Skydance Animation and Netflix have another hit movie, Swapped, which debuted on the weekly global top 10 charts for the streamer with 15.5M views based on 26.4M hours watched. That’s in addition to ranking in the daily top 10s in over 90 countries.
In the opening 3-day debut, Netflix’s second-best animated movie debut on a Friday in quite some time, putting it in touching distance of The Sea Beast.
On Tuesday, the movie was launched; it was undeniably Netflix’s biggest movie debut, preventing an apples-to-apples comparison in the graph above. Interestingly, Netflix still noted in their write-up that Swapped had ‘the biggest three-day opening for a Netflix animated film since Leo in 2023.’ In its first five days, Leo pulled in 34.6M views.
It’s a welcome win for Netflix Animation, which has had a hard time finding big animated hits since KPOP Demon Hunters since last summer, which is now into its 46th week straight in the weekly top 10s, regularly chunking in over 4 million views every single week and now up to 617M views and over 1.028B viewing hours in total. Of course, that movie famously started (as you can see above) low in the top 10s before steadily growing over time.
The movie, directed by Nathan Greno, tells the story of a tiny woodland creature and a majestic bird who suddenly swap bodies, forcing them to team up to survive the wildest adventure of their lives.
It picked up mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, including our own Andrew Morgan, who gave it a 3/5 star rating, but the audience reception thus far has been overwhelmingly positive, with it sitting at an 89% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of publication.
Much of the film’s immediate draw can likely be attributed to its stellar voice cast, featuring Michael B. Jordan and Juno Temple as the mismatched duo, alongside comedy heavyweights like Tracy Morgan and Cedric the Entertainer. That’s in addition to its vibrant clips and artwork going viral across social media, including many with tens of millions of views.
We consistently see from the Netflix Engagement Data report that animated movies, whether licensed or from Netflix’s own output, are the top performers and have strong long-tail viewership. We can tell you that on the global daily top 10s, Swapped managed to unseat Apex today as the #1 title for May 5th. Its next big competition will be Remarkably Bright Creatures this Friday.
Next up on Netflix’s animated slate is Steps later this year and Ray Gunn right at the end of the year, with the latter also from Skydance Animation.
The former, assuming it leans more into the Disney Princess vibe, should be bankable, though Ray Gunn remains a bit of a question mark given that it skews a little older than Netflix’s usual animated movies.