Pictured: Obliterated, Family Switch, Sweet Home S2 / Netflix
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending December 3rd, 2023. This week we’ll be covering a bunch of different Netflix shows and movies. This week, we’ll cover Family Switch, Obliterated, Sweet Home, Criminal Code, Squid Game: The Challenge, and a general look at South Korean dramas.
If you missed out top 10 report from last week, we covered Squid Game: The Challenge, Leo, and Last Call in Istanbul. This post is the English equivalent to a post on the Substack Netflix n Chiffres.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from November 27th, 2023 to December 3rd, 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. Family Switch is doing fine but not crazy fine.
You would think that a holiday comedy involving body swapping and Jennifer Garner would be a huge hit. You would not be entirely wrong as Family Switch garner-ed (pun intended) 22.2M CVEs over its first four days on the platform.
Is that the best launch for a Netflix holiday film? No, because Falling for Christmas with Lindsay Lohan is still the reigning champion, but it’s second, just ahead of The Noel Diary.
So, it was a pretty good launch, all things considered. We will see if the holiday season is carrying it until the end of the year.
2. Obliterated is doing fine too
I don’t know if you had any expectations for the opening weekend of Obliterated, the raunchy action-comedy series from the creators of Cobra Kai, but mine were pretty low.
It turns out that Obliterated was not wholly destroyed by the competition, as it launched with 7M CVEs over its first four days. That’s low but not as low as I thought it would be, and if we compare that launch to the other launches of the US Netflix series of the year, we can be cautiously optimistic about a renewal for a second season.
Green is for the renewed series; red is for the canceled series. So it’s trending towards the bottom end of the renewed series (or the higher end of the canceled series if you’re that kind of person).
3. Sweet Home comes back to quite an empty house of fans.
When Sweet Home debuted three years ago, Netflix gave it the “datecdote” treatment, mentioning that 22 million accounts started the first season over its first 28 days.
Three years later, the second season of the South Korean show is finally here, and its launch weekend is quite low, with only 2.5M CVEs over its first three days, just under what D.P. season 2 got when it came back.
We already mentioned a bunch of times that the more time there is between seasons, the higher the decay between seasons appears to be so that just might be another example of that.
Season 3 is already shot and will arrive in Summer 2024, so the result of its second season might not matter much now, but a renewal beyond the third season already seems very unlikely.
4. Criminal Code gets renewed and it’s no surprise as to why
Hit Brazilian series Criminal Code has been renewed, just three weeks after its premiere, and a look at the numbers explains why that renewal was swift. After 14 days, it’s currently the third most-watched Netflix Latin American series released since 2021, behind Fake Profile and Palpito, both of which were renewed for multiple seasons.
5. Squid Game: The Challenge continues to soar.
Analyzing CVE numbers for weekly released shows is not as straightforward as it can be for binge-released shows, but if you stick to a dedicated methodology, it can be done.
Squid Game: The Challenge is a very good training field, as the weekly released show is still at the Top of the Top 10 this week. So far, and per my very own methodology, the show is just behind the second season of Love is Blind in terms of viewership, with an average of 23.5M CVEs per weekly batch of episodes.
Season 2 of Love is Blind represents the peak for that particular show, so it’s not bad so far. We will have more to say next week as the final episode is released, enabling us to have an end-of-release window CVE number that we can compare.
6. What are the biggest South Korean dramas of the year so far?
As Strong Girl Nam-Soon, Castaway Diva and My Demon occupy three places in the international Top 10 this week, it might be good to look at how weekly released South Korean dramas are faring this year so far.
Now, there are a few caveats:
- Weekly released South Korean dramas are usually acquisitions by Netflix for the entire world, except for South Korea, and their release schedule can be different depending on the part of the world.
- The US and Asia tend to have them basically at the same time of their broadcast in South Korea whilst some other parts of the world get them a few weeks after.
But let’s take a look at the main South Korean shows on Netflix in 2023, and we can see that King the Land is so far the main weekly released South Korean show of the year on Netflix.
Strong Girl Nam-Soon is third, while My Demon and Castaway Diva are less of a draw.
That’s all for this week; feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.
