Most Popular on Netflix: A Look at Today's Top 10 (2024)

Netflix has been notoriously stingy with its data. Even directors and showrunners have had a hard time gauging if what they’d put out into the world was reaching its intended audience. With the advent of the Netflix Top 10, though, we can now get at least one little peek behind the curtain. The list of Netflix’s daily Top 10 Most Popular indicates an omnivorous appetite among the Netflix faithful, from reality shows to prestige TV, animated kids shows to docu-series of every stripe. Here are the entries for March 4, 2024, of the five most popular TV shows and five most popular movies on Netflix.

TV Series

1. Avatar: The Last Airbender
Year: 2024
Stars: Gordon Cormier, Kiawentiio, Ian Ousley, Dallas Liu, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Ken Leung, Daniel Dae Kim
Genre: Fantasy, adventure
Rating: TV-MA

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Avatar: The Last Airbender is often considered among the best animated series of all time, and for good reason. Over its 61-episode run, it deftly balanced contrasting elements: humor and weighty themes, episodic adventures and overarching storytelling, a fantastical setting with grounded details, and much more. And despite working in the broad realm of a fantasy epic, its characters and the 100-year war of imperial conquest they faced were portrayed with a specificity that captured the emotional reality of living in this world on fire. Even setting aside its nostalgia, it’s one of those rare stories that offers as much, and maybe more, for me as an adult as it did when I first caught it on Nickelodeon as a kid. For all these reasons, Netflix’s new live-action spin on this beloved show has a lot on its shoulders, a weight increased by previous disappointment, as this fanbase has already been burned by a hot-mess 2010 film adaptation that virtually no one enjoyed. Although Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender can’t fully capture the magic of its predecessor and falls into some of the pitfalls alluded to by the previously mentioned promotional soundbites, it still captures enough of the impact and gravitas of what came before to make this retelling land. After initially struggling to reconcile the original’s “detours” with a more serialized plot, it eventually sets up a string of episodes that capture the cathartic moments, weighty subject matter, and joyful undercurrents that made this tale so affecting. The animated version is still undeniably the definitive one, but there are enough interesting additions here, especially in the final stretch, to make things worthwhile for those who already know how this adventure goes. —Elijah Gonzalez

2. American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders

Year: 2024
Director: Zachary Treitz
Genre: Crime docuseries
Rating: TV-MA

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This four-part docuseries follows the murder of an investigative journalist looking into a sprawling political conspiracy theory.

3. Love Is Blind

Years: 2020-
Creator: Chris Coelen
Stars: Nick Lachey, Vanessa Lachey
Genre: Dating Reality
Rating: TV-MA

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“How do you spell Cole? So not like the ‘coal’ like Santa?” “This is a deal breaker. Do you like the Jonas Brothers?” And with those two absurd quotes from two different singles, I was hooked on yet another season of Love Is Blind, a reality relationship series that takes the word “cringe” to an entirely new level. The Nick and Vanessa Lachey-hosted Netflix series is back for a third season, this time set in Dallas, and it’s crazier than ever. While the formula remains the same (chat via pods for 10 days, propose, meet your fiancé, get married four weeks later, drink from golden goblets) the players have all changed—and what an oddball group of characters they are. —Terry Terrones

4. The Tourist

Year: 2024
Creators: Harry Williams, Jack Williams
Stars: Jamie Dornan, Danielle MacDonald, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson
Genre: Crime drama
Rating: TV-MA

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After a car crash, a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory and an array of mysterious people trying to kill him.

5. Furies

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A young woman looking to avenge her father gets pulled into the dark world of organized crime in Paris, as she recruited to become the next “Fury” in this new French action-thriller series.

Movies

1. Spaceman

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Spaceman, Sandler’s latest, was developed with Netflix but expressly not under the Happy Madison banner. Directed by Johan Renck and based on Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 sci-fi novel Spaceman of Bohemia, the film follows Czech cosmonaut Jakub Procházka (Sandler, sometimes attempting the shallowest hint of an accent) as he travels alone to the outer parts of our solar system. There, just past Jupiter, his mission is to sample the Chopra Cloud, an anomaly that appeared in Earth’s skies four years earlier and is the goal of an international space race. Because Jakub, halfway through a year-long journey, appears to be the leader in that race, he becomes a figure of pride for his country and something of an international celebrity, though he spends most of his artificial day cycle only communicating with Peter (Kunal Nayyar) in mission control, whose sole priority is keeping Jakub sane. His other sole priority is running interference on all of Jakub’s communication with the rest of humanity, directed by Jakub’s commanding officer, Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rosellini, as respectfully subdued as the rest of the cast). Meanwhile on Earth, Jakub’s very pregnant wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan, not doing an accent at all) sends Jakub a message that she’s leaving him, that she can’t handle being alone any longer, especially as she draws closer and closer to giving birth. Ironic, of course, because Jakub is physically alone and so censored from the rest of his life that he never even receives the message—until he meets a giant arachnoid extraterrestrial stowaway with telepathic powers, a vastly intelligent interstellar traveler Jakub comes to call Hanuš (Paul Dano, whose voice never rises above a lovely, reassuring purr).Together, the two prepare to make it to the Chopra Cloud, which Hanuš reassures Jakub will be both the beginning and ending of all things. Hanuš is actually more concerned with Jakub’s relationship with Lenka, which he accesses through studying Jakub’s memories, projecting them back at the cosmonaut for further scrutiny. Led by Sandler’s laconic, haunted performance and breathing with Max Richter’s rainy-day score, Spaceman exists on a wavelength of low-key melancholy. Prominent among its concerns are loneliness and the corresponding silence of vast unbridgeable distances, two qualities not exactly abundant in Happy Madison productions. Which is an even more glaring anomaly than the Chopra Cloud: There’s very little trace of Sandler’s past selves in Spaceman. No one expects the film to be funny, but no one expects Sandler’s character to be so humorless either. Loneliness so defines Jakub that all glimpses of his past, revealing an anguished childhood and a dull and charming courtship with Lenka, show little but trauma. Eventually even Hanuš questions why anyone would want to spend so much time swimming around such miserable memories. —Dom Sinacola

2. Code 8: Part II

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The sequel to the 2019 Canadian dystopian sci-fi film Code 8 has arrived on Netflix. Code 8: Part II once again stars cousins Robbie and Stephen Amell, navigating a world with superhuman abilities and oppressive cops.

3. Code 8

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The original 2019 Canadian sci-fi movie following a a superpowered human in a world where the use of powers is prohibited.

4. Tyler Perry’s Mea Culpa

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Tyler Perry’s latest film for Netflix is a steamy legal thriller about a defense attorney representing a famed artist accused of murder.

5. The Legend of Hercules

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Did you remember that there were TWO Hercules movies released in 2014? Did you remember that there was one? This version without The Rock bombed at the box office thanks to terrible reviews (5% on Rotten Tomatoes), but that didn’t stop Netflix from taking advantage of just how bored its members might be.