Did Cobra Kai’s Batch Release Work? Plus...This is the Future of Straight-to-Streaming Films?
The Streaming Ratings Report for 16-Aug-2024
(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.)
In the latest salvo in the big “Should movies go to theaters or straight-to-streaming?” debate, just last week, Apple pulled its Brad Pitt-George Clooney-starring film, Wolfs, from its theatrical calendar; now they’re sending it right to Apple TV+ instead.1
So much for Apple committing theaters.
If you want context on why this happened, I’d recommend two of my past articles. First, “The Data Is In: Theatrical Films Massively Outperform Straight-To-Streaming Films” (And yes, I owe everyone an update on that series, but the news has been way too crazy all summer.) In short, films that go to theaters do better on streaming than films that don’t (even accounting for marketing costs). Stay tuned for more on this in this week’s film section.
But there is a caveat: you have to care about making money. If profitability doesn’t matter as much—especially if you don’t publish numbers—then bad headlines can matter more. The streamers don’t want to send films to theaters, lest they bomb and they wind up looking bad, lost money be damned. In short, those films are getting what I’ve dubbed “The Argylle Treatment”.
This is why you and Hollywood need streaming ratings! So you know what flops and what doesn’t. If the streamers get negative PR about their streaming films when they flop, they’ll be more likely to send their films to theaters.
(I’d also worry about the competitive implications if some companies have the pressure to make money and others don’t. Read my big take on the vital importance of renewed antitrust enforcement for Hollywood this week here.)
On to this week’s issue, including Peacock’s Those About to Die’s complicated numbers, the continued House of the Dragon vs. The Boys battle, the return of The Acolyte, how politics and soccer are generating big live ratings, whether Simone Biles’ unscripted TV skills are as elite as her gymnastics skills, and more.
But let’s dive right in, starting with Cobra Kai’s latest batch of episodes...
(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 July 15th to July 21st.)
Television - Cobra Kai And the Latest Netflix Batch Release
If it had come out in June, would I have put Cobra Kai in my “big June genre showdown”? Probably not. True, it’s about martial arts, but it’s also more of a comedy-drama. It doesn't strike me as quite genre enough.2
Moreover, I’m not sure it’s huge. At least not compared to something like Bridgerton. Here’s a showdown of both shows, with total viewership by season:
An 18.1 million hours opening weekend isn’t great. Especially if we see a decline next week, which could happen, or it could get a small “binge release curve” bounce.
We also shouldn’t compare this season with previous ones too closely, because Netflix is leaning more into “batch releases” than ever: previously, “batched” shows had two rounds of episodes and this time, Cobra Kai will have three (3!) batches of episodes extending into 2025! Next week, I might do a “views” count to account for the run-time of the various batches of episodes. And while the fewer episodes might impact the total, it’s hard to see how they impacted Bridgerton, as a comparison.
Still, I shouldn’t be too negative as this was the top show on Showlabs and Luminate:
Like some of our other genre shows, though, really this is a question about how well...
This season holds up over time.
How the fewer number of episodes impacts the weekly viewership.
So I guess I’m saying, we’ll wait and see. As for acquisitions, this was clearly one of Netflix’s best pick-ups ever—it has been a steady ratings winner for them over the years; it has elite IMDb scores at an 8.5 on 211K reviews—but it looks like it may finally be running out of steam.