Pictured: Ginny & Georgia, The Pale Blue Eye and Inside Job
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending January 8th, 2023.
Netflix updates its top 10 stats page weekly with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past seven days. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data easily, visit our tool.
Last week, Netflix also released its top 40 list for the entire year, which we’ve summarized here.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from January 2nd, 2023, to January 8th, 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. Ginny & Georgia returns with a bang.
Picture: Netflix
It was in the air, as the first season crept back into Top 10 around the globe before the launch of the second season, but Ginny & Georgia probably earned its wings as a bona fide Netflix hit last week with a launch of 19.2M CVEs in just four days.
That’s the best launch for a returning English-speaking series released on a Thursday.
Ginny & Georgia season 2 viewership CVE opening week vs Never Have I Ever S2 and Warrior Nun S2
A swift renewal should follow quite soon but we’ll keep an eye on how the series evolve in the next few weeks.
2. The Pale Blue Eye ends the 2022 season of Netflix’s prestige films quite well
Directed by Scott Cooper and starring Christian Bale, The Pale Blue Eye launched with nearly 20M CVEs in its first weekend, the 25th best launch for a US film released on a Friday in my dataset.
It could seem a bit low but as a prestige film with such a dark atmosphere, let’s give it a pass.
The Pale Blue Eye vs. other Netflix Original Movie Launches 2022
3. Glass Onion loses a bit too much steam in its third week
After its great second week, Glass Onion is now starting to losing steam in its third week with a 65% drop.
That’s a bigger drop than The Gray Man, Red Notice, The Adam Project, and Don’t Look Up (that all lost between 61 and 63% in their third week).
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is still on track to be the second biggest Netflix film of 2022, but it could also go under The Gray Man in the coming days.
Glass Onion viewership vs. biggest Netflix Original Movies
4. Two European series flopped hard last week
Two European series launched this week, and to be frank, they flopped.
The first one, Copenhagen Cowboy by auteur Nicolas Winding Refn, was probably too out there to get a mainstream audience.
Still, the second one, The Lying Life of Adults, was an Italian adaptation of a book by Elena Ferrante and quite Netflix’s big bet for the beginning of the year. The two failed to enter the ranking this week.
On the bright side, Woman of the Dead, an Austrian acquisition, did a pretty good launch with 4.4M CVEs over its first four days, but that goes to show again that marketing, big names, and promotion will only get you so far on Netflix.
Woman of the Dead viewership launch vs other European Netflix Original launches
5. The cancellation of Inside Job, explained by numbers.
The cancellation of Inside Job announced this week is quite puzzling since the series was first renewed a year ago following the launch of the first part of its first season. At the time, the series did an OK launch with 4.7M CVE over its first three days.
Inside Job viewership vs Other Netflix Original Animated Shows
At the time, the numbers must have been decent enough to warrant a swift renewal from Netflix for a second season. But the second part of the first season was released one year later, in November 2022, and it did not do so well.
First, Part 2 did not break into a global weekly Top 10; it reached the Top 10 TV in only 11 countries, compared to the 28 countries reached by Part 1.
When we look at data from TV Time (that logs the number of members that declared to have watched episodes of the series), we can observe a pattern. The first ten episodes (aka Part 1) only lost 12% between the first and the last. The following eight episodes (aka Part 2) only lost 11% between the first and the last. The problem lies here in the drop between the tenth and the eleventh episode.
Inside Job completion rate for TV Time
If we look at the decay rate between the first and the last episode of the first season, the decay rate is now closer to 50%, meaning that half of the people who started the series did not return for Part 2.
Part 1’s numbers were good for a renewal, but Part 2’s numbers are not. This atypical release schedule is probably to blame, just as a renewal was announced after only the first episodes. Part 2 acted as a real season 2, with a steep drop off in numbers that resulted in the cancellation of the renewal made last year. A renewal that probably came too early in the process.
Either way, even if this cancellation can be explained with numbers (or lack thereof), how it dealt with it is – again – not talent-friendly, and it perpetuates this idea that it cancels everything.
