This Netflix movie might have flopped with critics, but the director claims 500 million people watched it

Netflix movie Don't Look Up wasn't a huge hit with critics when it was released in 2021, scoring just 56% on Rotten Tomatoes.

But director Adam McKay has claimed that almost half a billion people watched the movie on the streamer, which would make it a massive success with audiences. "The estimates of how many people saw that movie – Netflix will never say exactly – but it’s somewhere between 400 million and half a billion," he told NME.

Don't Look Up is a satirical dark comedy about a comet approaching Earth, as an allegory for climate change. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Timothée Chalamet, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, and more. It's Netflix's second most popular movie ever, behind only Red Notice.

"In the face of these dramatic catastrophes that keep happening, a movie seems really small and ridiculous," McKay said elsewhere in the interview. "But what was inspiring and energising was the popular response to that movie, not the critics and the cultural gatekeepers who hated it. It ended up being number one in something like 85 countries, as diverse as Pakistan, Vietnam, US and Uruguay. That’s extremely rare for a comedy which is usually confined by cultural regional reference points."

Our own Don't Look Up review was positive, awarding the film four stars and calling it "a satire so gaudy, OTT, and stark-raving mad it plays, in these tumultuous times, like social realism."

Don't Look Up is streaming on Netflix now. You can fill out your watchlist with our guides to the best Netflix movies and the best Netflix shows.