Zack Snyder thinks more people saw Rebel Moon than Barbie, so let’s see if he’s right

Joe Rogan’s podcast is not generally an accurate representation of… reality (you could just glance at the caliber of his usual guests to know that), but filmmaker Zack Snyder appeared on the show this week and dropped a curiously bold claim: According to him, Netflix’s whole distribution model is so “crazy” that he thinks more people have probably seen his movie Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child Of Fire than Barbie (when it was in theaters)—due to Netflix’s ubiquity and the fact that you can just throw something on without having to go out to a theater and buy a separate ticket.

That seems completely absurd, because Barbie made over $1 billion at the global box office last year and was a genuine cultural phenomenon, and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon might as well be yet another one of Netflix’s disposable monster-of-the-week true crime docs for how much of an impact it made. So let’s do some basic math and see how it all shakes out. (And, to make this explicitly clear, this is all our in-house number-crunching based on publicly available data, and neither Netflix nor Warner Bros. Discovery responded to our requests for comment.)

Snyder claimed on the podcast that 80 or 90 million Netflix accounts at least hit “play” on Rebel Moon, but Netflix’s own data on its Global Top 10 web page suggest that it’s on the low end of that. The site only reports data for movies that got more than 3 million views, which Netflix compiles by comparing the numbers of people who clicked on the movie and the total number of hours that people spent watching the movie. In the four weeks that Rebel Moon was on that chart, Netflix says it got about 71.9 million views. If we are enormously generous and we assume that it got 2 million for each of the seven weeks since then, that makes it about 86 million.

Barbie, meanwhile, made $1.4 billion globally. Going by the data from WorldAtlas, the average movie ticket around the world is about $10.7, so that means somewhere around 135 million tickets were sold for Barbie—which is quite a bit higher than our generous estimate for Rebel Moon.

But Snyder raised a good point while talking to Rogan (a rare thing to happen on that show), which is that one view on Netflix doesn’t necessarily mean one person, and we’re talking about how many people saw Rebel Moon versus how many people saw Barbie. He said that Netflix itself considers each view to be two people, which is how he came to the conclusion that 160 million people saw Rebel Moon, but that can’t possibly be an accurate interpretation of these numbers. A 2020 review of studies about streaming use noted that “people tend to binge-watch alone,” and while watching one movie doesn’t necessarily qualify as binge-watching, it does at least take the air out of the argument that one view on Netflix is automatically two views because people watch things together.

Unfortunately, none of that is really quantifiable, meaning we can’t accurately adjust our Netflix math to account for the possibility of people watching Rebel Moon alone or with others. There’s also the fact that someone could watch Rebel Moon twice, which would count for Netflix’s data, but wouldn’t count twice for the number of people who saw the movie. And the same goes for Barbie’s ticket sales. You could buy a ticket two times, and you’re still just one person. But people could also sneak into Barbie without buying a ticket, which would still count as them seeing the movie in a theater (Snyder’s only stipulation), but wouldn’t be reflected in the movie’s ticket sales.

So it seems like there’s no right way to do this without fudging the numbers one way or the other. Still, it seems safe to conclude that Snyder’s claim isn’t as outlandish as it seemed, but he is almost certainly overestimating Rebel Moon’s success by at least a little bit. Therefore, we would wager that the number of people who have seen Barbie in a theater is indeed higher than the number of people who have seen Rebel Moon on Netflix, but not by a ton.