Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and the most-watched movie on Netflix changing as quickly as it takes you to press play. At the end of April, the Tom Hardy-led actioner “Havoc” held strong in the top spot among the streamers’ programming in the U.S., but according to viewership aggregate site FlixPatrol, it’s since been unseated from number one by the new German thriller “Exterritorial.”
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Written and directed by Christian Zübert, “Exterritorial” stars “Barbarians” actress Jeanne Goursaud as a mother on the hunt for her missing kid. The twist? The child apparently disappeared inside a U.S. consulate building in Germany, and Goursaud’s Sara has to bend and break more than a few rules to find him. Fortunately, Sara is an ex-Special Forces officer, so she’s equipped to fight her way through the consulate building and get to the bottom of her son’s disappearance – potentially uncovering a vast conspiracy in the process.
Exterritorial just punched its way to the most-watched spot on Netflix
While “Exterritorial” isn’t getting the best reviews (it currently holds a 5.8 rating on IMDb, and only 42% of Rotten Tomatoes viewers liked it), it does have the kind of premise that grabs hold of you if you happen to catch a teaser for it on the Netflix home page. From the Angelina Jolie-led historical film “Changeling” to Jodie Foster’s “Flightplan,” stories about moms fighting tooth and nail to recover their lost kids – often with very little help from the systems designed to help them – have long-since been a staple of the thriller genre. According to Decider’s John Serba, the movie is “a rough amalgam of political thriller ‘Rendition’ and ‘John Wick’-derivative action movies like ‘Extraction’ and ‘Atomic Blonde,'” but it mostly holds its own thanks to some punchy fight choreography.
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“Zubert nurtures a realistic tone for a while, before inching away from the verisimilitude of a more realistic conspiracy thriller with every passing roundhouse, chokehold and armbar,” Serba writes. Based on reviews from critics and viewers alike, it seems your opinion on the film might come down to how much ridiculousness you’re willing to endure for the sake of watching a strong woman beat up a bunch of bad guys. Still, it’s always great to see a non-English language film top the streaming charts, proving (as Netflix in particular often has before) that subtitles are, as Bong Joon-Ho once said, simply the “one-inch tall barrier” standing between audiences and a whole new world of movies.
“Exterritorial” is led in the streaming viewership rankings by two other action films. In addition to “Havoc” (another unrealistic action-thriller directed by “The Raid” filmmaker Gareth Evans), “The Equalizer 2” also made the Netflix top 10 as of Monday, May 5, 2025. The Denzel Washington-led film made bank at the box office when it was initially released in 2018, but we won’t know whether or not “Havoc” and “Exterritorial” could’ve followed the same lucrative path since Netflix has a tendency to keep its movies on the small screen.
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You can catch all three films — as well as other current chart-toppers like the “Twilight” saga and the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy “Sisters” — on Netflix now.
