'Swapped' Hits For Netflix and Skydance Animation With 15.5M Views In Opening Weekend

Skydance Animation and Netflix have another animated hit on their hands with Swapped, debuting #2 on the weekly global top 10 charts for the streamer with 15.5M views based on 26.4M hours watched. That’s in addition to ranking in the daily top 10s in over 90 countries.

Here’s how Swapped compares against other Friday debuts:

Title	Cumulative Views (1 weeks)	Rank
The Sea Beast	16,900,000	1
Swapped	15,500,000	2
Vivo	13,200,000	3
Back to the Outback	10,100,000	4
Orion and the Dark	10,000,000	5
KPop Demon Hunters	9,200,000	6
Spellbound	8,500,000	7
In Your Dreams	8,300,000	8
The Monkey King	8,100,000	9
The Magician’s Elephant	8,000,000	10
Thelma the Unicorn	7,300,000	11
The Twits	5,900,000	12
Scrooge: A Christmas Carol	4,900,000	13
Nimona	3,200,000	14

That opening 3-day debut makes it Netflix’s second-best animated movie debut on a Friday in quite some time, and puts it in touching distance of The Sea Beast.

‘Swapped’ Review: Skydance Animation Steps Up Its Visual Game In A Heartfelt, If Familiar, Body-Swap Tale

One notable exclusion from this list is Leo. While undeniably Netflix’s biggest animated movie debut, it launched on a Tuesday, preventing an apples-to-apples comparison in the graph above. Interestingly, Netflix still noted in their write-up that Swapped had ‘the biggest three-day opening for a Netflix animated film since Leo in 2023.’ In its first five days, Leo pulled in 34.6M views

It’s a welcome win for Netflix Animation, which has had a hard time finding big animated hits since KPOP Demon Hunters since last summer, which is now into its 46th week straight in the weekly top 10s, regularly chunking in over 4 million views every single week and now up to 617M views and over 1.028B viewing hours in total. Of course, that movie famously started off (as you can see above) low in the top 10s before steadily growing over time.

Picture Credit: Netflix

The movie, directed by Nathan Greno, tells the story of a tiny woodland creature and a majestic bird who suddenly swap bodies, forcing them to team up to survive the wildest adventure of their lives. It picked up mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, including our own Andrew Morgan, who gave it a 3/5 star rating, but the audience reception thus far has been overwhelmingly positive, with it sitting at an 89% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of publication.

Much of the film’s immediate draw can likely be attributed to its stellar voice cast, featuring Michael B. Jordan and Juno Temple as the mismatched duo, alongside comedy heavyweights like Tracy Morgan and Cedric the Entertainer. That’s in addition to its vibrant clips and artwork going viral across social media, including many with tens of millions of views.

We’ll see how this one trends over time, but if it’s anything like Netflix’s other movies in this genre, it’ll add value to Netflix for many years to come. We consistently see from the Netflix Engagement Data report that animated movies, whether licensed or from Netflix’s own output, are the top performers and have strong long-tail viewership. We can tell you that on the global daily top 10s, Swapped managed to unseat Apex today as the #1 title for May 5th. Its next big competition will be Remarkably Bright Creatures this Friday.

Next up on Netflix’s animated slate is Steps later this year and Ray Gunn right at the end of the year, with the latter also from Skydance Animation. The former, assuming it leans more into the Disney Princess vibe, should be bankable, though Ray Gunn remains a bit of a question mark given that it skews a little older than Netflix’s usual animated movies.

Did you enjoy Swapped on Netflix? Let us know in the comments down below.