Pictures: Netflix
Welcome to your August 2025 update of the biggest movies of 2025! Below, we’re looking at the year’s biggest hits (and misses) by tracking the most successful launches and most-watcheded Netflix movies, both English and non-English, as well as feature documentaries. Using data from Netflix’s official Top 10s and now Netflix’s Engagement Report, we’ll break down which titles are leading the pack so far this year and those that haven’t quite made the bill. Let’s dig in.
Note: For this list, we’ll be looking at the first two weeks of launch for each title (except for feature documentaries) in addition to using the Netflix Engagement Report. Data goes up to August 10th, 2025.
English Language Movie Hits of 2025
Picture: Netflix
Back in Action came out of the gate swinging in January 2025 and has built itself a convincing lead in the movie charts for the year so far, although KPop Demon Hunters would later prove to be the ultimate winner of 2025. That strong performance in its first two weeks continued for the Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz action comedy, with the movie ranking in Netflix’s all-time top 10 list at the time of publication, at number 6.
Tyler Perry defied all odds with his movie STRAW, which, after two weeks, picked up over 74.2M views.
The Tom Hardy action movie, Havoc, comes in a distant third, with The Life List shortly behind, cementing Sofia Carson’s continued status as a Netflix movie queen.
The Electric State is now the seventh most-watched launch of 2025 and fifth for the first half of the year. Given the reported budget, that’s almost certainly a disappointment for the streamer and perhaps marks the end of Netflix’s massive-budget swings (big budget swings will still be coming!).
Of course, KPop Demon Hunters isn’t particularly well represented in these three lists right because it was released in June, which prevents it from putting in too much viewership in the first half of the year, and the fact that it really didn’t become a big hit until week 3 onwards.
Elsewhere, horror continues to struggle on Netflix with Fear Street: Prom Queen currently ranking last amongst the English language films from the US that have managed to feature in the US top 10s for two weeks.
First Two Weeks
First Month
Engagement Report (January – June 2025)
Documentary Feature Hits on Netflix in 2025
Moving on to documentaries, we’ll narrow this list down to just the first week of launch until we get the Netflix Engagement Report data. Until June, The Twister: Caught in the Storm took home the most amount of views and by quite some distance, although it eventually was overtaken by Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster and eventually one of the newest Trainwreck documentaries: Poop Cruise. So far in 2025, people have soured slightly on murder documentaries in favor of documentaries on catastrophes and disasters.
A few misses from the list include an early release of the year following Bryan Johnson, the man who is going to extraordinary lengths to try to live forever. That title is Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. Also missing from the documentary feature list is Behind the Curtain: Stranger Things The First Shadow, the behind-the-scenes documentary for the stage play (which is brilliant). The British documentary Grenfell: Uncovered also failed to enter the global top 10s.
This year, Netflix will continue its expansion into documentary “franchises”, for lack of a better phrase. Untold is the biggest one so far, and of the three that have been released, only The Liver King and The Fall of Favre managed to jump into the top 10s, with Shooting Guards missing out.
Non-English Language Movie Hits of 2025 So Far
Looking at the top 4 movies of the year, there’s a clear trend: action movies kick ass for Netflix’s international movie slate. Exterritorial, Counterattack, and Ad Vitam have broken into the all-time most watched list at the time of updating. Action and violence are universal, and that applies here, with all four movies performing well even beyond their origin country.
Elsewhere, a good showing for Japanese titles, albeit less so for Indian films and romance titles.
First Two Weeks
Engagement Report (January – June 2025)
A couple of notable omissions from the chart above include the French musical comedy “Banger,” which only spent a single week in the Non-English charts, garnering 1.9M views before dropping out. That’s a similar story for the anime movie The Rose of Versailles, which only garnered 1.3 million views before dropping out.
As a reminder, we offer many top 10 tools that go beyond what the official Netflix Top 10 site provides. Our simple search tool allows you to search for individual titles and (easily) go back through prior weeks of top 10s with comparisons of how much a title jumped or dropped in any given week. We’ve also got a country search and our Netflix Engagement Reports search tool.
What’s been your favorite new release of 2025 so far? Let us know in the comments down below.
