Netflix gives surprising boost to troubled star’s ‘awful’ $100,000,000 movie-Tori Brazier-Entertainment – Metro

Netflix’s latest big release has proven a hit with curious viewers (Picture: Netflix)

Netflix has given Jennifer Lopez at least one reason to smile this week after cancelling her entire US tour amid swirling speculation around her marriage to Ben Affleck.

Well, 31,600,000 reasons actually, as that’s how many times her new $100million action sci-fi movie Atlas has been watched in the past week.

For the second week running, it’s the most popular title on the streaming platform, defying critics and terrible reviews.

It was initially watched a staggering 28 million times in is first three days on the platform, despite showing a dismal and (very) rotten score of just 19% on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

The $100million (£78.6m) movie follows data analyst Atlas Shepherd (Lopez) as she embarks on a mission to stop a renegade robot.

In the face of her deep distrust of AI, she is forced to trust the artificial intelligence device when the mission takes a dangerous turn. 

Atlas also stars Oscar nominee Sterling K. Brown, Marvel’s Simu Liu and Sherlock Holmes and Shazam! actor Mark Strong.

According to Netflix’s site Tudum, Atlas has completely dominated this week’s global top 10 once again, with 31.6m views of the movie clocked internationally.

That’s also comfortably ahead of the 21.4m Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver managed in its first (partial) week of release back in April.

This is based on 63,100,000 hours viewed of the film, which has a two-hour runtime.

And, as ever, Netflix likes to base its calculations on each account actually representing two people, so it could be argued from their standpoint that Atlas has been watched already by a wild 119m people, with both weeks’ figures taken into consideration.

Netflix’s data was collected between May 27 and June 2, with its success in its first week only accounting for three full days of the movie’s release after it came out on Friday May 24.

Atlas also far outstripped the competition from other titles currently streaming on the platform, with animated movie Ice Age: Collision Course in distant second place with 9m views.

Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs was nipping at its heels in third place this week, with 8.1m views, while a former number one was in fourth.

Atlas, starring Jennifer Lopez, was panned by critics but is still number one on Netflix in its second week, with a further 31million views (Picture: Ana Carballosa/Netflix)

The movie also stars Oscar nominee Sterling K. Brown as Colonel Banks (Picture: Ana Carballosa/Netflix)

New Netflix film Mother of the Bride, starring Brooke Shields, Miranda Cosgrove and Benjamin Bratt, was also panned upon its release – with some viewers even complaining of it having ‘an AI script’.

However, it still pulled in 6.1m view this week, ahead of the likes of Madame Web, Security, Sing 2 and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

This triumph for Lopez, 54, comes hot on the heels of her dramatically axing her entire This Is Me… Now tour, which was due to kick off in Orlando at the end of June.

She scrapped a string of planned dates already, but after weeks of questions about slow ticket sales and ongoing rumours about the state of her marriage, she decided to pull the plug on the whole thing.

Lopez has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny surrounding the state of her marriage with Ben Affleck (Picture: Getty)

The singer and actress described herself as ‘completely heartsick and devastated’ over letting her fans down.

‘Please know that I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary. I promise I will make it up to you and we will all be together again.

‘I love you all so much. Until next time…,’ a statement read on her OnTheJLo newsletter.

A representative from Live Nation had issued a statement earlier that day, announcing: ‘Jennifer is taking time off to be with her children, family and close friends.’

Last week, she added fuel to the fire by cancelling her entire US tour (Picture: Nathan Congleton/NBCUniversal via Getty)

She and Ben, 51, were then spotted out together at his 12-year-old son Samuel’s basketball game over the weekend, putting on a show of unity with an extremely awkward air kiss.

But Lopez has no time for that to dampen her spirits as she also shared her delight over Atlas’s continued success, which she called ‘great news’.

‘Atlas is #1 worldwide again this week!!! Thank you all so much!!!’ she gushed on her website.

‘It may seem like there’s a lot of negativity out in the world right now… but don’t let the voices of a few drown out that there is sooo much love out there,’ she added.

Although J-Lo might be pulling in interest from fans for this flick, directed by Brad Peyton, it was dubbed ‘a massive misfire in almost every conceivable fashion’ by Allen Almachar for The MacGuffin, while The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle wrote: ‘Imagine two hours of Lopez trying to deadlift 1,000 pounds, and you’d have an idea of what Atlas is like.’  

J-Lo, pictured with her co-stars Simu Liu (L) and Brown (R), shared her thrill over Atlas’s continued success in a statement (Picture: Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images)

Deadline’s Valerie Complex also called it ‘a missed opportunity’ while Empire’s Helen O’Hara observed: ‘Even major movie-star charisma can’t make up for the recycled story elements, tired exposition and endless psycho-babble.’

Fans have also been left less than impressed, with viewer @thisisseaston simply tweeting: ‘This new J Lo movie is really bad. Not even fun to watch bad. Bad bad.’

‘All those amazing cancelled shows. For this,’ @sin_shady718 added. 

Atlas is streaming on Netflix now.

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