(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.)
Like last issue, I’m going to dive right into this week’s Streaming Ratings Report without any wry asides. (I’ve been saving some up…) Honestly, I’d have rather put the SRR on pause for a week due to the wildfires—since I’m based in Los Angeles like many of my readers—but I already had to delay the report over the holiday break (like I do every year) so I don’t really have the space on the calendar to delay them any longer. Luckily, after an absolutely jam-packed double issue today, we’ll be (mostly) back on track.
And bear with me, since we’re missing some data from quite a few data sources. On the plus side, nothing stopped Nielsen or Samba TV from putting out their ratings, week-in and week-out, all holidays. Good job, Nielsen and Samba TV! But I’m missing some other data, including a week from Reelgood, three weeks from Luminate, three weeks from JustWatch, and one week from TV Time. Some of this is on my team (we missed a week due to a mid-December trip during the holidays), but most of it is missing data. I’ve reached out to the companies to try to get the missing data.
(If any PR reps from these companies want to send me the data, please do!!!)
There’s a ton of stuff to go over this week. We’re talking five straight-to-streaming Christmas movies and whether they should have gone to theaters, Thanksgiving Day football, some horror films coming out in December, Paramount+ continuing its great run, Black Doves and The Madness on Netflix, Apple TV+’s surprising hit film, Fly Me to the Moon (sarcasm), a live show’s gigantic ratings, and a whole lot more.
Let’s dive right 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 November 25th to December 8th.)
Film – Did Santa Bring Christmas Gifts or Coal to These Holiday Films?
The streamers start releasing their Christmas films in November, then, the weekend of Thanksgiving, the trickle becomes a deluge. This year, five straight-to-streaming films from three different streamers came out over this two-week period, with some successes, one “that movie did fine”, and two misses.
Starting with the successes, I gotta give some props to Dear Santa on Paramount+. (Nielsen mistakenly had this as Peacock initially.) Starring Jack Black and made by a Farrelly Brother, this family comedy got 9.1 million hours, which is a terrific film debut for Paramount+, though it did come out on a Monday giving it a full seven days to accumulate viewership. It also only lasted one week on the charts.
Adding it all up, I would call this a success for Paramount+, but not a chart smasher.
The other success is Our Little Secret from Netflix, a Lindsay Lohan holiday romcom. Assuming this movie was cheap—and it should be—it did really well, getting 17.4 million hours in its first week, and 10.1 million in its second. Samba TV had it at 2 million households in the first five days, good for a Netflix film. Netflix has released one of these romcoms per week since November started, and they’ve mostly done well, but Our Little Secret has done the best of the bunch:
I’d put Netflix’s latest animated endeavor, That Christmas, in the “meh” category. It involves Santa and a small town and…I couldn’t tell much more about the plot from either its homepage on Netflix or IMDb. Coming out on 4-Dec, we know it makes the charts for two weeks on Nielsen at least at 9.2 million and 9.9 million hours.
But…that puts it actually in rare territory for Netflix: “a hit for them”. I wouldn’t call this a hit compared to animated films put out by other studios. But it’s actually one of Netflix’s best animated film openings:
The other two straight-to-streaming films feel like misses. Netflix’s Mary barely made the Nielsen charts and missed the Luminate charts this week, but makes it the week of 13-Dec (though under 4 million hours). It did make the Samba TV charts for one week as well. Frankly, this one was probably a miss. Interestingly, it only has a 27 on Metacritic, off of just six reviews, and a 5.2 on IMDb with under 10K reviews.
The pretty clear miss is Nutcrackers on Hulu. Starring Ben Stiller and directed by David Gordon Green, this one didn’t resonate with viewers (a lowly 5.5 on IMDb) or critics (54 on Metacritic), and the plot (about four kids whose mom dies) seems like a bummer for a Christmas film, but it eked out 5.0 million hours viewed according to Luminate which is just over my cutoff for an outright miss on Luminate. It also missed the Nielsen charts. Now, it’s on Hulu, which is at a size disadvantage compared to Netflix, but it also got purchased by Hulu for “eight figures” at TIFF. This just doesn’t seem like enough hours to justify that purchase.
So…Straight-to-Streaming or Not?
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