Disney-Pixar's disappointing Lightyear and Universal's spry Minions: The Rise of Gru have been the big-ticket animated feature films at the box office this summer.
But much more quietly, it's been Netflix's The Sea Beast that might have drawn the biggest CGI family-movie audience overall.
Blessed with a 95% aggregated critics ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, The Sea Beast drew just over 68.1 million hours of streaming on Netflix's global platform for the week of July 11-17, making it the top film on Netflix for the week.
Directed by Disney veteran Chris Williams (Bolt, Big Hero 6, Moana), The Sea Beast tracks the adventures of a young stowaway who joins forces with a legendary hunter of sea monsters.
Our back-of-napkin math: Accounting for the film's nearly two-hour runtime, you end up with around 34 million Netflix accounts worldwide streaming the movie in just one week. Assuming at least two viewers for each stream for this family film ... you're at around 68 million watchers, juxtaposing bigger groups of viewers against bored individual kids watching it multiple times on their iPad to while away the dog days of summer.
Multiply that total by the average price for a movie ticket (which is up to around $9.57 according to the MPAA) and you're at a weekly global box office of around $650 million. And that's not even accounting the more than 33 million streaming hours that The Sea Beast drew on Netflix the week before. (Netflix said in its Q2 letter to shareholders Tuesday that The Sea Beast, which dropped July 8, is up to 102 million streaming hours, while calling the title out as one of its recent programming highlights.)
To date, the latest Minions move has drawn over $534 million at the global box office.
In other Netflix categories, Season 4 of Stranger Things continued to be Netflix's top overall draw, capturing just over 102.3 million viewing hours. And yes, the first three seasons also once again ranked in Netflix's English-language series top 10 last week. The debut of the Resident Evil series finished second with nearly 72.7 million watching hours.
