(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.)
As I stressed in my very last article, politics is not my bailiwick, unless it directly impacts the entertainment business…
…but, whoo boy, it has been hard to avoid this past week, hasn’t it? (And it’s distracting, time-wise, reading all the news. I’d suggest checking out Cal Newport’s latest podcast and newsletter for some must-read advice.) Truth be told, the election doesn’t have much to do with the ins and outs of streaming ratings each week, which didn’t stop just because an election happened. The streamers seemingly released as much content as ever over the two weeks starting 30-Sep and 7-Oct.
A week out from the election, it feels like people are finally ready for different news. As such, I have a big, big, double issue this week. (Partially because Nielsen published late two weeks back.) We’ll talk about the NBA, President Obama, LeBron James and Netflix’s latest big sports docu-series, a streamer quietly licensing its streaming original films (which no one else noticed yet), two big reality series for Netflix landing on the charts, Tulsa King’s quiet success, a big YA drama returns, a ton of flops and misses begging the question, “Are we still in a streaming bubble?” and more.
But we’ll start with the theme of October: horror films.
(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, 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 September 30th to October 13th, two weeks of ratings data.)
Film – Spooky Season Begins…
Let me be clear about my nuanced, data-based beliefs on horror films as a genre:
- They have an above-average hit rate in theaters (and have for the last few years).
- This is great!
- (In fact, compared to romcoms or comedies, horror is the best-performing mid-budget genre in theaters.)
- They also have much lower costs than most blockbusters, which can generate phenomenal return on investment for producers in success.
- That’s great too!
- Conversely, horror films have a much, much, much lower ceiling than most blockbuster superhero, sci-fi, or animated films.
- That’s not so great for theaters, obviously. They need “butts in seats” and ROI doesn’t necessarily put them there.
- Horror films do NOT have an above-average hit rate on streaming, and, in fact, it might be lower than other genres like action, YA, romcoms, or comedy.
Of course, I’m talking averages here. When I say something like “films released in theaters tend to do better on streaming”, the “on average” is implicit. If the statement were, “Every theatrical film outperforms every streaming film”, the conclusion would be so obvious we’d need no data analysis in the first place!
Same for horror films. If a few horror films do well on streaming, it doesn’t invalidate the point that, on average, the vast majority of horror films actually bomb on streaming.
I bring this up to prepare us for “spooky season”, when the streamers tend to release more horror (or horror-adjacent/scary) films for Halloween. This two-week period covers just the start of the season, since we’ll get horror films all month. And invariably, a few will break out of the pack. But don’t let one or two success stories distract you from the bigger, floppier picture.
And that’s the context this report provides, compared to much of the coverage. Over the last two weeks, the horror or horror-adjacent streaming films included…
- Salem’s Lot (2024) on Max
- The Platform 2 on Netflix
- House of Spoils on Prime Video
- Hold Your Breath on Hulu
- Caddo Lake on Max
- Mr. Crocket on Hulu
And a TV shows…
- Teacup on Peacock
Again, that’s over just two weeks, and if we looked back to the week of 23-Sep, we’d have even more. The point is—unsurprisingly—the streamers release a lot of original horror films around October. But how do these films do? Mostly, not great.
Let’s start with Max’s Salem’s Lot (a remake of past horror miniseries both based on a Stephen King novel), which came out on 3-Oct. It was originally supposed to go to theaters, and while Warner Bros has embraced theaters at times, they clearly didn’t think this one was up to snuff. In terms of Nielsen viewership, it actually did well for a Max film, getting 5.5 and 3.5 million hours. That compares well to other Max titles, though again, it doesn’t match the peaks of their top theatrical titles:
In contrast, The Platform 2, a sequel to Netflix’s Spanish-language original from 2019 that got a rare datecdote at the time (that it had 56 million customers watch 2 minutes or more), did less well, only getting 3.4 million hours on Nielsen and 3.5 million hours on Luminate. That’s pretty low. In this case, the foreign language (Spanish) likely turned off some viewers. I’d add, sub-par marketing doesn’t help. This is the description that’s on IMDb right now as I write this.
“A thrilling physical journey that allows an approach to the darkness, where it is scary to look. It appeals to the viewer’s civil responsibility and forces them to face the limits of their own solidarity.”
If a random customer went to IMDb, would this make them want to watch it?
