How do you treat the death of a world figure like Pope Francis? With prayers, rituals and, apparently, films.
The streaming minutes for the film Oscar winning in 2024 “Conclave”, which explores the Byzantine process for selecting a new Pope, jumped this week after the news of the Pope’s death, according to the Luminate follow -up company. The other also jumped for the image of Netflix in 2019 “The Two Papes”.
Even before the Amazon Prime video made “conclave” available at no additional cost for subscribers on Tuesday, the Total Streaming Total Shipping of the United States of the film jumped on Monday at 6.9 million minutes watched, against 966,000 the previous Monday. On Tuesday, the number of minutes watched jumped at 18.3 million, compared to 574,000 in the previous Tuesday.
“The data show an increase of +3 200% in the number of week -long viewers,” said Luminate.
Given the jump that “Conclave” saw on Monday, Luminate said that the hearing had been influenced by both the Pope’s death and Amazon’s decision to make the film free to make the origin of the subscribers.
Released in October 2024 and based on the thriller of Robert Harris in 2016 of the same title, “Conclave”, which won an Oscars for the best suitable scenario, follows a fictitious papal electoral process (and the whole palace intrigue) after the death of a pope. The candidates are played by Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, among others. The secrets are emerging and the tensions go out when the competition field shrinks.
The papal electoral process represented in “Conclave” is quite precise, according to experts. The representations of the film of different ritual acts, including how the cardinals include votes by reading paper ballots aloud, weaving them a single wire 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 in which he participated when Pope Francis was elected was a “very different experience of what they represented in the film”.
“Despite all its artistic and entertainment value,” he said, “I don’t think the film is a good representation of the spiritual reality of what a conclave is.” “The Two Papes” by Netflix, a biographical drama on Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benoît XVI, also saw an increasing audience, with luminate signaling a 417% increase in the audience. According to Luminate, the 2019 film watched 290,000 minutes on Sunday, against 1.5 million minutes viewed on Monday.
