Pictured: Heart of Stone, Painkiller and Zombieverse
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending August 13th, 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. This week, we saw some movements in the overall top 10, with The Mother moving up to seventh on the most-watched English movies list.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from August 7th, 2023, to August 13th, 2023, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent,” or CVE, expressed in millions. That is the same metric used now by Netflix in its Top 10 following the June 2023 update in methodology. They label these numbers as views. 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. Heart of Stone is not The Mother
We wanted to see if Gal Gadot could take over Jennifer Lopez or Chris Hemsworth as Netflix action lead of 2023 but “Heart of Stone” launched with good, not great numbers, with 33.1M CVEs over its first 3 days, making it the 4th best launch for a Netflix film released in 2023.
It is noticeably lower than The Mother or Extraction 2, but that is what you will get when you release a film in the middle of summer.
2. Painkiller does a good launch.
Painkiller had some hurdles for its launch, the main one being that its story had already been told last year in Dopesick released on Hulu or Disney+, depending on your country of origin. But its launch of 7.2M CVEs over its first four days ranks it in quite a good place among the “serious” Netflix dramas of the year so far, between The Diplomat and Beef. So not bad, all things considered.
This one is a limited series and is not expected to return for a season 2, but given we’ve seen limited series turned into anthology series, never say never.
3. ZombieVerse has no bite in the Top 10.
There are some shows where you can see that Netflix expects a lot from performance, and ZombieVerse is one of them, combining the elements of South Korean success All of Us Are Dead with the competitive reality TV side that did really well for Physical: 100 earlier this year. It also was noticeably put forward in Netflix marketing and promotion efforts in the US lately, but when your launch does approximately the same number of CVEs as the launch of Too Hot to Handle: Germany, can you say it’s a success? I don’t.
4. Netflix US animated series are STILL struggling in the top 10.
Do you know how many seasons of US Netflix animated series have been released since January 2023? 26? You’re right!
And out of those 26, do you know how many did not manage to break into the Top 10? 25? You’re also right!
And the miracle happened this week with season 8 of Gabby’s Dollhouse managing to break the curse with 4.1M CVEs over its first week. The last time we saw Gabby’s Dollhouse in the Top 10 for its debut week was in August 2021 for the launch of season 2!
In the meantime, however, the curse claimed the soul of Mech Cadets, whose first season released last week did not manage to break into the global Top 10, even with the recent methodology change. So the fight continues.
