Ghosted (opens in new tab) is a dreadful movie – despite its stellar cast and interesting premise, it's neither funny nor particularly exciting. The central pair of the piece, Chris Evans' Cole and Ana de Armas' Sadie, are so incredibly unconvincing that it's difficult to tell if they were even in the same room as each other over the course of filming, let alone whether they even met in person.
The critic's consensus agrees, evidently, with a critics score on Rotten Tomatoes of 29%. It doesn't look like the almost universal panning of Apple TVs Plus' latest movie has done anything to audience engagement, as the movie smashes the streaming service's records. Deadline reports (opens in new tab), in fact, that numbers could be even higher than initially thought as well.
Worst movie, best numbers
According to Deadline's report, Samba TV says that the movie pulled in 328,500 viewers in the first two days of streaming since launching on the streaming platform on April 21. That puts the movie higher than other high-performing Apple TV Plus movies, including Finch, which saw 228,500, and Spirited at 174,000 within the same time frame.
Samba TV takes data from a group of 3.1M SmartTV-using households, and crucially, who streamed something for at least a minute.
Why is the movie successful? Maybe it's the bad critic score effect, maybe people want to see just how bad it is. Or maybe it's the star power – de Armas and Evans already shared the silver screen in Knives Out, an excellent picture that defied expectations to earn a sequel on Netflix. Maybe it's just that there really aren't all that many new movies at the moment, and viewers wanted to see a little more of their favorite actors in a movie that on paper sounds and looks to be a lot of fun.
Maybe, just maybe, they watched the first minute and turned it off because it was by no means, even remotely, one of the best Apple TV Plus movies.
