Increasingly, there’s been a disconnect between the response from critics to new Netflix movie releases — and how those same movies actually perform on the streaming service. A good example of this is the response to Me Time, the Kevin Hart-led Netflix comedy that hit the streamer on August 26.
Upon its release, Me Time immediately rocketed up the Netflix charts. It was even briefly the #1 English-language movie on Netflix in the world, no doubt on the strength of its lead actors’ fame. Since then, Me Time has been one of the Top 10 Netflix movies in the world for a total of four weeks. And for the 7-day period that ended on September 18, the movie racked up 7.9 million hours of viewing time, to make it the #4 movie on Netflix in the world right now. And it doesn’t stop there.
Response to Me Time on Netflix
According to the current data from Netflix about this week’s top titles, Me Time is still a Top 10 film on the streamer in a whopping 41 countries around the world. Again, almost a month after its Netflix debut.
Now, though, let’s take a look at the actual response to the film from critics and viewers — not just the amount of time everyone spent watching it.
The Rotten Tomatoes scores, of course, always break up the responses into an aggregate overall sentiment from critics, as well as a measure of the sentiment from audiences (on a percentage basis, with the highest being 100%). So what do critics and viewers think of Me Time?
Well, the movie has a super-atrocious 34% audience score, based on more than 500 user ratings. With critics, however, the movie (which also stars Mark Wahlberg and Regina Hall) fared much worse. It has a 6% critics’ score, based on 64 reviews. “A film that never knows what it wants to be other than little scattered pieces of better comedies about male insecurity,” one of the most recent critics’ reviews reads. “An absolute embarrassment all-around and one of the worst films of the year.”
READ MORE: 17 more Netflix releases are coming this week – here’s the full list (Sep 21-24)
Why does Netflix make so many terrible movies?
We should add the important caveat that Rotten Tomatoes scores are certainly one signal of sentiment around a movie. But it’s necessarily a comprehensive one, given that not everyone who watches a title like Me Time will head over to a site like Rotten Tomatoes and record their thoughts. The scores above, for example, are presumably from a subset of the movie’s audience — more specifically, from the subset most passionate in their reaction to it.
That said, there is a pattern here.
Me time by Kevin hart is just not funny waste of time😢
— KHALIF🔴 (@Remmymike_) September 17, 2022
For a few months now, the #1 Netflix movie in the world almost every week has, like Me Time, been an utter flop with critics (and sometimes viewers, too). We took a deeper look at this unwelcome distinction for Netflix in an earlier post, which you can check out right here.
Long story short, Netflix makes a ton of content that viewers and critics claim not to like. What’s not in dispute, though: Viewers are streaming the heck out of these titles, regardless. Even the ones that critics utterly rip to shreds.
More Netflix coverage: For more Netflix news, check out the latest new Netflix movies and series to watch.
