The Gray Man's run as Netflix's most popular movie has come to an end after just eight days. Instead, a surprising original movie has taken the crown from the Russo brothers-directed film and knocked it down to second place on the streamer's daily top 10.
Purple Hearts, a new Netflix original, is now the streamer's current number one movie, per IndieWire. The film stars Nicholas Galitzine as a Marine and Sofia Carson as a singer who get married for military benefits – but a tragedy alters the course of their relationship.
The Gray Man is Netflix's most expensive movie ever, and there's already a sequel and spin-off on the way. Chris Evans, Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Regé-Jean Page, Billy Bob Thornton, and Jessica Henwick make up the cast of the movie.
The action film had the second most popular opening weekend on Netflix of this year with 88 million hours watched across its first three days. It couldn't quite beat the Ryan Reynolds-starring The Adam Project, though, which scored 92.43 million in its opening weekend. The Gray Man's initial performance makes it the fifth most popular opening weekend of all time on Netflix, too, with Red Notice, Don't Look Up, The Adam Project, and The Kissing Booth 3 making up the rest of the top five.
"This movie is an original IP," Joe Russo explained in a recent interview with Total Film. "It's not pre-existing; it's new characters [and] a new world. It's risky for studios. Studios are in a more conservative mode. A lot of them are in IP-management mode. There's a certain price they'll give you to experiment with something new. They're interested in original IP in a way that perhaps some other studios aren't at the moment – and at a higher price tag, which did allow us to execute a lot of the action sequences in the movie. It would have been a smaller film at a different studio."
The Gray Man is streaming on Netflix now, and you can fill out your watchlist with our guide to the best Netflix movies currently available.
