Netflix Bets Its Box Office Reports on Narnia and Charlie

Netflix will publish theatrical grosses for six of its own movies, the first time the streamer has reported box office in 11 years. The list starts with the Cannes drama La Bola Negra on October 16, 2026, and runs through Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew and the animated Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory in 2027.

Four of those titles are still limited, platform, or IMAX-only bookings. The wager is the two wide releases, and the new scoreboard that will print whatever they do.

The Six Films and How Long They Sit in Theaters

Netflix has posted weekly viewing charts for years and still treats ticket sales as a private number. That changes with this slate. A high-level executive at a legacy studio put the motive in one line after the failed Warner Bros. bid: “The real question is ‘What does Netflix want to be now?’ Having almost bought Warner Bros. Discovery, you get the sense that they can’t put some of that toothpaste back in the tube.”

The company confirmed the reporting habit because it finally has two wide titles on the calendar, Narnia and Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory. Until now it often kept ticket sales out of the shared studio feed that other distributors use. Even its first No. 1 weekend, the KPop Demon Hunters sing-along in August 2025, went out as an industry estimate.

THE SIX-TITLE SCOREBOARD

La Bola Negra, from Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (Los Javis), won a share of Cannes’s Best Director prize and will get Netflix’s longest window yet, a 46-day platform run before it hits the app. Peter Berg’s WWII football drama The Mosquito Bowl, with Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis, plays select AMC houses and other theaters for 26 days. Danny Boyle’s Ink gets 27 days in limited play, then streams in the U.S. and Latin America on January 8, 2027.

David Fincher’s The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, written by Quentin Tarantino and starring Brad Pitt as the stuntman from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, takes an exclusive two-week IMAX run starting Nov. 25 before arriving on the service on December 23. That IMAX slot had been earmarked for Narnia before Gerwig’s film moved to a full theatrical plan. Pitt produces with Ceán Chaffin; the supporting cast includes Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

Sarandos Already Promised 45 Days Once

The reporting decision lands after Netflix tried to buy Warner Bros. and lost to Paramount. During that chase, co-CEO Ted Sarandos pledged a 45-day theatrical window for Warner films and talked like a studio boss who wanted a chart.

I’m giving you a hard number. If we’re going to be in the theatrical business, and we are, we’re competitive people. We want to win. I want to win opening weekend. I want to win box office.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, January 2026 interview

He had called communal moviegoing “an outmoded idea” at a Time100 event in April 2025, then said the line was “outmoded for some,” using towns without a theater as the example. After looking at Warner’s books he said the theatrical economics were “more positive than we had seen and we had modeled for ourselves.” The bid died anyway. The 45-day number did not.

Narnia now carries a 50-day exclusive run, five days longer than that Warner pledge. Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory is booked for 47 days. La Bola Negra sits one day over 45. The three limited titles still come in at 26 or 27 days, which is closer to the short windows major chains rejected on Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

Inside Netflix the message is cooler. Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria told a March presser not to mix the two businesses: “There is Warner Bros theatrical distribution, and then there’s Netflix, which we’ve been in a different business. I don’t want you to conflate the two.” Film chairman Dan Lin asked for patience in the same session. “We are a streaming-first company. The strategy works really well for us. You can see our members watch seven movies a month,” he said. “Just give us some time.” Insiders have also framed the new windows as film-by-film calls, which keeps a slate from looking like a permanent conversion.

The Grosses Netflix Used to Keep Off the Chart

Trades have always guessed at Netflix weekends. The company itself has not signed the number. That is why a sing-along of a movie that had already streamed could finish No. 1 and still miss the official chart.

THE GROSSES THEY DID NOT REPORT

1. 2015: Beasts of No Nation becomes Netflix’s first limited theatrical title, the start of an awards-first pattern that also covered Roma, The Irishman, and Marriage Story.
2. June 2019: Spencer Klein, the former 20th Century Fox executive vice president and general sales manager who handled U.S. and Canada sales on Fox slates including Deadpool and Planet of the Apes, is hired to run Netflix theatrical distribution.
3. 2019: Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story gets a 30-day theatrical window, the previous high-water mark now beaten by La Bola Negra.
4. November 2022: Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery takes a limited Thanksgiving run that sources later pegged at $15 million, against the original Knives Out five-day haul of $41.4 million.
5. August 23-24, 2025: The KPop Demon Hunters sing-along opens to $19.2 million from 1,700 theaters, or $11,294 per site, without an official Netflix report. AMC sat out that weekend; it joined a Halloween return that added $5 million in 2,890 theaters and pushed the domestic total to $24.3 million, with 79.0 percent of that total from the first weekend.
6. November 2025: Wake Up Dead Man finishes at $2.5 million after AMC, Regal, and Cinemark declined a 17-day window and asked for 30 days.

