DreamWorks' most-memed about movie just made it onto Netflix's leaderboards, establishing itself as a still-popular viewing option for audiences. Thanks to releases like the Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and How To Train Your Dragon series, DreamWorks Animation is one of the most well known animation studios of all time, and has continually reaffirmed that status with a wide assortment of movie hits.
More recent years have brought us newer but still critically and financially viable releases like The Bad Guys movies, the Trolls films, and 2024's The Wild Robot, which has won a wide assortment of awards since its release back in September of that year. Given this level of fame, it's perhaps inevitable several DreamWorks movies are also the source of many memes, with the Shrek series having a wide array of the most famous and infamous examples of this respectively.
That said, there is one DreamWorks film that has survived the tests of the time in pop culture with and arguably because of the memes around it to an even greater degree - to the point the movie and its first lines in particular are considered synonymous with the world of internet comedy. Interestingly, this looks as though it may have played a role in said film having a major streaming resurgence in recent history.
Despite Bee Movie having released almost twenty years ago now, the movie has had another lease of life in the world of streaming, having become one of June 2026's most-watched movies on Netflix's weekly records.
Between June 8 and June 14, Bee Movie gathered 2,500,000 views and netted itself an assorted 3,800,000 hours of watch time from these views, which made it the 10th most-watched English language movie on the platform during this period of time. That's no small feat for any film, let alone one that had its debut many years ago.
However, this also makes a lot of sense given Bee Movie's unusual cultural relevance today, since the film has been one of the DreamWorks movies to be the source of the most memes in the years since its release. With the film's unusual premise of centering around the life of a bee who tries to sue humanity for taking beekind's honey - and who starts a romance with a human woman - this is perhaps no surprise, as Bee Movie has remained well-known over time in a way due to its fascinating storylines.
Bee Movie has a dual sort of appeal. On one hand, it works as an entirely conventional DreamWorks animated movie, with some interesting action scenes, some entertaining jokes, and characters who are compelling enough to make you want to see what happens to them in the long run.
On the other side of things, the surreal and unique premise of Bee Movie - and the huge assortment of memes made around the movie, its script, and the parts of the film that are most odd to see out of context - has added a different kind of reason to watch the film that remains to this day. Ultimately, it's hard to see clips of a man complaining a bee stole his girlfriend and not be at least a little intrigued, and this likely will have helped Bee Movie's Netflix success at least in part.
As such, Bee Movie hitting Netflix's charts isn't entirely surprising, though it's certainly all the more interesting in an age where newer films like KPop Demon Hunters and Swapped are generally expected to be the platform's animated heavy hitters.
