(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.)
A bunch of theatrically-released films (Kinds of Kindness, The Watchers, A Quiet Place: Day One, and The Fall Guy) came to streaming this week, the week of 26-August. As I wrote a few weeks back, I find myself writing more and more on theatrical films when they come to streaming than I ever have before. First, it just makes sense because theatrical films matter as much to streaming as straight-to-streaming films.
Second, fewer and fewer films are going straight-to-streaming than ever before.
The movie studios that are under pressure to make money (Disney, Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, Paramount, Lionsgate) keep sending their films to theaters. The companies that aren’t under that same pressure (Amazon, Apple, Netflix) are the ones pulling back from theaters (or have never gone). My theory is that they don’t want the bad publicity that comes from a box office bomb. Meanwhile, Bloomberg has an article on how Apple is lowering the budgets for their straight-to-streaming films, like Netflix leaked earlier this year.
If you’re going to make the case that the tech companies have secret data that shows that straight-to-streaming films do just as well or better than theatrically-released films, you also have to explain why that data says that those films need to be made at lower budgets than theatrically-released films. And be upfront about what this says about the future of movies and the budgets for films going forward.
Even with four or five interesting new films, I thought Adam Sandler’s latest comedy special was the most interesting topic of the week, especially what it says about streaming standup specials and the other streamers aping Netflix’s strategy. And on the TV side, we have a battle of streaming titans:
The Rings of Power versus Only Murders in the Building.
All that, plus a look at the horror genre on streaming, a big new miss from Netflix, a buzzy new true crime series, college football ratings, a change at Rotten Tomatoes, all the flops, bombs and misses, 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 August 26th to September 1st.)
Television – Can Two Big Returning Shows Maintain the Momentum?
When I start writing the TV mini-dive, I usually ask, “Was this show a hit or not?” We don’t have to ask that question about the two shows we’re covering today, because they are, indeed, big, big hits. I speak of Amazon’s uber-expensive Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, and Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, the award-winning and long-running Hulu comedy.
Instead, the question is, “Are these hits growing, losing or sustaining momentum?” Remember, great shows have big viewership numbers but fall off over time. Truly elite TV series actually gain viewers over time, à la Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad.
With the caveat that we only have one week of data—and these are both weekly released TV series, so really, the total performance over the next several weeks matters more—let’s see what the data says.
Samba TV dropped the first data points about these respective shows, which helped establish a narrative that The Rings of Power’s ratings are slipping. Indeed, they kind of are, but with a few caveats:
If I just look at just that chart, yes, The Rings of Power did see a drop off. The caveat, which comes with its own caveat, is that The House of the Dragon saw a similar drop off:
Indeed, even Only Murders in the Building had a drop off and then stabilized too. For big, buzzy shows, this makes sense: a lot of folks sample the first episode or even first season, and then stop watching. This isn’t as good as gaining momentum, but I’d argue it’s somewhat expected. It also shows both of these charts lag well behind HoTD, at least as far as their first episodes are concerned.
The trouble with these Samba TV data points—and why I call them datecdotes—is that Samba TV doesn’t use the same number of days to evaluate each show, which is why the above charts range from “live” viewing all the way out to 1 week of viewership for Only Murders. The good thing about Samba TV’s measurement is that they focus on unique households, so that accounts (somewhat) for the length of an episode or season. In that sense, you can see that Only Murders really does have a smaller reach than RoP; it’s not just the run-time, which complicates the picture when only looking at total hours viewed.
I’d also add, on the Samba TV charts—which don’t provide numbers, but a ranking by unique households—both of these shows underwhelmed:
Speaking of total hours viewed—Nielsen’s metric—Only Murders and RoP ended up a little lower than I would have guessed. Only Murders’ latest season ended up with 7.7 million hours in its first week. It’s only a half-hour show—though episodes seem to run longer and longer each season—but it came out on a Tuesday, so that’s still a little low. Meanwhile, The Rings of Power had 16.9 million hours, but it released three new episodes and man, these things are long.
So far…yeah, that seems a little low on debut for The Rings of Power. It’s not quite as big as The Boys (though that show is on its fourth season) or House of the Dragon (and that has a lot of linear TV viewing to add to its totals), so we’ll see. The Rings of Power also struggles in comparison to Amazon’s other top shows.
A few shows, like Fallout, have much higher peaks than Rings of Power, while The Boys kept up the momentum through four seasons. That said, through one week, Rings of Power looks bigger than the fantasy series The Wheel of Time. I didn’t want this mini-dive to go too long, so I didn’t include Luminate’s data here, but it’s roughly in line with Nielsen’s viewership data.
That data matches Amazon’s datecdote from a few weeks back. As Amazon described it internally, the show is “strong”, but not the biggest or as big as season one so far. That tracks the data, same for their description that it’s a top five show all time for them.
For Hulu, Only Murders is one of their bigger shows by a long shot, though it looks like The Bear has passed it in terms of “peak viewership” in a given week, though The Bear is binge-released, and Only Murders comes out weekly.
I’d add, Only Murders’ superpower in past seasons is twofold. First, it releases new seasons every year like clockwork. In today’s streaming landscape, where two years—partially due to Covid-19—is the norm, that’s refreshing. It also has long stays on the top ten charts, as the last season lasted nine weeks last year.
So…gaining or losing momentum? Through one week, both shows look like they’re slowing down. But honestly? This question won’t be fully answered until we have all the data. Look to see if either show loses viewership over the next few weeks.
Quick Notes on TV
- I gotta be honest with you: Netflix’s big new TV series of the week, Kaos—starring Jeff Goldblum in a fantasy/comedy about the Greek gods—might actually be the miss of the week. It made the Nielsen charts with 8.5 million hours in its first week. At first, reading the rough pitch, I thought it might only be a thirty-minute show, but, nope, it’s eight episodes at an average of fifty minutes a piece. For that run time, 8.5 million hours is pretty poor and well below “The Obliterated Line”.
- Netflix had another docu-series, Worst Ex Ever (from Blumhouse of all producers), make the charts this week as well. It’s a spinoff of Worst Roommate Ever, but much darker, given the domestic abuse subject matter. With only four episodes, it managed 13.8 million hours in its first week, which is solid for true crime.
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so please subscribe.
We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read these posts about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
