How Did Streaming, er, TV’s Most Expensive Show on TV Fare in Season Two?
The Streaming Ratings Report for 15-Nov-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.)
The streaming wars just can’t decide:
Have we hit peak TV or not?
Some weeks, it looks like the bubble has definitely burst. One week this summer had the fewest English language titles I’ve ever seen, seven, in the four or so years I’ve been doing this. Two weeks this summer had the third and fifth lowest number of new titles in the last four years.
But we had more new original TV shows and movies this week (reminder: the week starting 14-Oct), 43, than any week going back to Sep-2023.
As I asked last week after looking at all of the flops and misses, “Are we still in a streaming bubble?” Given that the bubble arguably already popped post-2023 strikes, looking at a week like this one, I think Tinseltown may still be making too many TV shows and straight-to-streaming films. This is especially worrying because production is already down, people are already suffering, and if Hollywood pulls back even further, the pain will only spread.
Of course, the data is noisy. Just looking at the month ahead, the over-production trend does not continue. We have two more very light weeks, which, thankfully, coincides with Thanksgiving weekend. Then it yo-yos back the other way; last week, every new streamer released a new, not-inexpensive English language TV show!
So we’ll have a lot to talk about. We’ll start by checking in on a show that may have cost more than all of the other new shows combined, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series. That, plus Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, a Netflix show beating the NFL, checking in on half-hour TV series, the return of The Lincoln Lawyer (in one batch of episodes too!), some big linear TV shows returning to broadcast, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
Let’s dive in.
(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 October 14th to October 20th.)
Television - How Good is Good Enough for The Rings of Power?
Here’s my main question/concern analyzing The Rings of Power:
Is it fair to hold Amazon’s Prime Video’s Amazon Studio’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to a higher standard than other TV shows?
Short answer: yes.
Listen, if you commit billions to make a TV show (again, literal billions; for a rundown on the math, go here), then your show has to be one of the biggest television shows each year, full stop.
Did The Rings of Power clear that bar? Maybe, but probably not.
The Rings of Power dropped its eighth episode (in its sixth week of release, having released three episodes in the first week) on 3-Oct, and it fell out of the Nielsen originals top ten list this week, the week of 14-Oct.
Nielsen had a data issue processing numbers for the season finale, so we didn’t get the full numbers for the weeks of 30-Sep and 7-Oct until this week, so now we can run the full analysis.1
And defining “success”, in this very specific case, is tough. Do we insist it be the biggest show on TV? Or the biggest “genre” show? Or just “one of the biggest”? Or just “big enough to justify its budget”? I’d argue it probably needs to be one of the biggest, but not necessarily the clear number one.
Let’s start with the bad news: this isn’t the biggest show on TV. Or even the biggest genre show. Compared to similar shows, The Rings of Power lags behind four other genre—meaning fantasy, sci-fi, superhero, etc—shows this year, specifically Avatar: The Last Airbender, House of the Dragon, Fallout, and The Boys.
Fallout finished with 163.9 million hours in eight weeks. House of the Dragon had 160.9 in nine weeks, The Boys season four had 150.5 million, and Avatar: The Last Airbender had 105.2. The Rings of Power? Only 92.3 million. After that, it's a pretty big drop from fifth to sixth place, with some clear genre misses (Star Wars: The Acolyte and Sweet Tooth, for example). Still, that just barely puts The Rings of Power in the successful camp.
Obviously, The Boys has more episodes, but The Boys seems to be gaining strength, season over season. Meanwhile, some other non-trivial number of House of the Dragon fans watched that show on linear TV, meaning it had even more reach than The Rings of Power.
Samba TV’s numbers back this up, showing that The Rings of Power—while having a solid six-week run—never topped their TV charts. Consider: The Penguin has topped those charts for seven straight weeks, and Tulsa King is in the midst of a seven-week run too:
Even worse, The Rings of Power seems to be losing steam as the episodes go on. The worry for Amazon Studios/Prime Video is that season three starts in an even smaller place and then shrinks more. In other words, even if The Rings of Power’s second season just cleared the bar for success—that bar being “justifying its budget”—the odds that future seasons will also clear the same bar are dropping.
So how about some good news? Well, this is still one of the top shows on TV in 2024.
And that’s the rub. Right now, by my count, 140 first-run streaming TV shows have made the Nielsen top ten charts in 2024. Through eight weeks, The Rings of Power’s second season sits just outside the top ten, or top 9% of all TV shows, that made the Nielsen charts for one week or more. Given that we still have a few more big, big shows to come out in 2024, The Rings of Power will likely fall further down the charts by the end of this calendar year. Is that good enough?
If you think about it in box office terms, it really isn’t. If the most expensive movie of the year doesn’t make the top ten, you’d probably call it a big flop. Look at Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (7th in domestic box office in 2023), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (12th), Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (13th), or Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (15th); they were all considered flops or misses, mostly because of their giant, post-Covid 19 budgets.
Summing it up, I’d avoid calling this a huge flop. It’s still one of Amazon’s biggest shows and does well for them—they say—globally. But I just can’t call this a big win for them either. If the show is profitable—and Amazon does have ways to evaluate that—it just isn’t public. So anyone who says “No one knows” is wrong because…they know—it’s likely barely so.
Worse, if it keeps trending downward, then it will likely be very, very unprofitable. So stay tuned for that fun story!