After that, everything else is a candidate for “Miss of the Week”. Netflix’s $17 million Sundance acquisition sci-fi horror comedy, It’s What’s Inside, didn’t make the Nielsen charts in its first two weeks, and on Luminate, it garnered a paltry 2.6 million hours. Max’s sci-fi thriller/horror-adjacent, Caddo Lake did slightly better at 2.8 million hours on Luminate, but missed Nielsen. Hold Your Breath, which Hulu bought the rights for at a festival just two months ago, missed all the viewership charts. Prime Video’s House of Spoils, starring Ariana DeBose, also missed all the charts too, as did Hulu’s horror film Mr. Crocket. Teacup on Peacock missed the viewership charts too.
Even worse, some of these films missed the easier-to-make interest charts, like House of Spoils and Mr. Crocket. (To their credit, It’s What’s Inside, Caddo Lake, and Hold Your Breath made the Just Watch and Reelgood charts, and Teacup made Reelgood, Just Watch and TV Time, but that didn’t translate to viewership.)
To sum up, five horror streaming originals look to be misses, and the biggest hits are below average for streaming films. That’s not a great hit rate.
(What about IMDb? Eh, it’s complicated for horror films. Horror can have truly awful IMDb because many non-fans of the genre downvote it, so most of these films have below a 6 on IMDb, but I don’t hold that against them. In fact, It’s What’s Inside has a 6.6 on 25K IMDb reviews, so I’d call that a win! If I wanted to tilt the argument in my favor, I’d include IMDb scores, but that’s dishonest/bad analysis. )
Quick Notes on Film
- Sony’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die landed on Netflix on 8-Oct and promptly topped the Nielsen film charts, but didn’t really smash the ratings, though, only getting 13.7 million hours in its first six days. Again, that feels a bit low compared to other Netflix action films (Spenser Confidential opened to 23.7 million, The Gray Man opened to 24.0 million, and Extraction opened to 18.5 million), especially for as well as it did in theaters—$193 million in America and another $207 million overseas, on a $100 million budget. The wild card here may be that Sony films aren’t available on Netflix’s ad-supported tier, meaning, unlike Netflix originals, they may only reach 60-90% of Netflix customers potentially. In terms of reach, Bad Boys 4 made third place on the Samba TV charts.
- Joining Bad Boys 4 were films like Trouble, a Swedish crime/action comedy that missed the charts in its first week, Lonely Planet, another romance about a May-November relationship—like the 25th film this year in that vein?—starring Laura Dern and a Hemsworth, and a true crime documentary on the Menendez brothers. They had 3.4 million, 3.5 million, and 10.2 million hours, respectively. The Lonely Planet numbers are particularly low, coming last place in a generally weak week for film.
- Inside Out 2 is having a fairly precipitous drop off (after a top ten all-time opening), so it’s definitely not a “rewatchable” Disney animated title. (Encanto or Moana this is not…) Meanwhile, The Garfield Movie keeps making the charts for Netflix.
- The usual array of library titles (besides the horror ones mentioned above) made the various ratings or interest charts, including Joker (propelled by its sequel’s release), Escape Plan, The Mechanic, and Pixels. The crown goes to Sing, though, which showed back up on Netflix.
- As a reminder, Luminate’s film charts only tracks “originals”—meaning streaming first films—so a few more films will make these charts than make Nielsen, though they’re often on the very, very low end in terms of hours. This week featured a South Korean war film, Uprising, with 2.6 million hours, and Girl Haunts Boy, which is a Netflix streaming exclusive (but isn’t branded as an original) with 2.4 million hours. Tubi’s low budget/ultra-low budget Vicious Murder also made the carts at 1.4 million hours. Like some of the streaming original horror films above, those are very low numbers.
- Our “Dogs Not Barking” (my term for any show or film that doesn’t make any of the ratings charts that we track, find an explainer here) for the last two weeks include two documentaries—Hulu/ABC News’ documentary Patrice: The Movie and Apple TV+’s The Last of the Sea Women—three standup specials—Netflix’s Tim Dillon: This Is Your Country and Ali Wong: Single Lady. (Ali Wong!) plus Hulu’s Heather McMahan: Breadwinner—and two animated specials: The Bad Guys: Haunted Heist (for kids) and Velma: This Halloween Needs to Be More Special!
- I can confirm last week’s misses, including four straight-to-streaming films, Netflix’s Rez Ball (from LeBron James and Sterlin Harjo), Prime Video’s Killer Heat (starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley and Richard Madden), Paramount+ Apartment 7A (a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby), and Hulu’s She Taught Love.
Television – Starting Five Fails to Start
It would be hard to line up more star power than President Barack Obama, LeBron James, and Peyton Manning. If they made a TV show, with that kind of star power, how could it miss?
And yet…
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