After Donald Trump’s announcement of J.D. Vance as his running mate on Monday, viewership of “Hillbilly Elegy” increased by 1,179% compared to the day before, per Luminate.
The 2020 Netflix film, based on Vance’s 2016 memoir of the same name, was watched for 19.2 million minutes on Monday — a huge leap from the 1.5 million minutes the film was watched on Sunday, by which point Vance’s VP bid was already a sweeping rumor.
Monday’s total comes out to an estimated 163,836 views. This is calculated by dividing the number of minutes watched by the film’s 117-minute runtime, which means, for example, that watching half of the movie would constitute half of a view, etc.
Upon its release in 2016, Vance’s memoir was widely discussed as giving context for why working class white voters may have been attracted to Trump. The film debuted on Netflix in November 2020 after a limited theatrical run and received negative reviews. Variety wrote that Gabriel Basso’s portrayal of Vance was “so wholesomely likable that the fate of his soul never seems at stake. His people may be haunted by the demons of Appalachia, but he comes off as a yuppie whose life has boiled down to: Will those demons stand in the way of my career path? Not if he won’t let them they won’t. That isn’t quite drama — it’s feel-good therapy.”
“Hillbilly Elegy” was directed by Ron Howard. Alongside Basso, the cast includes Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Haley Bennett, Freida Pinto, Bo Hopkins and Owen Asztalos.
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