New 51% RT Thriller That Became 1 of Netflix’s Most Popular Movies Ever in Under 3 Months Marks 12 Weeks in the Top 10

Netflix has no shortage of action films, whether from original films or leased titles. However, one of the streaming platform’s titles has become a global hit: Exterritorial.

The dual language German-English action film debuted at the top of the charts immediately after its release on Netflix on Apr. 30. Since then, Exterritorial has continued to hold on to the charts, and achieved a very strong feat: it just celebrated its 12th week in the charts, Tudum reports. This comes after the action thriller became one of the streamer’s most popular films.

For the week between Jul. 21 and 27, Exterritorial was in tenth place in the Top 10 non-English movies charts, adding another 800k views. The action film is also part of Netflix’s Most Popular non-English Top 10, with a total of 91.4 million views and 166 million hours viewed since its debut on Netflix.

In mid-July, Netflix also released its Engagement Report for the first half of 2025, and Exterritorial was in fourth place on the streamer’s Top 10 most-watched movies of the year, both in English and non-English. At the time of the report’s release, Netflix had clocked the action film with 88 million views. It was behind Back in Action, Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx’s film, Tyler Perry’s hit Straw, and Sofia Carson’s drama The Life List.

That means Exterritorial also surpassed other hit Netflix films, including Tom Hardy’s latest action film, Havoc, which had 87 million views, and the Russo Brothers’ expensive, star-studded sci-fi The Electric State. The competition between Exterritorial and Havoc was stronger, as both films were released at the same time. However, Havoc had Hardy’s star power, but, after its poor reviews, the film fell behind the highly underrated German action thriller nobody talked about.

Even with its success, the film wasn’t exactly a hit with the audience, who gave Exterritorial an unfortunate 51% approval score on the Popcornmeter. The action film doesn’t have enough reviews from the critics for a score, but out of nine opinions, only two were negative.

What Is Exterritorial About?

Exterritorial follows a woman’s attempt to find her son after he goes missing at the U.S. embassy in Germany during a visa appointment. However, the woman is no civilian, as she has a history as a special forces soldier, whose area of expertise was to extract targets from dangerous situations. The plot twist continued because, as she is trying to find her son, the consulate tries to convince her that her son was never there, and leads to her uncovering a dark conspiracy.

The action film has a real-life inspiration, as director Christian Zübert told Deadline that he actually came up with the idea while he was in a U.S. consulate getting visas for his family. Although his experience there didn’t lead to him uncovering a conspiracy or missing children, he got the idea during the legal proceedings. The film starred Jeanne Goursand as Sara Wulf, the lead character, as well as Dougray Scott, Lera Abova, Kayode Akinyemi, and Rickson Guy da Silva.

Exterritorial is streaming on Netflix.

Source: Tudum