Picture: Netflix
Overnight, J. D. Vance was announced as Trump’s vice president choice for the 2024 election as the RNC gets underway. Since that announcement, viewership has been rising on the Ron Howard adaptation of Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, leading it to enter the Netflix US top 10 movie chart.
Featuring a star-studded cast of Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Haley Bennett, and Gabriel Basso (the latter of which has gone on to become a Netflix superstar with the series The Night Agent), the movie premiered on Netflix on November 24th, 2020, following a small theatrical rollout in select theaters.
Adapted by Vanessa Taylor, the film seeks to retell Vance’s upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, with his dysfunctional family headed up by his drug-addicted mother. Despite hardship, Vance defies the odds, serves in the military, attends Yale Law School, and has a political career, leading to his VP nomination last night.
In 2022, Ron Howard spoke about the film and J.D. Vance, saying he was surprised by his embrace of Donald Trump.
Fast forward to this morning, and Hillbilly Elegy can be found at the number six spot in Netflix’s daily US top 10s. No other region has seen this feature, which makes sense given that Netflix’s pick wasn’t announced until early evening for most people around the globe, as not everyone is quite plugged into the hour-by-hour when it comes to US politics.
Here’s the full top 10s for July 16th:
| # | TV Shows | Movies |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vikings: Valhalla | Trolls Band Together |
| 2 | Receiver | The Long Game |
| 3 | Supacell | Vanished into the Night |
| 4 | Hannah Berner: We Ride at Dawn | Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F |
| 5 | Exploding Kittens | Minions |
| 6 | America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders | Hillbilly Elegy |
| 7 | Worst Roommate Ever | A Family Affair |
| 8 | Your Honor | An American Crime |
| 9 | The Man with 1000 Kids | The Super Mario Bros. Movie |
| 10 | Desperate Lies | Shrek |
You can also see an influx of traffic to the official trailer for the movie on YouTube, with many new comments and over 200,000 views, which is different between now and an archived copy of the page on July 1st.
The movie has never been a major performer for Netflix until now. When it was released, it was only in the Netflix movie Top 10s for two weeks (14 days) before dropping out and never reappearing.
That was in part because the movie was critically panned when it was first released, even leading to its nomination for a slew of awards at the Golden Raspberry Awards.
Given Vance’s political affiliations, that could be one reason why the movie received quite as much disdain as it did.
Netflix released any official viewing figures for the movie (it’d have qualified under the old ranking system). We’ve yet to see it appear in the weekly viewing figures that Netflix releases every Tuesday.
Throughout 2023, the movie was only viewed the equivalent of 4.4M times (that’s 8.7M hours watched in total), and in the second half of that year, it was #1806 in the movie charts. For a few comparisons, Red Notice had 61.9M views for 2023, The Irishman had 16.6M, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, on the lower end, had 1.1M in the same timeframe. You can browse all of Netflix’s 2023 viewing data here.
Have you been rewatching Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix since its reappearance in the Netflix top 10s? Let us know in the comments.
Netflix Synopsis: "An urgent phone call pulls a Yale Law student back to his Ohio hometown, where he reflects on three generations of family history and his own future."
