Netflix says over 45 million accounts watched the original horror film Bird Box in its first week, breaking the company’s debut seven-day streaming record, as announced on Twitter Friday.
Bird Box has become a viral social media sensation since its debut on the streaming service Friday, Dec. 21, aided by the sudden (and possibly suspect) proliferation of memes related to the film.
While Netflix famously doesn’t share its viewership numbers, a spokesperson elaborated on the statistic shared online in a statement issued to The Verge. The spokesperson explains that the company only counts an account as having watched Bird Box “once a view surpasses 70 percent of the total running time (including credits),” and adds, “each ‘account’ may include multiple views and viewers but is only counted once.” They also noted that this “specific data collection method is only applicable to Bird Box, not the rest of its content.”
For now, we’ll have to take the company on its word, lacking any publicly accessible data to counter this oddly specific but somehow still vague statistic. For those who still want to watch Bird Box, the film is available on Netflix here. (Just don’t expect to see any monsters in it.)