Netflix's own chart: the GTA 6 Extended Look opened at No. 1 with 31.1 million views and led in 87 of 93 countries

Netflix published its weekly Top 10 on 1 September, and Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look sits at the top of the English film list for the week of 24 to 30 August with 31.1 million views. Netflix says it also reached No. 1 in 87 of the 93 countries it tracks globally, and calls the premiere first-of-its-kind for the service. The showcase went up on Netflix on 27 August, six hours ahead of Rockstar's YouTube channel, the arrangement we logged on 6 August.

The number needs its own footnote, because Netflix defines a view as total hours viewed divided by runtime. The chart credits the Extended Look with 14 million hours over a runtime of 27 minutes. The film in second place, The Whisper Man, has 23.2 million views but 44.1 million hours, because it runs an hour and 54 minutes. Measured in time actually spent watching, the thriller is three times the size of the game showcase. Measured in the currency Netflix ranks by, the game showcase wins comfortably. Both are true, and only one of them makes a headline.

For scale on the other side of that six-hour window, Rockstar's own upload stood at 17.8 million views on YouTube this morning, published on 27 August at 21:00 Eastern. A YouTube view is not counted the same way either, so read the comparison as an order of magnitude rather than a like-for-like gap: the streaming premiere put the video in front of roughly twice as many accounts as the platform where Grand Theft Auto trailers normally break records.

One line in Netflix's write-up is worth keeping for the database. The 27 minutes were, in its words, captured entirely from in-game footage on PlayStation 5. That is the same footage Digital Foundry pulled apart in its own analysis of Rockstar's 4K file, where it measured native 1440p with a spatial upscale to 4K and a 30 fps target, so the platform behind the numbers is now stated by the distributor as well.