2024 kicked off in a huge way for Jennifer Lopez, who released her ninth album (her first in a decade) and its positively reviewed concert visual film This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, famously featuring a wild Ben Affleck cameo, and the making-of documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told. Lopez also returned to the realm of science-fiction for the A.I. terrorist thriller Atlas, and while critics were pretty harsh with their takes on the Brad Peyton flick, those opinions definitely haven’t stopped people from watching.
It’s always easier to take a chance on a potentially bad movie with a Netflix subscription as opposed to getting out of the house and into the theater, which is possibly part of what’s helped Atlas become the most-watched movie on Netflix at the moment, despite it being railed on by a wide swath of people who’ve watched it. Let’s look at the good news first.
Jennifer Lopez’s Atlas Hits #1 On Netflix
On the TV side of things, Netflix audiences are living it up in the past, with Bridgerton Season 3 absolutely dominating the charts with its first batch of episodes, giving fans a new couple to root for while also allowing star Nicola Coughlin to clap back at body shamers. But viewers are definitely living it up in the future when it comes to movie-viewing habits.
According to Netflix’s first stats released after Atlas’ debut, the two-hour movie is sitting pretty atop the list of the service’s other most-streamed films for the week of May 20-26. During that stretch, Atlas was reportedly watched 28.2 million times, for a total of 56.3 million minutes streamed. Not too shabby at all.
In fact, Jennifer Lopez shared her appreciation with fans on X after Atlas first hit the top spot on the streaming service’s daily movie rankings, saying:
Gracias for making Atlas number 1 worldwide on @Netflix I LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH 🤍🙏
In second place, for comparison’s sake, is the Netflix original animated feature Thelma the Unicorn, which was viewed somewhere around 10.7 million times, for a total of 17.4 million minutes streamed. Below that, we have some of the Ice Age sequels making their debuts, with Madame Web holding strong in the ninth spot, though it def reached the #1 spot despite being panned so hard.
Atlas Dipped To 19% On Rotten Tomatoes, And The Audience Score Is Also Bad
Obviously Rotten Tomatoes is only an aggregate for critiques, and isn’t so much an indicator itself of how well a movie will do, especially when it comes to streaming features. But it’s still something of a surprise to see Atlas doing so well when its score is currently sitting at a dismal 19%, with 75 reviews compiled for the average.
What’s more, even the “good” reviews for the sci-fi movie are freely open about the minimal things that worked well, with most agreeing that overall, it’s not anyone’s best effort. And it’s not even just the critics that were left wanting.
More often than not, when critics go low with their takes for a project fronted by a beloved celeb, fan efforts can go a long way in balancing things. But in this case, the balance is still tipping a little too hard in the wrong direction, as Atlas currently only has a 50% Audience score, with more than 500 ratings logged.
So it appears as if Atlas is remaining popular in spite of itself, which tends to be how unwanted sequels happen. But only time will tell if Jennifer Lopez’s badass analyst will be back to take on another (or the same) threat for a second film. For now, there’s no Atlas 2 in Netflix’s upcoming movie schedule, but if it sticks around that #1 spot for a while, it might be a good time to get those expectations rolling.