The Most Popular Streaming Movies This Week

The world of streaming provides a near-infinite array of viewing possibilities. There are now countless streaming services, each with their own libraries containing hundreds or thousands of movies to watch. (Did you know there’s a streaming called Fawesome? Well, there is. And I have heard its selection is fawesome.)

With all those choices and with all those services, it’s hard to know what people are actually watching. Most streaming services do not share their data, and those who publish “most viewed” lists often do so using arcane mathematical formulas that can’t be fact checked. (Do we really think Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Attack of the T-Rex had 5.9 million views on Netflix last week? I mean, I have never even heard of this movie until literally right this very minute, but I have no proof that it didn’t. Maybe it did!)

One way I like to investigate this topic is by looking at streaming films’ popularity on the movie-based social media app Letterboxd. As we have outlined previously, popularity on Letterboxd is determined by “a mix of member activity, including reviews, comments, watches, logs, watchlists, etc.” The more people are reviewing, watching (and saying they want to watch), logging, and writing about something, the higher it rates on the site in terms of “popularity.”

But Letterboxd also allows you to filter results in their database according to where movies are available, either in theaters or on VOD or streaming. And when you weed out the popular films that are exclusively available in theaters, you wind up with a list of the most popular titles of the moment on streaming — and here they are (and where to currently stream them)…