No One Knows Why A Famously Bad Movie Is Currently #1 On Netflix

Yesterday, Netflix announced that it will stop sending DVDs through the mail at the end of September. So you’ll have to look elsewhere for one of the worst movies of the 2010s — like the Netflix top 10.

The Snowman is a famously terrible film. The “grim, dim, snowbound thriller” from 2017 has a six percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and even the film’s director, Tomas Alfredson, had a miserable time making it. “Our shoot time in Norway was way too short, we didn’t get the whole story with us and when we started cutting we discovered that a lot was missing,” he told the Norwegian Broadcast Corporation. “It’s like when you’re making a big jigsaw puzzle and a few pieces are missing, so you don’t see the whole picture.”

The Snowman had been retired to the meme bargain bin, but it’s currently — and bizarrely — the most-watched movie on Netflix in the United States. Tens of thousands of subscribers decided, all at once, that instead of Phantom Thread or Lord of the Rings or The Irishman, they would prefer to watch a movie where Michael Fassbender plays a sad detective named Harry Hole.

This is a case not even Mister Police could solve.

The snowman is the perfect piece of shit box office flop to go viral on Netflix a decade after it failed in theaters pic.twitter.com/Cxgy8KX68Y

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) April 18, 2023

The sad thing is that THE SNOWMAN is actively worse than a number of direct-to-vod serial killer flicks that periodically break out for a week on Netflix https://t.co/I7prOaCUUV

— Scott Mendelson (@ScottMendelson) April 18, 2023

now it's your chance to see "The Snowman" (2017), which is inexplicably the 'number one' movie on Netflix right now in the U.S. pic.twitter.com/4dJpz9Eavg

— Todd Vaziri (@tvaziri) April 18, 2023

Netflix's biggest flex is its ability to turn any piece of garbage—and THE SNOWMAN is a complete piece of garbage—into the most-watched movie on any given day.

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) April 18, 2023

This is what Netflix should actually apologize for.