Netflix's recent German film about vampires on a plane, Blood Red Sky, became both an international and domestic sleeper hit for the service and proved that the streamer's foray into foreign content is paying off handsomely. Although the dialogue is primarily in English, the success of the horror movie as Netflix's most-watched German production ever still paves the way for more original programming on a global scale and confirms that American audiences are willing to watch stories from beyond their country's borders.
At first glance, Blood Red Sky seems like niche genre fare that's more destined to live among the cult video stacks than become a worldwide hit. The film combines elements of an airplane hijacking thriller with vampire horror, the type of premise that seems like it would pique the intrigue of genre fans but leave general audiences less receptive. Yet the film's viewership numbers show just how wrong that assumption is. Blood Red Sky hijacked the number one spot on Netflix in the United States, as well as in Brazil and Saudi Arabia, and has racked up over 50 million views per U.S. household so far. Interestingly, the film never made it to the top spot in Germany, landing at number two instead.
People like high-profile directors and movie theater executives decry streaming services as a far less traditional and rewarding experience than cinemas, but the irony is that Blood Red Sky would probably not exist if it wasn't for Netflix's hunger for more content. According to Deadline, director and writer Peter Thorwarth first wrote the script 16 years ago and had been shopping it around for years. David Kosse, who was Universal Pictures International chairman nine years ago, expressed interest, but left the company and only greenlit the project when he became Netflix's Vice President of International Film. Thorwarth had trouble igniting interest in his script in both his native Germany and in English-language countries, but Netflix's position as an international marketer finally fulfilled the filmmaker's ambitions.
The reason why Netflix has invested so much effort in producing and distributing foreign content is that the bulk of the streamer's audiences are not, in fact, American. Unlike other streaming services that struggle with an international rollout (HBO Max still hasn't launched in Canada, and streaming staple Hulu is unavailable in the U.K.), Netflix is still the world's top source for streaming entertainment. What's more, even though Netflix doesn't necessarily produce its non-English language content for primarily American audiences, the mere presence of foreign films and TV series within the American library, coupled with an algorithm that purposely pushes original programming above licensed content, means that these productions have a fair shot at becoming stateside hits.
Case in point, Blood Red Sky wasn't even Netflix's first German success story. Barbarians, a TV show very much about German culture and history, was previously Netflix's most-watched international series in the United States. Before that, the sci-fi mystery series Dark was Netflix's first German-language show, but 90% of its audience came from outside of Germany, a huge sign of a growing market. It's not just German content that Americans are watching, either. Spain's Money Heist and France's Lupin series were both global phenomenon that became domestic hits. On the film front, the Spanish dystopian sci-fi film The Platform became the most-watched foreign language movie with 58 million households watching in the first month, and the Korean zombie movie #Alive topped American Netflix charts on its debut.
Interest in international movies seems to be growing in the United States at the same time as streaming services allow for more access to these stories. For years, movie-goers have perceived foreign cinema as the object of cinephiles and cult audiences, but Netflix has proven that all it takes for these projects to reach the mainstream is easy accessibility. Peter Thorwarth has expressed that Blood Red Sky is neither truly German nor American, but actually a bona fide "international movie." Perhaps that sentiment best represents the way Netflix has brought global entertainment to the local TV screen.