Netflix Top 10s: You Are So Not Invited to My Bat-Mitzvah, Who is Erin Carter?, and Ahsoka

Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending August 27th, 2023. This week, we’ll be covering You Are So Not Invited to My Bat-Mitzvah, Who is Erin Carter?, Swamp Kings, The Ultimatum, Heart of Stone, Painkiller, and even Disney+’s Ahsoka!?

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, which has just been updated with even more data from the Nielsen top 10s.

Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from August 21st, 2023 to August 27th, 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.

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1. A checkup on Heart of Stone and Painkiller after two weeks.

Heart of Stone has been out for nearly three weeks and it’s time to see how well it’s faring so far when we compare it to the other big Netflix films of 2023. With an estimated 77,4M CVEs after 14 days, it’s the fourth biggest Netflix film of the year (as it should). A solid performance but not quite in the same realm as The Mother and Extraction 2.

Let’s also do a checkup of Painkiller as it’s also in its third week. Now, you’ll notice the series is tracking almost identically to The Diplomat and Beef, around the 20M CVEs mark. We’re seeing a trend developing, like with movies, whereby we’re seeing different levels of viewership groups for various shows.

So Painkiller thus far is in the good category but a long way off the excellent tier of new Original series.

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2. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat-mitzvah is not inviting enough audiences.

The Sandler’s family comedy You Are So Not Invited to My Bat-mitzvah is launching quite softly with 12.3M CVEs over its first week-end. Now, it’s not unexpected since the subject matter seems very American and might not travel well internationally.

Reviews are good, though, with Rotten Tomatoes claiming it’s the best-reviewed Adam Sandler film ever. So it might have done very decent numbers in the US but we will have to wait for Nielsen’s numbers to know for sure.

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3. People are getting to know Erin Carter.

British thriller series Who is Erin Carter? had a very decent launch last week with 13.2M CVEs over its first four days. It’s a step up on Painkiller or Beef and just below the launches of Keep Breathing and Obsession, without the added bonus of a famous star (Melissa Barrera for Keep Breathing or Richard Armitage for Obsession) so all in all, a good and solid performance.

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4. The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On is back, but audiences have moved on.

The first season of The Ultimatum: Marry Me or Move On was a fairly decent success back when it premiered, but the launch of season 2 is nowhere near that, with only 3.6M CVEs for the first batch of episodes. That’s 40% less than the launch of season 1! A steep decline that does not bode well for the show’s future.

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5. Untold: Swamp Kings is a new example of how international audiences could not care less about American football.

As a French person, American football (and its supposed and self-inflated importance in the streaming wars) has always been a mystery. The numbers for Quarterback were decent but not mindblowing, and this week, the release of the documentary series Untold: Swamp Kings also provided another snapshot of how international audiences do not really care about this sport. With only 5M CVEs over its first 6 days, it’s one of the worst launches for a Netflix US documentary series, half of what the docuseries about soccer star Neymar did when it was released.

That’s not to say that American football is not important, but if I’m Netflix, do I want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in global rights for a sport that does not resonate outside the US and Canada and a handful of countries worldwide?

Especially since in the US, Netflix’s number of subs is quite steady and might need American football to keep it steady. So I get why Netflix decided to invest in sports documentary series instead. It keeps fans involved whilst not costing billions of dollars in streaming rights.

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Bonus: Disney Adopts CVE?

Written by Kasey Moore

Yesterday, Disney announced via its Star Wars blog that Ahsoka had drawn 14 million views. How did Disney come to this figure? The same way Netflix comes to its views since the summer and the same way that we’ve been compiling these reports for well over a year.

This is a significant move from Disney as it appears we’re moving towards a unified metric that all streamers will be using possibly to satisfy the transparency requests from the various guilds now striking.

 

How does this 14 million number compare to Netflix Originals? Given we’ve only got views for a single episode, we can try and make comparisons with both movies and series. With thanks to Frederic for pulling these two graphs for us.

Given we’ve only got one episode of data for Ahsoka, it’s hard to make a direct 1:1 comparison with various Netflix series. Add to that the fact that most Netflix Originals are released on Thursdays or Fridays, not Wednesdays and the comparisons are difficult.