365 Days Is So Popular On Netflix

Netflix’s erotic thriller 365 Days and its sequel, 365 Days: This Day, are phenomenally popular on the streaming service despite the original movie having a dismal 0% rating on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. For years, popular romance franchises have struggled with critics but proved huge hits with audiences. For example, Twilight’s movie adaptations were derided as corny and contrived by reviewers but brought in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. At first glance, the critical failure and surprise streaming success of the 365 Days franchise look like a similar situation. An over-the-top guilty pleasure, the 365 Days movies are frequently — and not unreasonably —compared to the 50 Shades of Grey series, which was itself originally a work of Twilight fan-fiction. However, critics have found the 365 Days movies to be much more objectionable than most goofy but harmless romance fare.

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The 2020 erotic romance adaptation 365 Days tells the story of Laura, who is held captive by mafia don Massimo for the titular time frame as he attempts to make her fall in love with him. The sequel 365 Days: This Day, is more complicated, with secret identical twins, shoot-outs, secret rival mafia dons, another love interest, and many more conventions of the larger-than-life romantic thriller genre. However, the inherent silliness that comes with this genre territory is not what most critics object to about the 365 Days movies. Rather, it is the question of whether the franchise glamorizes abusive relationship dynamics in its portrayal of Laura and Massimo’s romance.

Why 365 Days Was Controversial, 365 Days proved controversial upon release due to the numerous scenes wherein Massimo, despite claiming he wouldn’t so much as touch Laura without her consent, gropes her, manhandles her, coerces her into uncomfortable situations, ignores her discomfort and, in the movie’s most infamous scene, forces her to watch him receive oral sex from someone else. As the above summary implies, Laura and Massimo’s relationship in the 365 Days movies is clearly not a healthy one. Moreover, the fact that 365 Days depicts Laura's situation as a glamorous, sexy predicament and not a frightening, discomfiting, or dangerous one led critics to worry that the franchise would promote such abusive behavior.

Why 365 Days' Rotten Tomatoes Score Is 0%, While it’s nothing new for a popular romance movie to fail to impress critics, the reviews received by both 365 Days movies are particularly risible. While the franchise earns a lot of criticism for its technical flaws — bad acting, a cheesy soundtrack, gratuitous slow-motion, an absurd storyline, and dour, humorless writing — reviews featured on Rotten Tomatoes are more concerned with the question of how the relationship depicted in 365 Days and its sequel could influence impressionable viewers. Some critics, such as Cosmopolitan's Taylor Andrews, view this as the biggest problem with the series, while others like Variety's Jessica Kiang argue that even viewers who aren't likely to replicate these behaviors would still find the movie to be embarrassingly bad.