The Mother has proven to be an enormous hit for Netflix. The action movie, which was helmed by Mulan (2020) director Niki Caro, starred Jennifer Lopez in the title role as an assassin fighting to protect her daughter, who was placed with a foster family when she went into hiding. The ensemble cast of the project included Joseph Fiennes, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Paul Raci, and Gael García Bernal.
Netflix has now released their first Engagement Report, sharing their content's viewership numbers for the period between January and June 2023. Although the The Mother released in May, just a month before the end of this period, it nevertheless became the most-viewed movie on the platform for the first half of 2023 and the 14th most-viewed title overall on that chart with a total of 249.9 million hours viewed. It h as ranked above other high-performing Netflix original titles such as Extraction 2
How The Mother Became Such A Hit
One surprising thing about The Mother's streaming success is the fact that the movie’s reviews tended to range from mediocre to outright negative. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie holds a 43% score, and on Metacritic, it has a similarly low rating of 45 out of 100. The audience scores are more positive but not considerably better, landing the movie at 62% on Rotten Tomatoes and an average score of 6.5 out of 10 on Metacritic.
However, there are several factors that likely helped propel The Mother to the top of the chart. The first was the fact that it was released on Mother's Day weekend. Although the movie isn't based around the holiday, the thematically appropriate title seems to have managed to draw Mother's Day audiences in a way that new theatrical releases Book Club: The Next Chapter and Hypnotic failed to do. This also may be what allowed the movie to rack up so many hours before the June cutoff despite other, earlier Netflix titles spending more time on the chart.
On top of the holiday weekend viewers, Lopez leading the The Mother cast likely helped propel it to the top. She is a well-known star who has been nominated for two Golden Globes, but she hasn't been the primary lead of a non-comic action movie since 1997's Anaconda. Seeing the star return to the genre after so long was likely a draw for many viewers who are used to seeing the star onstage or in other genres, like dramas and romantic comedies.
Source: Netflix
