Clint Eastwood’s 2018 movie The Mule is now charting on Netflix. The movie stars Eastwood as Korean War veteran Earl Stone, who gets caught up in becoming a drug mule for a cartel and tries to stop his life from spinning out of control. Although Eastwood has directed two other movies since then – 2019’s Richard Jewell and 2021’s Cry Macho – The Mule is his last major hit. It raked in a total of $174.8 million at the worldwide box office.
Now, The Mule has made a surprising appearance on Netflix’s Top 10 English-language movies chart for the past week. The Eastwood title has landed at No. 6 on the chart, making its Netflix chart debut with 5.4 million unique views that encompass over 9.2 million hours. It is the oldest movie to rank so high on the chart, as the Top 5 is populated with more recent titles ranging from Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction 2 and the original 2020 Extraction to 2021’s Paw Patrol: The Movie.
Does Clint Eastwood Have Another Hit In Him?
One of the main reasons that The Mule is charting in the Top 10 is the fact that it was added to Netflix this week. However, that doesn’t necessarily account for it charting so high, as the only other new non-2023 titles to land in the Top 10 were Get Out at No. 9 and 47 Ronin at No. 10. Other new-to-Netflix titles like 2014’s Unbroken, 2017’s Dunkirk, and 2006’s Accepted don’t appear on the chart at all.
This could indicate that there is a renewed interest in Eastwood’s work that wasn’t born out by the pandemic-depressed theatrical release of Cry Macho two years ago. The 93-year-old filmmaker hasn’t stopped directing in the meantime, so there could still be another hit on the horizon for him. His next movie, Juror #2, is currently in pre-production.
The Juror #2 cast includes Toni Collette and Nicholas Hoult in addition to Eastwood, who stars as a man who discovers he has the ability to swing an important murder trial one way or the other. Unlike Richard Jewell, the movie stars Eastwood in the title role once again, and unlike Cry Macho, it will come out in an era when the box office has had more time to recover. If this strong viewership for The Mule is any indication, this new movie could have a strong chance to revive Eastwood’s commercial prospects one more time.