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What if I told you one of the biggest box office flops of 2024 was the biggest streaming film of the year?
I predict that most people in Hollywood don’t know what that film is, especially if you just read the headlines in the trades. Even I figured that another film won the year, and I track streaming ratings week-in, week-out. (My readers might be able to guess what that hit film is…)
Today, I’m continuing my recap of 2024, but instead of flops and bombs, we’re looking at the winners, the films that topped the box office and the streaming charts. (Celebrating the hits is a lot more fun than excoriating the misses.) And like I did last year, I’m using every data source I can, including…
- Nielsen’s annual and weekly top ten lists
- Samba TV’s weekly top ten lists
- Luminate’s annual and weekly top ten lists
- JustWatch’s year-end list
- IMDb’s end-of-year rankings
If a data set didn’t make the list, it’s because I couldn’t find its year-end recap, even after searching for it. (There seemed to be fewer recaps in 2024 than 2023, and I’m not sure what to make of that.) Reminder: my focus is on the US.
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The Top 25 Films At the US Box Office
We’re starting with US box office, like I did last year, since theaters still drive the most value in the theatrical value chain. To put that in plain speak, they make the most money!
Although most everyone is (rightfully) talking about Disney’s lackluster start to 2025 (and it is lackluster), they had an excellent 2025, with three of the top five films and four of the top nine. Universal Studios wasn’t too far behind them with three of the top eight, while Warner Bros. had three of the top eleven films.
Here’s that look by “genre”:
Obviously, I’ve been banging on the “animated films” drum for a while now, and animated films did very, very well again in 2024. (Hold on to this thought for when we get to streaming ratings…) But fantasy and sci-fi films also did very well, with three of the top seven spots and five of the top fifteen. (Of the classfiications this year, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice gave me the most trouble. Fantasy? Yes. Horror? Kinda. Funny? Sure. So it’s firmly the toughest film to fit into one genre label this year.)
As I wrote for the Ankler, if I ran a studio, I’d be mining the fantasy and sci-fi IP wells for future franchises. Speaking of franchises…
IP, sequels and reboots dominate at the box office, making up 22 of the top 25 films at the US box office. This year, I classified a few titles as “Type 3” IP, meaning they’re based on popular IP, but not simply a reboot or sequel, like It Ends With US.
To address all of the people who hate sequels and reboots…I agree with you! Hollywood can’t survive on reboots and sequels alone; they need to replenish the franchise well, like Universal has done over the last two years with The Super Mario Bros. Movie and now Wicked. This is something Disney is starting to learn. (Like animation, the IP-to-original ratio shifts on streaming…)
One final note on genres. The actual most popular “genre” isn’t really a genre, but a style: exciting. People go to the movies to see spectacle, which often means action or exciting set pieces…
…18 of the top 25 films have a lot of action set pieces. (Even Wicked ends with one, and I classified a horror film, Nosferatu, as not action, but one could argue it too has exciting set pieces.)
Nielsen’s Annual Streaming Recaps
Nielsen has the longest track record for streaming ratings in the industry (going back to 2020), so we can draw the most robust long-term trends from their data. Each year, I use two different datasets from them, their annual rankings and weekly.
Let’s start with their big annual list, rebranded as the “Artey’s” this year. Here are the winners this year, color-coded by streamer:
Looking at this chart, animated films are the big winner, making up nine of the top ten films. And the tenth biggest film was about Santa Claus! (To be fair, Red One is a PG-13 action film.) Of course, this has been a trend for the past few years looking at Nielsen’s annual charts by year:
Here are all those films separated by “kids” versus “films for adults”:
As in past years, Moana is the big winner, winning both this year and last year, along with taking second place in two other years.
I have one other takeaway, a true “Dog Not Barking” if you will. In this case, the Dog Not Barking is an entire genre: straight-to-streaming kids films. Seriously, in the five years of this list, there are only two Netflix straight-to-streaming kids films on the charts: The Mitchells vs. the Machines and We Can Be Heroes. And one of those came to Netflix from Sony during the pandemic. That’s not a great hit rate.
Nielsen’s Weekly Film Charts Winners
As I mention each year, Nielsen’s total hour look definitely has a kids films bias, because little kids love watching and rewatching the same movies over and over and over again. (The same thing happens with Luminate, which you’ll see shortly.) So let’s move on to the winners according to Nielsen’s weekly top ten lists, which show how films “for adults” fared.
I’ve been collecting the viewership data on the streaming titles going back to 2020. Given that the bulk of a film’s viewership (when it’s new to a streamer) comes in the first four to eight weeks—not a single film made the Nielsen top ten list for more than seven weeks in 2024—Nielsen weekly charts make a nice complement to their annual summary.
In 2024, Overall, 146 movies made the Nielsen Top Ten in First Run, Early, Pay 1, Pay 1b, and Pay 2 windows.
(Let’s define those “theatrical windows”. A “first run” film comes to streaming first, without a theatrical run (or a very limited run). Same goes for streaming films that get limited theatrical releases with no publicly-reported box office; I count those as “First Run”. A “Pay 1” film goes to theaters, then comes to streaming between 45 days to a year later. If a film switches streamers, we call that a “Pay 1b” window, and we see that with major studios sending films to Netflix or Prime Video. Lastly, some films come to streaming before 45 days, and I call those “early”. I usually lump these in with “Pay 1” titles since it’s usually just a matter of timing.)
Here are the results, looking at films in their first four weeks of viewership:
The surprise result I mentioned in the intro?
Red One bested Carry-on!!!!
How many people knew that Red One, which was widely panned as a flop, if not an outright bomb, was the big winner of the year? Yet everyone touted Carry-on as a huge streaming hit at the same time, so this seeming contradiction got lost in the narrative shuffle. Note: Red One is one of two “early” films in my data set, meaning films that came out shortly after their theatrical run on streaming.
The reason “early” releases have likely fallen from favor is that now most streaming films get at least a modest run on VOD/PVOD/EST/TVOD to make extra, high-margin revenue. Fun fact: The other “early” release in 2024 was The First Omen.
Looking at this chart, Road House didn’t do as well as I remembered, making you wonder if it could have gotten a Red One-sized bump it would have gotten if it had gone to theaters first.
Ah, yes, I see a hand up in the audience. What about views counts? Don’t worry I checked: Red One bests Carry-on on both viewership and views in the US.
Otherwise, Netflix—with their size—continues to dominate streaming viewership. Here are the top films each week on the Nielsen Top Ten:
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