Pictures via Netflix
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending March 10th, 2024. Busy week this week with the premieres of Damsel, The Gentlemen, The Program, and The Signal. We’ll also check out the ongoing battle of One Piece vs Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Every Tuesday, Netflix updates its top 10 stats page with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past seven days.
A few changes in the most-watched all-time list over the past couple of weeks, with Leave the World Behind, Fool Me Once, and Society of the Snow continuing to pick up viewing hours and rising in the charts or cementing their current positions.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from March 4th, 2024 to March 10th, 2024, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent,” or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours viewed announced by Netflix by the runtime of films or series. It allows for better comparisons between films and series, but it’s not an audience metric. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season.
1. Avatar: The Last Airbender and One Piece are battling it out
There seems to be a (friendly, let’s hope) battle of the fandoms online between Avatar: The Last Airbender and One Piece. The two series are battling it out in Netflix’s Top 10 eight months apart. Now in its third week, Avatar is still in the lead, but it’s also showing a bigger decay rate in its third week than One Piece.
Avatar has been renewed for two additional seasons, while One Piece was only renewed for one more.
2. Damsel is bringing the fire.
Action film Damsel, starring Millie Bobby Brown, is Netflix’s big event film of the month (an essential month as it closes the first financial quarter), and it did not disappoint with a killer start of 35.3M CVEs over its first weekend. That’s the 10th-best launch for a Netflix original film released on a Friday and the best of 2024 so far, besting Lift (32.8M).
Now, could the film have done better? Probably as it missed the Hall of Fame of launches, which is north of 40M for the first weekend, and a very early estimate of its 91 first days run places it around 110-115M CVEs, which is too low for the all-time Top 10. Still, it is a higher start than Enola Holmes 2, which launched at 29.6M CVES over its first three days back in November 2022.
3. The Gentlemen could use a bit more firepower.
British series The Gentlemen, set in the Guy Ritchie film The Gentleman, did an ok start for its first four days, clocking 12.2M CVEs. Now, that’s only the third-best launch for a British Netflix series, trailing behind Obsession and Who is Erin Carter? But the reviews are great, and the series has a stellar average on IMDb with 8.4/10, so it might play well over the next few weeks.
4. The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping does a classic start.
Not a week has passed since a new documentary series was released by Netflix that managed to reach the weekly Top 10. This week, it’s The Program‘s turn, and the chilling docuseries lands with 7.1M CVEs after six days, an average launch, all things considered.
5. Hot Wheels Let’s Race is racing through the kids content.
New Netflix animated series do not do well in the weekly Top 10. Still, when they manage to appear, it is usually because they are based on an existing intellectual property, whether it’s films (Jurassic World, The Boss Baby), video games (Arcane, Castlevania), or even toys as this week, Hot Wheels Let’s Race did a perfect launch for a kids animated series released on a Monday.
6. The Signal is not picked up by audiences.
The German limited series The Signal had a weak launch, with only 4.9M CVEs over its first four days, one of the worst openings for a new German Netflix series.
Now, it might pick up the pace next week as it slowly went up the charts globally this week.
7. Supers*x is not exciting enough.
The biopic series about Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi is not exactly performing as profusely as its inspiration character, as it launched with a very low 3.2M CVEs during its first five days and the lowest launch for a new Italian Netflix series in my dataset.
8. Netflix Engagement Report: Netflix Sports Content
One way to use the Engagement Report provided by Netflix is to look for how old series and films are performing years after their release, as we have been doing here over the past weeks since December. Another way to use it is to provide viewing information about programs that were released during the period covered by the Engagement Report (January to June 2023), for which we did not have a lot of data.
This week, I took a look at Netflix sports content on the heels of the cancelation of Break Point after two seasons and the fact that season 2 of Full Swing did not manage to enter the weekly Top 10 this week. Now, sports, or sports-adjacent programming, has been an increasingly important focus of Netflix strategy so it might be good to look at the earlier attempts of Netflix in that area.
Between January and June 2023, Netflix released four new seasons of documentary series centered around a sport in particular: season 5 of Drive to Survive (Formula 1), season 1 of Break Point (Tennis), season 1 of Full Swing (golf), and season 1 of Tour de France: Unchained (cycling).
It also released two sports documentary series focused on personalities such as Connor McGregor (MMA) and Bill Russell (basketball). Let’s see how all of them fared over their release period.
For series released early in 2023, we have a bird’s view of their performance over more than 100 days after their release, which is excellent. As you can see, of all the four series about a sport in particular, Break Point was the one that underperformed. Season 2 probably did not do better, hence its cancelation. Drive to Survive is still the leader, but we saw that season 6, released a few weeks ago, did suffer quite an important decrease in viewership. Tour de France: Unchained and Full Swing are in the middle, good enough to be renewed but probably not good enough to last longer than a second season.
On the personalities-related docuseries, Connor McGregor clearly had more appeal to the audience than vintage star Bill Russell.
In the next Engagement Report to be released in June, we will have numbers about The Netflix Cup, a Netflix big golf event in Las Vegas for which we did not have any viewership numbers. We will have to wait until December 2024 to have numbers for The Netflix Slam Netflix’s exhibition tennis match between Rafa Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz and December 2025 to get some more numbers about the upcoming boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, due July 2024.
This was first published in French on the Netflix n Chiffres Substack.
That’s all for this week. Please let us know what you think in the comments below.
