Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending December 10th, 2023. Lots to cover again this week with titles covered including Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Yu Yu Hakusho, Leave the World Behind, Obliterated, Car Masters, and another look at the Big Netflix Data Dump
In case you didn’t know, 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.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from December 11th, 2023 to December 18th, 2023, 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. Leave the World Behind is leaving its world of competitors behind.
After only ten days, Leave the World Behind is already on the path to the all-time Top 10, charting exactly like Extraction 2, which currently holds the 10th spot.
The curve is slightly in favor of Leave the World Behind so the film must keep its momentum in the next 11 weeks to achieve that quite remarkable feat. Now, there’s an apocalyptic event on its path, and it’s called Rebel Moon, which is coming in hot for a spot of its own in the all-time Top 10, and Netflix sure is putting all its weight behind it.
2. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is starting quite nicely.
The latest Aardman film and sequel to Chicken Run is doing quite a good start with 11.9M CVEs after its first three days and the fourth-best launch for an animated film released on a Friday.
It might play well over the holidays; only that is if the space opera Rebel Moon does not suck all the oxygen out of the charts.
3. Yu Yu Hakusho is a big success right out the gate.
Japanese Netflix series has been slowly gaining momentum over the past few months, but besides Alice in Borderland, it lacked another success. That changed this week with the live-action adaptation Yu Yu Hakusho launching with 7.7M CVEs over its first four days, the best launch for an Asian series released on a Thursday.
4. Car Masters is again showing up.
Car Masters might be unassuming and out of the spotlight of other major Netflix shows, but it manages to get into the Top 10 every now and then. Season 5 launched with 2.4M CVEs, just a small decay from the launch of season 3. The fans are still here!
5. Obliterated might not be obliterated by Netflix after all.
US series Obliterated just passed the 14-day mark in the charts, and we can now have a better view of its performance over its first two weeks. With 18.4M CVEs, it’s in the right zone to get a cautious renewal for a second season, so let’s say we’re now 60% confident it will be renewed.
Still, the series will end up quite far from My Life with the Walter Boys, which showed a nice bump in week 2, probably because of a TikTok phenomenon around the series. Netflix didn’t wait and announced yesterday that the series was renewed for a second season, as we predicted last week.
6. Netflix Data Dump deep dive: Academy Awards edition!
Academy Awards nominations are just around the corner for 2024, and we decided to take a closer look at the big Netflix Data Dump and especially how the Netflix films that were nominated for an Academy award between 2015 and 2021.
The first two still most-watched Academy Award-nominated Netflix films during the first six months of 2023 are two animated films, The Mitchells versus the Machines and Over the Moon, with the equivalent of 110 000 and 73 000 complete viewings per day. Don’t Look Up and The Irishman are still going strong, too, coming in 3rd and 4th, just followed by The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, one of Netflix’s earlier Academy Awards plays.
At the bottom, there’s a trend emerging as Netflix subscribers do not seem to like black and white film, or musicals for that matter, as Mank, Roma, Tick, tick… boom!, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom are among the least-watched Academy award nominated Netflix films.
That’s all for this week; feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.
Netflix Synopsis: "A band of fearless chickens flock together to save poultry-kind from an unsettling new threat: a nearby farm that's cooking up something suspicious."
