its strategy. The heist film, which focuses on the NFT technology that was all the rage back in 2022, probably won’t make a huge splash when compared to other releases from the streamer, but it is off to a good start at justifying the reported $100 million budget that the film cost.
Lift stars Kevin Hart, Viveik Kalra, Vincent D’Onofrio, Úrsula Corberó, and Billy Magnussen as a crew of thieves who pull off a pair of high-stakes jobs simultaneously – stealing a famous Van Gogh painting from London while kidnapping a renowned NFT artist in Venice.
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