How do you process the death of a world figure like Pope Francis? With prayers, rituals and, apparently, movies.
Streaming minutes for the 2024 Oscar-winning film “Conclave,” which explores the Byzantine process of selecting a new pope, jumped this week after the news of the pope’s passing, according to the tracking firm Luminate. Viewership also jumped for Netflix’s 2019 picture “The Two Popes.”
Even before Amazon Prime Video made “Conclave” available at no extra cost to subscribers on Tuesday, the film’s total daily U.S. streaming viewership jumped on Monday to 6.9 million minutes watched, compared with 966,000 the previous Monday. On Tuesday, the numbers of minutes watched jumped to 18.3 million, compared with 574,000 the previous Tuesday.
“The data shows an increase of +3,200 percent in week-over-week viewership,” Luminate said.
Given the jump that “Conclave” saw on Monday, Luminate said that viewership was influenced both by the pope’s death and Amazon’s decision to make the film free to Prime subscribers.
Released in October 2024 and based on Robert Harris’s 2016 thriller of the same title, “Conclave,” which won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, follows a fictionalized papal election process (and all of the palace intrigue) after the death of a pope. Contenders are played by Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, among others. Secrets emerge and tensions flare as the competition field narrows.
The papal election process depicted in “Conclave” is fairly accurate, according to experts. The film’s depictions of different ritual acts, including how cardinals count votes by reading paper ballots aloud, weaving them along a single thread and then burning them, are “more or less correct,” said Piotr H. Kosicki, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland.
But in remarks on his blog, Cardinal Seán O’Malley, the former Archbishop of Boston, said that the 2013 conclave he participated in when Pope Francis was elected was a “much different experience than what they depicted in the movie.”
“For all its artistic and entertainment value,” he said, “I don’t think the movie is a good portrayal of the spiritual reality of what a conclave is.” Netflix’s “The Two Popes,” a biographical drama about Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, also saw a growing audience, with Luminate reporting a 417 percent increase in viewership. According to Luminate, the 2019 film had 290,000 minutes watched on Sunday compared with 1.5 million minutes watched on Monday.
