Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.cbr.com
One of the most divisive movies of the year has made a major impact on the streaming market. Ben Affleck’s latest directorial project, Animals, topped the Nielsen charts after being released on Netflix for two days.
The film garnered a staggering 719 million minutes viewed for the week of Oct. 5 and 11. Even weeks later, the crime thriller has not left the platform’s top 10 charts, with it currently sitting at the #2 spot worldwide, according to FlixPatrol. Unfortunately, this has not translated into positive reception. With a 31% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and an equally shoddy 37% audience score, Animals has been a popular yet controversial watch since it dropped on Oct. 9.
Animals Is a Chaotic Thriller Where Everyone Has a Secret
Animals is Affleck’s first directorial effort in three years, after the Golden Globe-nominated Nike Air Jordans biopic Air. It also marks Afflecks’ second collaboration with Netflix in 2026, as he also starred in the action-packed The Rip, one of the streamer’s best originals this year. While Affleck has generally had success as a director, the new release set a disappointing record: Affleck’s lowest-rated entry on Rotten Tomatoes, with some critics calling it a riff on the great Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.
In the crime thriller, Mark Kimball (Affleck) is an LA mayoral candidate on the verge of losing, so he makes a major campaign gamble towards the city’s Latino American community. It’s such a big gamble that he spends his entire life savings on said campaign, all at the behest of his manager, Sam (Steven Yeun). This decision is heavily contested by his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington). Unfortunately, this comes at the worst time possible; on Halloween, Mark’s son, Denny (Christopher Woodley), along with the son of his housekeeper, Cecilia (Adriana Paz), go missing, with a $7 million bounty being placed on Denny’s head.
While Mark struggles to figure out how to handle this horrifying situation, it turns out to be the opening of Pandora’s box. To save his son, he’s going to have to find out some pretty life-altering secrets that send his world into disarray.
Negative Reviews Won’t Stop Animals From Conquering Netflix
Warrick Page/Netflix
Despite its stacked cast and intriguing plot, Animals has received negative reviews since its release at the beginning of October. Some critics have said that the film has the makings of something that could have been great, but ultimately falls short. Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com called it “easily Affleck’s worst directorial effort,” while Rodrigo Perez of The Playlist said that the actor-director “wants to explore what happens when honorable people discover that the world demands indecent things of them, but the drama rarely earns the gravity it assigns to those quandaries.”
Even though the reviews say one thing, the viewing numbers say another. Animals continues to be a massive success for Netflix. While Nielsen’s numbers have yet to update for the week of Oct. 12 and 18, Netflix has provided the numbers for that week via Tudum. Its data has it as the #1 film watched worldwide, with over 30.8 million views and 55.4 million hours viewed. Even if it was a gamble for both Affleck and Netflix, it looks to still have paid off, regardless of word of mouth.
Animals is now streaming on Netflix.
- Release Date
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October 9, 2026
- Runtime
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106 minutes
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Kerry Washington
Abigail Kimball
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Gillian Anderson
Dayle Burton
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