Decoding the Netflix 100

When Netflix launched its online rental service 10 years ago, the mythic "top 10 most-rented films" category was, as one might expect, art house and foreign flicks. But now that it has become a mainstream giant offering more than 100,000 movies to over 8 million subscribers, you would expect that same top-10 list to have been taken over by big-grossing blockbuster hits.

Amazingly, it hasn't. As of this reporting, 98 percent of the top worldwide grossing films of all time don't even crack the Netflix 100, a list posted online every other Sunday calculating the number of times a specific movie has been viewed.

Take these examples as assaults on conventional wisdom (and, in some cases, taste): While Harry Potter doesn't make the top 100, Jane Fonda and J. Lo's comic miscarriage Monster-in-Law does. You won't find Frodo or Anakin or Peter Parker on the list, but you will find Sara Huttinger, Lucinda Harris, and Brooke Meyers. (Don't ring a bell? They're characters played by Jennifer Aniston in Rumor Has It, Derailed, and The Break-Up, respectively—big hits, according to the Netflix 100.) The list also includes such head-scratchers as Fun With Dick and Jane, Just Like Heaven, and Coach Carter. The most-watched Spielberg film according to Netflix isn't E.T., War of the Worlds, Schindler's List, or Saving Private Ryan. It's The Terminal, his 2004 Yakov Smirnoff-lost-in-an-airport dud.

So what explains these renting anomalies, and how have smaller, less expensive—and, it's worth pointing out in some cases, truly awful—films been able to stave off the influx of Hollywood blockbusters?

THE ONLINE RANKINGS PRINCIPLE
To try to explain this, the first thing you need to know is that, to this day, the Netflix 100 is the only standings that the rental giant releases online for its subscribers. This is strange when you consider the charts that you won't find on the site, like, say, top rentals for the week or month. But it also helps explain why indie films are able to compete with the big boys.

Imagine if you will the antiquated act of walking into your local Blockbuster. Displayed along the walls are independent films, critical faves, and Oscar winners. Big-budget new releases are generally placed in the center racks. You might argue that most people will make the little bit of extra effort to find the big-budget Hollywood hit. Netflix is a fascinating model to study because their user main page is set up much like this "bizarro" Blockbuster, where the prominent sections, along with New Releases and Previews, are the Netflix 100, Critics' Picks, and Award Winners.

To understand how this influences the top-rental rankings, let's take a look at the movie Crash, which grossed a modest $54.5 million in the United States. Before Oscar night, March 5, 2005, the small-budget ensemble drama was nowhere near the top of the charts. But with more than one million movie requests flooding in during the telecast, the Oscar winner quickly shot up the Netflix 100, and just over a month later surpassed Mystic River and Mr. and Mrs. Smith to grab the top spot. Amazingly, it has held on to the number-one position for more than three years. How has it achieved this remarkable feat?

For one thing, it gets a tremendous boost from what we call the online rankings principle, which states: The top entries of an online ranking tend to stay the top entries. Why? Because Web users value not only getting useful information, but also getting it quickly. It's a time-saver to equate a higher position with better. You see this principle constantly at work on search engines like Google and YouTube. They say that the rich get richer—nowhere is this as true as where online rankings are concerned.

And it's not just Crash, with its impressive streak, that has benefited from the online rankings principle. Look, for instance, at the other top-four films from last April's Netflix 100. The number-two spot was held by Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which has since dropped only four spots to number six. The number-three movie, Walk the Line, has slid only two spots to number five, while the number-four film, Hotel Rwanda, has fallen only to number eight. In fact, of the movies from last April's top 10, five are still in the top 10 and only one, Ray, has fallen out of the top 20.

This reveals something powerful about the psychology of online consumers: It doesn't matter as much what a film costs, what it's about, who stars in it, or how many special effects it has. The most important determining factor of popularity is simply its very existence on a ranked list—even one that people don't fully understand, like the Netflix 100—and its corresponding position on the chart. Put Star Wars in the top 10 and it will stay in the top 10. Replace Star Wars on the list with Hotel Rwanda and an amazing thing happens—more people rent Hotel Rwanda.

