Netflix's Sci-Fi Thriller With 157 Million Hours Watched Has Yet To Be Surpassed

Published Oct 7, 2026, 10:45 AM EDT

Felipe Rangel is a Movie and TV Journalist ScreenRant. He has been writing about movies and TV since 2021. Felipe joined ScreenRant in 2022, working across different teams, covering everything from breaking news to features to reviews and more.

Felipe is a writer who is an avid film and TV fan, with superhero movies and series being his biggest passion. He graduated from college in 2019, having studied Journalism. Before college, he spent a month studying at the Oxford English Centre. His superhero knowledge expands to the comics, with his undergraduate thesis being "Politics Reflected In American Comics."

Netflix's sci-fi thriller that became one of the streaming service's most-watched movies of all time has yet to be surpassed nearly a year after it was released. Netflix has had a lot of success with the sci-fi genre over the years, both when it comes to attracting major talent and discovering new stars. On the latter, Stranger Things comes to mind.

One of the biggest Netflix series ever, Stranger Things blended elements of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy to craft a unique and immersive world with charming characters fans constantly worried about dying. Other noteworthy Netflix sci-fi series include the genre-defining anthology series Black Mirror, the cyberpunk Altered Carbon, the mind-bending masterpiece Dark, the animated Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and many more.

As for Netflix's slate of movies, over the years, the streaming service has had quite a few hits coming from the genre. For instance, Sandra Bullock's Bird Box was a global streaming sensation, also inspiring the viral Bird Box Challenge on social media. Ryan Reynolds' time travel movie The Adam Project discovered future Percy Jackson actor Walker Scobell. In 2026, Alan Ritchson's War Machine conquered global charts.

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The Reacher star's new Netflix sci-fi thriller being so successful reminded me of a 2025 release from the streamer. That would be the sci-fi thriller The Great Flood, a South Korean disaster movie with a sci-fi twist that rose to become a global streaming sensation. Only a couple of months before its 1-year anniversary, the film has yet to be topped on the streamer.

The Great Flood Has Not Been Surpassed On Netflix's Charts

The Great Flood was released worldwide on Netflix on December 19, 2025. The sci-fi thriller would rack up a whopping 157.3 million hours viewed during the 91-day window used for Netflix's official all-time movies chart. The streaming service's main tracking metric comes down to the views that a movie or TV show gets, which is the project's hours viewed divided by its runtime. As such, The Great Flood ended with 86.6 million views, according to Netflix's official data, which was enough for the 2026 sci-fi thriller to end up as the 5th most-watched Non-English Netflix movie of all time.

Sure, there might be four other Netflix movies ahead of it on that global chart, with Troll leading the list at 103 million views. However, none of those films were released after The Great Flood came out on Netflix in December 2025, meaning a movie has yet to surpass it on Netflix's all-time Non-English movies chart. That said, when taking into account all Netflix movies released in 2026 so far, there are a few that managed to beat the sci-fi thriller. One of those was Ritchson's fellow genre release War Machine, which has amassed 139.9 million views to rank 10th on Netflix's all-time English movies chart.

Why The Great Flood Remains Worth Watching On Netflix Nearly A Year Later

The continued success of The Great Flood and Ritchson's meteoric rise with War Machine show that the sci-fi thrillers tend to be powerhouses on Netflix. Now, just a couple of months away from the South Korean movie's 1-year anniversary, it is easy to see why The Great Flood has yet to be surpassed on the streamer's charts, as it continues to be worth watching due to its intense and high-stakes story. The film follows a mother desperately trying to make her way to someplace safe to save her son as the world is ending around them via a monumental flood that is engulfing everything.

Initially, viewers believed that the movie's sci-fi twist was tied to the asteroid that hit Earth and caused the massive global flood. However, as Netflix's The Great Flood comes to reveal, there is a much bigger twist hiding in plain sight that completely recontextualizes the sci-fi thriller. As such, The Great Flood is perfect for repeated viewings on Netflix, as subscribers can go back and catch the clues to the film's shocking sci-fi twist, and it is a major one.