Pictured: Your Place or Mine, You, Viking Wolf
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending February 12th, 2023.
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.
Missed last week’s top 10 report? We looked into Ginny & Georgia, Freeridge, Lockwood & Co, and Viking Wolf.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from February 5th, 2023 to February 12th, 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. Your Place or Mine makes a good, but not great, launch in week 1
Your Place or Mine is Netflix’s big play for Valentine’s Day this year, and to make this a hit, they cleaned house in the release calendar and took two very bankable actors to headline this romantic comedy, Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher.
So how well did it do? With 27.7M CVEs over its first weekend, it’s the second-best opening for a romantic comedy released on a Friday, but it also feels a bit underwhelming as it trails behind He’s All That, released in Summer 2021. Its second week might be bigger since it had Valentine’s Day in it, but after that, we might expect a huge drop in week 3.
Your Place or Mine vs other romance movies in CVE viewership
2. The new season of You reaches new heights.
The record-breaking launch of the second season of Ginny and Georgia lasted exactly four weeks as the return of “You” for its fourth season smashed the record for the launch of a recurring series released on a Thursday with 23.5M CVEs.
Now, because it only has five episodes for this first part, I don’t expect You to continue on that pace over the next few weeks as bingeing the season is, in fact, quicker than for Ginny & Georgia, but we’ll see.
So far, the fourth season is ahead of the launch of season 3, but again, the release in two parts will make analyzing the future numbers of You quite difficult.
3. Love to Hate You is not breaking out of the niche.
The newly released South-Korean romantic series Love to Hate You may have given us an indication of the total size of the audience niche for the South-Korean romantic series. It seems to be between 1.3M-1.4M CVEs over their first weekend.
Love to Hate You viewership CVE vs The Sound of Magic and Remarriage & Desires.
4. Are Norwegian films the new rage?
Picture: Netflix
Something is happening in the non-English film rankings: Norwegian films are taking over.
It started with Troll back in December, but swiftly after, Narvik came along, and then Viking Wolf at the beginning of 2023 up until now. It could be a consequence of the breakout hit of Troll that helped put Norwegian films front and center on millions of Netflix’s homepages thanks to the algorithm but the trend is quite clear.
Let’s also mention that while Troll is a bona fide Netflix original film, Narvik and Viking Wolf were released theatrically in Norway. Netflix swooped in to buy the global rights and release them as Netflix Originals everywhere else in the world. Expect more Norwegian commissions and acquisitions on the film side in the future.
