Florence Pugh’s Netflix Western Is Officially a Colossal Streaming Hit

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Published Oct 21, 2026, 9:15 PM EDT

Rohan Naahar is a News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he'll watch anything once.

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

Despite competition from flashier titles, an old-fashioned Western limited series has emerged as a massive new hit on Netflix. The show benefited from an unusually robust marketing campaign and the presence of major stars, two of whom are part of the record-breaking Marvel Cinematic Universe. The show premiered to positive reviews on October 1, and has spent three full weeks in the upper tier of Netflix's weekly viewership charts. The show is on track to overtake the streamer's other major Western offering this year, the fellow literary adaptation Little House on the Prairie, which has accumulated 29 million views so far.

Little House on the Prairie has already been renewed for a second season; it marks another attempt by Netflix to lure the target demographic of Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone franchise, which has turned Paramount+ into a destination over the last few years. In 2025, Netflix released the hit Western limited series American Primeval, which accumulated 46 million views. Two other Yellowstone-inspired neo-Westerns — The Waterfront and Ransom Canyon — have delivered mixed results for Netflix, with The Waterfront having been canceled after a single season.

Here's Where Netflix's New Western Stands

But there was no pressure to return for the streamer's latest hit, East of Eden. Starring Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott, Mike Faist, Ciarán Hinds, and Hoon Lee, the seven-episode series added 6 million views to its tally in its third week, and passed 25 million views and 175 million hours viewed in total. This comes after it amassed 18 million views in its first two weeks, despite competition from the supernatural thriller limited series Below. Created by Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather Elia Kazan directed the iconic 1955 East of Eden movie, the new show holds a "Certified Fresh" 86% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The site's consensus reads, "Zoe Kazan imbues her legacy adaptation with delicious moral quandaries and sumptuous landscapes, but it's the expanded character work from Pugh and Lee that brings justice and dignity to this new canon of East of Eden." Pugh will soon be seen in the hotly anticipated movies Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday, which are slated to clash in theaters on December 18.