This fact could be incredibly important to movie studios. For example, a movie that peaks at 101—just off the Netflix 100—will eventually fall farther down the list, finally settling in the 1,000 range, where it might go out to 800 subscriber households a month. If that same movie rises to number 92—just onto the Netflix 100 list—then it has a good chance of going up. The higher it rises on the list each week, the more hits it will get, spurring it on higher and higher up the standings. So, let's say it reaches number 38, as the forgettable romantic comedy Must Love Dogs inexplicably did last April. A year later it's still the 55th all-time most popular film on Netflix, and probably makes more per week than Spider-Man or Jurassic Park. In other words, a movie studio can dramatically increase sales of a title on Netflix by simply getting it onto the Netflix 100.

Almost 20 percent of the most-rented films on Netflix are romantic comedies and "chick flicks." Anything with Jennifer Aniston seems to perform shockingly wellNow let's look at Hotel Rwanda, the eighth-most-rented film of all time on Netflix. As we mentioned, its very position on the Netflix 100 reinforces its popularity. But like Crash, it has also been helped by its other attributes. For one thing, it's one of the highest-rated films on Netflix. It scores the 17th spot on the list of dramas, which is ordered by subscriber rating, meaning the best-reviewed movies will be at the top, where they will be the first movies that people see on the screen and thus are more likely to be added to their queue. It also gets extra hits from being nominated for three Oscars (Award Winners list), critically acclaimed (Critics' Picks), as well as placing on the top-10 lists for Favorite Movies, Historical Drama, Top 10 of 2004, Favorite Political: Africa, and the IMDb Top 250.

Excluding personal member sites, last summer's blockbuster Transformers isn't on any of Netflix's prominently ranked lists. Effectively, it's hidden in the middle of the racks. As a result, it's number 93 on the Netflix 100, nine spots behind the art house film Capote and 56 spots behind indie drama The Constant Gardener.

To help determine any other interesting trends found in the Netflix 100, we analyzed the list going back a full year, a total of 28 separate charts since April 15, 2007. Once again, we see the value of grabbing a gold statue. The Departed, which earned director Martin Scorsese his first Oscar win in 2007, has been making the most serious bid to topple Crash and claim the crown. Since last April, it has risen from 40th place to its current position of number two. According to Steve Swasey, Netflix VP of corporate communications, The Departed has been gaining on Crash, but there's no way to tell how close it is to putting a final hit on it. "We don't disclose the actual number of rentals of any title for competitive reasons," explains Swasey. Want to know the total number of copies of Good Luck Chuck that were sent out? No luck, Chuck.

THE KLEENEX FACTOR
Netflix also won't release any official demographic information, but according to the Hollywood Reporter, the ratio of women to men is 53 to 47 percent. However, Swasey says even that number might not be completely accurate because women tend to handle the household's Netflix account. The bottom line is that we can't determine exactly the number of single women who rented Must Love Dogs compared with that of single men. (Is that the sound of a million guys exhaling at once I hear?) It's interesting to note, however, that almost 20 percent of the most-rented films on Netflix are romantic comedies and "chick flicks," including Cold Mountain (#96), from 2003, making it one the most enduringly popular films on Netflix. Other female-oriented fare that has been surprising in its long-term resilience includes The Notebook (#10), Memoirs of a Geisha (#32), Just Like Heaven (#56), and In Her Shoes (#57). And as we mentioned, anything with Jennifer Aniston seems to perform shockingly well.

Just when you think you have it figured out, think again. That sounds like something an omniscient narrator would intone during a preview for a big-budget Hollywood thriller (Just when you think you've figured it out 10 minutes in—you're right!), but we're actually referring to some of the other mind-bending anomalies of the Netflix 100. Ray dropped 24 spots, the most of any film in the top 10 over the past year. The next biggest drop was Wedding Crashers, which dropped 11 spots. Other surprising hits on the Netflix 100 include 2006's The Lake House, a sentimental love story starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, which was notable for its inability to repeat the duo's success in Speed, pulling in only $52,000,000 domestically. Since last April, it's actually gone up from number 30 to number 26—more impressive when you consider it was nowhere in the vicinity of the Award Winner or Critics' Picks charts.

We're actually not complaining about the strangely strong showing of The Lake House: It's the kind of illogic that pulls us deeper into the Netflix 100 universe, the mysteries of which shall be one day be solved. Just as soon as we reach number 132 on our queue, Enchanted ... um, we mean The Transporter 2.