Pictures via Netflix
Every Tuesday, Netflix updates its top 10 stats page with 40 new hourly figures for the top movies and shows of the past seven days. Below, we go beyond retyping Netflix’s top 10 press release and bring you comparisons to see how well titles are doing. It was a busy week for new releases, but some big flops and disappointments, sadly, headlined the week.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from November 18th, 2024 to November 24th, 2024, 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. A string of flops in a crowded week.
In a week with many Netflix original shows and films coming out, some were left out in the cold, like Academy Awards hopeful The Piano Lesson or British crowdpleaser Joy, which missed the weekly Top 10 in the film category entirely. On the TV side, the new season of the American talent show Rhythm + Flow did not make an impact and also missed the Top 10 for the release of its first batch of episodes. There are no charts for these as a result, as they were completely absent from the top 10 lists.
2. The Merry Gentlemen
Is the law of diminishing returns also applying to Christmas films? It may seem so as the new release this week was The Merry Gentlemen which launched with a noticeable drop compared to the Christmas films released since the beginning of November. With only 14.7M CVEs in 5 days, it’s a weaker start than Hot Frosty, which premiered last week and already had a slower debut than Meet Me Next Christmas, released the week before. This should change next week, though, with the release of Lindsay Lohan’s Our Little Secret.
3. A Man on the Inside
Let’s test our predictive model with the new (and excellent, believe me) series A Man on the Inside, which debuts with 6.9M CVEs over its first 4 days. It’s not a slam dunk, far from it. Still, with such a launch, its relatively low budget, and its excellent critical and audience reception (currently 7.8/10 on IMDb), this should be enough to secure a renewal for a second season, as this series has everything to become Netflix’s equivalent of Only Murders in the Building.
4. Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
As expected, the boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson is collapsing spectacularly in its second week, with a -96% drop in viewing hours between its 3rd and 9th day compared to the first two days of release. I still don’t understand Netflix’s forays into this domain, especially for a platform that prides itself on evaluating the profitability of its programming investments over the long tail of viewing hours. Live sports are the exact opposite of that: expensive events that perform well at the time of broadcast (when the technology holds up) but have no longevity and fade away much faster than any fictional or documentary content.
Maybe it’s just a billionaire’s whim, unsure of what to do with dormant billions, or perhaps it’s a way to outmaneuver competitors or sell ads. But as far as ratings go, I’m already betting we won’t see it in the Engagement Report for the first half of 2025.
5. GTMAX
The French film GTMAX isn’t off to a roaring start, with just 10.8M CVEs over its first 5 days—a launch that ranks more in the B-tier group, far from the successes of the genre like Wingwomen or Family Pack. Perhaps the competition was too fierce given last week’s lineup.
6. Spellbound lacks magic.
The animated film Spellbound from Skydance, originally slated for Apple TV+ before being shifted to Netflix following the change in their exclusivity deal, has been released—and its debut is rather underwhelming, with just 8.5M CVEs in 3 days. That’s weaker than The SpongeBob Movie or even Orion and the Dark released earlier this year. We’ll see if it holds steady over the holiday season, but British animated film That Christmas is just a few days away so it might cut into its progression.
7. Buy now!
There’s nothing like a documentary on the perils and pitfalls of shopping released the week before Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Audiences seem to be showing up with Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy pulled in 7.1M CVEs in 5 days—the highest launch for a non-true crime documentary this year. This one is going mega viral on the likes of TikTok, so we can see it sustain viewership heading into week 2.
8. Our Oceans
Netflix seems to be running out of new territory to explore with its nature documentary series. The latest one, focused on the oceans (aptly titled Our Oceans), has had a very weak start for a nature doc series, with just 2.1M CVEs in its first five days.
9. The Helicopter Heist
Heists everywhere, all the time. That’s probably scribbled somewhere in one of Ted Sarandos’ notebooks, as just weeks after the Spanish series Bank Under Siege, the Swedish series The Helicopter Heist drops with an almost identical launch, pulling in 2.8M CVEs in 3 days. Good, but not Money Heist-good.
10. The Empress Season 2 vs Season 1
The German event series The Empress returns for its second season, and let’s be clear right away—there will be a drop in viewership compared to season 1. With just 4.4M CVEs in 3 days, it’s starting off on a weaker footing. We’ll have to see in the coming weeks whether this decline holds or if season 2 manages to regain some traction.
That’s all for this week. Please let us know what you think in the comments below.
