Picture: The Mother, Queen Cleopatra, and Black Knight
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending May 14th, 2023. This week we’ll cover The Mother, Black Knight, Mulligan, Missing: Dead or Alive, Queen Cleopatra, and AKA.
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. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data easily, visit our tool.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from May 8th, 2023 to May 14th, 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.
The Mother delivers a punch for its opening weekend.
JLo has still got it.
That’s proven this week with The Mother tying Murder Mystery 2 as the best launch for any new Netflix film of 2023 with 42.9M CVEs in just three days. That’s also the fifth-best opening weekend for new Netflix films since June 2021 on record.
CVE viewership for The Mother vs. other hit Netflix movies in the first 3 days
Stop calling her JLo and start calling her “Jenny from the block(buster).”
AKA is still going strong after 17 days
French action film AKA is still going strong after 17 days, reaching the 50M CVEs mark. If we compare its first 14 days to the other international films, it’s the 3rd best launch on record behind Troll and Blood Red Sky.
CVE Viewership for International Movies after 14 Days
I’m sure some AI somewhere is cooking up the script for an action film opposing Alban Lenoir to vampires and trolls on a plane, and I’m here for it.
Missing: Dead or Alive and Queen Cleopatra fought each other last week
What a strange idea to program two documentary series on the same day, and lo and behold, they did quite the same average launch.
True crime docuseries Missing: Dead or Alive delivered a 7.6M CVEs launch over its first five days whilst Queen Cleopatra did not really ride the controversy surrounding it with a launch of only 6.7M CVEs.
First five days of CVE viewership for Missing: Dead or Alive and Queen Cleopatra
Black Knight makes a good launch but not a great one.
The sci-fi South Korean series Black Knight was supposed to be the big new series of last week and it did ok with a launch of 6.6M CVEs over its first three days. That’s a bit better than My Name and a bit less than Squid Game. But do not expect any “Squid game” level of hype for its second week. That was something we might never see again.
Black Knight vs other Korean Netflix Originals
Mulligan flops hard
Picture: Netflix
The new animated adult series Mulligan will assuredly be the next one on the chopping block of swift cancellations as it failed to make its mark on the Top 10 this week. To make matters worse, it did not make it to any weekly Top 10 worldwide on Netflix last week, and as of now, the series has a dismal 4.5/10 average on IMDb with only 300 reviews. That’s really, really (really) not good.
Netflix Synopsis: "In a dystopian future devastated by air pollution, the survival of humanity depends on the Black Knights -- and they're far from your average deliverymen."
