Swapped, the body-swap animated film from Skydance Animation and director Nathan Greno, has shattered Netflix’s animation viewership record, drawing 38.7 million views in its first seven days on the platform — the highest single-week total any animated movie has ever achieved on the service.
The film topped the Netflix charts for the week of May 4–10, ranking as the most-watched title on the platform globally, across all genres. It debuted the previous week with 15.5 million views in its opening three days before its viewership surged 150 percent in week two — a trajectory that outpaced recent Netflix animated hits including Leo and KPop Demon Hunters.
The film, six years in the making, centers on Ollie, a small rodent-like creature voiced by Michael B. Jordan, and Ivy, a bird-like javan voiced by Juno Temple, who magically trade bodies and must cooperate to return to their original forms. The screenplay was written by John Whittington, Christian Magalhaes, and Robert Snow, with a score by Siddhartha Khosla, and critics offered mixed-to-positive reviews, praising the visuals while noting a familiar plot structure.
The road to that finished film was far from straight. Greno told TheWrap the project originally followed four teenage superheroes with nothing in common — a concept the team spent a year developing before he walked into Skydance Animation chief John Lasseter’s office with a blunt assessment. “I said, ‘I think we’re doing the movie wrong,'” Greno recalled. He pitched a full reset around the idea of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, and Lasseter told him to blow it up and start over.
That restart introduced the all-animal world — a deliberate choice to avoid the human-swaps familiar from films like Freaky Friday. “We wanted to create the other,” Greno said. The species in the film cannot speak to one another, a creative decision that sharpened the empathy theme the team had been circling from the start.
Director Greno said working with Jordan transformed his approach to directing voice performances entirely: “His way of working and his way of finding the truth within the lines… both of them change the course of the movie 100%.”
The full voice cast includes Tracy Morgan, Cedric the Entertainer, Justina Machado, Ambika Mod, and Lolly Adefope, alongside Jordan and Temple.
