(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)
Before we get to this week’s absolutely jam-packed Streaming Ratings Report, I wanted to share some recent EntStrategyGuy appearances.
At the end of October, I went on Sonny Bunch’s podcast (I want to beat Richard Rushfield for most appearances) to talk about...everything? It was a great conversation so give it a listen.
Sonny Bunch’s Across the Movie Aisle also did a quite excellent segment talking about my article on the “Podcast Election”, so give that a listen.
In November, Brandon Katz wrote an article for the Observer on foreign content, and I provided him with some Nielsen data. (Katz is one of the best out there.)
Joe Adalian quoted me in his article on Agatha All Along for Vulture. It’s a great read and an excellent breakdown of the MCU’s TV evolution.
Also in December, I had the immense pleasure to go on Matthew Belloni’s must-listen podcast, The Town, to discuss the winners and losers in streaming in 2024 last month. It went well..so well that Matt split our recording into two parts! And the replies on Twitter were positive, which...never happens? Give it a listen.
Two of my favorite Substackers, Marion Ranchet and Ted Hope, cited my article on entertainment industry myths. Thank you both!
Finally, the Washington Review highlighted my thoughts on IP.
Today we’re just looking at the week of 9-Dec, then the next issue of the Streaming Ratings Report will close out 2023, looking at the weeks of 16-Dec and 23-Dec and talking about some big, big topics, like Squid Game’s second season and the NFL on Netflix.
But this week ain’t too shabby either. We’ll look at a few huge new films (Red One, Carry-On and It Ends with Us), plus a surprise foreign TV hit, Netflix’s latest comedy, MLS’s disappointing Apple ratings, a big linear TV finale ratings, Paramount+’s continued hot streak, a puzzling change on the theatrical calendar, all the flops, bombs and misses for the week, and a whole lot more.
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, and Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of December 9th to December 15th.
Also, in a very minor data change, since I already have the streaming data for the week of 16-Dec, I uploaded it as well into my Nielsen data set. I will analyze some shows and films for their two-week performance then, but only shows that premiered the week of 9-Dec.)
Film - Carry-On versus Red One versus It Ends With Us
First, let’s talk about when you should send a holiday movie to theaters.
I’ve been told that everyone knows Thanksgiving will be a big weekend at the theatrical box office, which is why Disney and others often schedule big blockbusters on the Wednesday before. (See Moana 2.) Because of that, distributors tend to avoid the weeks after that in December, worrying about box office carryover until the week of Christmas.
That’s why—even though I think it’s crazy—we never see Christmas films come out early in December anymore when, you know, customers actually want to watch them. To add to that worry, studios now want their holiday films on their streamers in time for the holidays.
So we have Christmas movies coming out in November. (And Halloween films coming out in August. Most notably, Haunted Mansion came out in July so it could make it to Disney+ in time for Halloween.) Personally, this feels like conventional wisdom that’s begging to be broken.
This thinking also explains why Amazon’s aspiring blockbuster Red One came out in November. Amazon rushed Red One onto streaming so quickly that it was still in theaters when it came to Prime Video.
Amazon wanted to have its cake (a theatrical release) and eat it too this year (have a big hit on streaming). Did they accomplish their goal? And could they fend off Netflix’s latest December hit or a surprise summer hit coming to Netflix?
Red One Smashed It On Streaming
Wow, Amazon ended up with a big, big opening for a film that disappointed in theaters. In theaters, audiences only coughed up $96 million domestically, and about the same globally.
But on streaming? It did very well. Here are Prime Video’s all-time charts:
According to an Amazon datecdote, it also had 50 million “viewers” in the first four days, but…I still don’t know what that means, since Amazon didn’t define viewers. (They released a similar data point for Road House, but it took two weekends to get to 50 million viewers. Interestingly…as we’ll see next week…Beast Games also had 50 million viewers, but took 25 days to get there.) Given those different time periods, that’s why I prefer Nielsen’s data.
Any way you slice it, this film smashed it, with 62.6 million hours in its first two weeks, only behind Glass Onion (for “early” theatrically-released films) and ahead of every other first-run streaming film except for Leave the World Behindand Hocus Pocus 2.
And just ahead of our next film, so I can’t help but compare the two…
Carry-On Is Netflix’s December Hit
Like clockwork, Netflix had a December breakout hit. Since I’m a psychopath, I can remember each one of them over the last five years from memory:
2024: Carry-On
2023: Leave the World Behind
2022:Knives Out 2, er, The Glass Onion: A Benoit Blanc Mystery
2021: Don’t Look Up
2020: The Midnight Sky2019: Bird Box
Oh damn, the two misses were that Bird Box came out in 2018 (wow, a long time ago!) and I forgot 6 Underground in 2019. I’m guessing most folks can’t recall The Midnight Sky, the George Clooney-helmed sci-fi flick that Netflix said did very, very well for them globally. (I’d provide a number, but that was from the days of “two minutes viewed”, a Netflix data cut I loathed.)
Back to the topic at hand: Carry-On looks to be as big a hit as those other films, with nearly 60 million hours through two weeks, and, like Red One, it’s ahead of everything except Leave the World Behind, Hocus Pocus 2, and Glass Onion on my all-time charts. I think it might actually leg out better too, given the hype.1
Also, according to Samba TV, it won the week with the most households:
In other words, a big, big opening like many of Netflix’s other December openings. The only thing it doesn’t have? Any theatrical box office to its name. Unlike…
What About It Ends with Us?
It Ends With Us probably grabbed the title of “box office surprise of the year”, as it managed to earn $148 million domestically in August. Even though it was based on the best selling book of 2022 and 2023, due to a surge of interest from BookTok, that only translates to about 1 million copies sold in each of those years. (Since the film came out, the publisher announced that it has sold over 10 million copies worldwide.)
As for streaming, it likely suffers from the “not on Netflix’s ad-tier” deficit, as it opened to 16.3 million hours, then dropped down to 7.0 million hours in its second week. Those are solid numbers, but that would only rank next to streaming-first films like The First Missy, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, or Trigger Warning and ahead of Old Dads. (A shiny gold doubloon to any readers who can name the stars of each of those films.)2
It did make Samba TV (see above), but again was bested by the other two big releases:
The one place it wins big? Again, the $148 million it owns in domestic box office.