According to data compiled from Tudum’s first week of releases from 2025, the film that we know now is Netflix‘s most-watched of all time wasn’t actually the top-viewed movie during the week that it premiered. In fact, it had half of the views that the top-streamed movie that week raked in—24.2M compared to a whopping, and shocking, 46.8 M views.
KPop Demon Hunters has become the most successful streaming film of all time, blowing the lid off of all sorts of statistics and the previously conceived notions of what a film by a streaming platform is capable of. But it wasn’t the most-streamed movie on Netflix the week it dropped. That honor, surprisingly, went to Back in Action, a spy-action flick that starred Cameron Diaz, Glenn Close, and Jamie Foxx. The film, which did not perform well with critics at all, centers around two CIA agents, Emily and Matt, as they must return to the spy life following the leaking of their identities.
It’s A Spy Thriller That Doesn’t Particularly Thrill
Back in Action only managed a 31% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, with critics calling it boring and cobbled together, saying it borrows ideas from its betters and fails to tie them together. Ayeen Forootan of In Review Online says, “It’s still almost painful to watch Back in Action abruptly spoil everything that is unique, charming, and witty in its first half for the sake of second-rate spectacle and overfamiliar trope-trading.” Natasha Alvar of The Fiction Department gives it a scathing 1.5 out of 5 stars, adding, “I had just watched Knight and Day again for the millionth time, so I was hopeful that maybe a movie with both Diaz and Jamie Foxx might be decent despite being a January movie on Netflix. I should have known better.”
While it did fare slightly better with casual viewers, it doesn’t seem like anyone is calling Back in Action their favorite movie. “I created a Rotten Tomatoes account just to tell you how awful this movie is. I didn’t know that good actors could act so poorly. It wasn’t even fun bad. It was just bad bad,” said one viewer. Another stated, “Definitely more entertaining than I was expecting. The action sequences were cool and Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz are cool together. The plot was basic, but expected for a Netflix action-comedy. I’d probably take off 20 minutes of the run time though.”
Considering all that, it’s not hard to see how it got absolutely buried under the massive phenomenon that KPop Demon Hunters became.
Did you see Back in Action when it debuted on Netflix? Let us know your thoughts about the movie in the comments, and then check out the ComicBook forum to keep the conversation going.
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