Those figures make Netflix a rounding error in the theatrical market. The Numbers puts the company’s 2025 domestic take at $26.8 million, a 0.31 percent share. The Irishman, budgeted at $250 million, never got the wide play Martin Scorsese’s team wanted, because the big circuits would not take Netflix’s terms. Small houses four-walled titles and took the rental. The new reports will not enlarge a screen count by themselves. They will put a studio name on a weekend total that used to live in rumor.

The company already knows how to publish a performance number when the metric is hours watched. It posts those tallies every Tuesday, and one recent original reached 73 million views with no box-office line attached. A public ticket chart is a different kind of boast, because it also publishes a miss.

What Best Picture Still Requires of a Streamer?

Awards math still explains the fall titles. General Oscar entry for the 99th Academy Awards, whose show is March 14, 2027, needs a paid seven-day run in one of six U.S. metro areas (Los Angeles County, New York City, the Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, or Atlanta), with at least three daily shows and one starting between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Streaming on or after the first qualifying day is allowed. Streaming first is not.

Best Picture adds a second hurdle that a one-week qualifying play cannot cover.

BEST PICTURE THEATER RULES

• Ten markets: The qualifying city plus nine more, drawn from the Academy’s top 50 U.S. list, for a total of at least ten.
• Seven more days: Each extra market needs at least seven days of paid shows, consecutive or not, with one showtime a day.
• 45-day band: The expanded run must fall within 45 days before or after the qualifying week, under the Academy’s Best Picture Expanded Theatrical Run criteria.
• Hard stop: If that extra run spills past December 31, 2026, it still has to finish within 45 days or by January 21, 2027, whichever comes first, or a nomination can be pulled.

That is why La Bola Negra, The Mosquito Bowl, Cliff Booth, and Ink can look like a theatrical conversion on a press release and still be awards plumbing. Seven days in the right cities, plus a short expansion, clears the form. Fifty days in IMAX, with Sony Pictures handling international theaters on Narnia, is a different product. The same Sony international deal sits on Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory, which Netflix Animation Studios will open wide globally on Nov. 5, 2027 before the December 22 streaming date. Kit Connor voices a new Charlie Paley; Taika Waititi voices Willy Wonka, now out of prison for turning a child into a blueberry, with Kate Winslet and Helena Bonham Carter in the company. Jared Stern and Elaine Bogan direct.

Exhibitors Want a Real Marketing Campaign

Theater owners have spent a decade watching Netflix treat cinemas as a qualifying errand. A veteran film distributor, speaking after the reporting news, said the welcome would be real if the spend matched the press line: “The exhibitors would absolutely welcome this. Imagine if Netflix of all places threw its weight behind a real theatrical marketing campaign, and not some awards play.”

Klein has been the person in that room since 2019. He came from Fox’s sales desk, where the job was booking wide commercial titles, and inherited a Netflix operation that four-walled awards movies and fought the Irishman window. Last year the relationship thawed in pieces. AMC skipped the first KPop Demon Hunters weekend, then played the Halloween return. Circuits also took the Stranger Things series finale as a ticketed concession event. Sarandos kept a CinemaCon sit-down with Cinema United chief Michael O’Leary even after Paramount won Warner, a meeting first booked when the acquisition still looked live.

The Mosquito Bowl now has select AMC dates, a small tell that the largest U.S. chain is back in the conversation. Cliff Booth is still an IMAX-only two-week event, which is a premium booking and a narrow one. The test the circuits actually care about is whether Netflix buys national advertising, holds a 45-to-50-day exclusive, and lets the weekend number stand when it is ugly.

A public gross also buys the weekly chatter that other streamers already chase by putting films in theaters. An unreported Netflix weekend dies by Monday. A reported one feeds the same conversation as a studio open, which is the point of printing it. That cuts both ways. Narnia will be read as a hit or a miss on the same board as everyone else. Cliff Booth can win the cinephile argument in IMAX and still look small next to a wide family title, because the footprint is two weeks of large-format screens, not 3,000 auditoriums.

February 12 Is When the Wager Gets Counted

The fall movies will train the reporting muscle. They will not answer the question Sarandos asked himself when he said he wanted to win opening weekend. That answer arrives when Gerwig’s origin story for Narnia, the first screen version of C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, opens wide on February 12, 2027, after IMAX sneak previews on February 10, then stays out until April 2. The cast list Netflix posted runs from David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell to Carey Mulligan, Daniel Craig, and Meryl Streep.

Narnia: The Magician's Nephew will release in IMAX and wide globally in theaters on February 12, 2027, and on Netflix on April 2, 2027. Sneak previews only in IMAX will begin on February 10, 2027.

Written for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig, the origin story for Narnia…

— Netflix (@netflix) May 1, 2026

Nine months later, Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory takes the holiday corridor with a 47-day wide run. Those two bookings are the first Netflix titles built like studio releases, with international theatrical partners and windows that outlast an Oscar qualifying week. Lin can still call the company streaming-first. Members can still watch seven movies a month at home. None of that will hide a February gross once Netflix has agreed to report it.

Narnia opens wide on February 12, 2027, in IMAX and regular theaters, and the number will be public the same weekend.