(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.)
Remember: as important as it is to look at ratings/viewership, it’s only half the analysis.
It’s not just that a film or show got good or great viewership; it’s how much it costs to make that film or show compared to get that viewership.
Yes, yes, in the steaming age, subscriber retention and acquisition (which both impact churn and hence subscriber totals) matter most. But as I’ve said before, total viewership by nearly any metric (hours, unique viewers, completion rate) is highly correlated to subscriber outcomes. If you know viewership, you know subscriber retention.
What we don’t know, as often, is budget totals. Unlike theatrically released films, streamers tend to hoard budget information. But sometimes the financials slip out. For example, we know that Netflix’s new sci-fi action flick, The Electric State, from the Russo brothers, starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobbie Brown cost $32 million to make.
What’s that? I missed a zero? Oh dear me.
Netflix paid $320 million to make The Electric State.
(I’ll toss in a “reportedly” here in case the numbers are wrong, but that’s the number that’s out there.)
That means it needs a lot of viewership to justify the price tag. Did it get there? Nope. In fact, it stands in stark contrast to Moana 2 and Kraven the Hunter, two films that came out in theaters in December. Both came to streaming the same week and cost a reported $150 and $110 million. One of those films bested The Electric State, and one’s viewership is remarkably close to it. Thus, in terms of budget, one film pretty clearly had the worst return on investment.
In part one of the week’s streaming ratings report, we’ll look at these three 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, 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 March 3rd to March 16th.)
Moana 2 Crushed It; The Electric State Not So Much
As the headline and subheader make clear, Moana 2 won the week in a landslide.
Let’s run through each film side-by-side, data source by data source, to see by how much.
Starting with Nielsen’s data—since we have the longest time frame, so we can draw the most apples-to-apples conclusions—Moana 2 opened to a whopping 33.3 million hours in five days, while The Electric State opened under 20 million hours, at 19.7 million hours after coming out on a Friday.
Moana 2 joined the “30 million hour club”, grabbing over 30 million hours in its first week on Nielsen; only twelve films have ever joined that exclusive grouping:
(Fun new fact alert! Look at the second film on that chart. It’s The Irishman, a film I’d never had data for. Looking for data on big budget Netflix films to compare to The Electric State, I asked Nielsen for The Irishman’s data, and they gave me its first two weeks of viewership. It had an utterly massive opening week, 45.0 million hours, though it came out over Thanksgiving weekend. Reminder: The Irishman reportedly cost $200 million. Back to the topic of the week!)
Obviously, The Electric State did not do that well. Here’s how it stacks up to some other expensive Netflix films from recent years:
That’s not great. Though it did beat Rebel Moon.
Again, I’m not asking for The Electric State to smash records—though it probably should have at its price tag—but it didn’t even accumulate 20 million hours viewed. 42 other films have opened to greater than 20 million hours in the streaming ratings era, but not The Electric State. It did best Kraven the Hunter, which only had 15.2 million hours in its first week, but that’s not as big a gap as you’d imagine.
Kraven is a Sony Pictures film, meaning it isn’t available to users on Netflix’s ad tier, which begs the question: would it have matched The Electric State had it been available to all Netflix subscribers? We just don’t know. By the way, if you want “views”—meaning viewership divided by runtime—Moana 2 extends its lead, 20 million views to The Electric States’ 9.2 million views and Kraven the Hunter’s 7.2 million.
Now, the biggest problem with Nielsen’s data is that they only provide total hours viewed, and that look can be biased towards kids films like Moana 2 with epic amounts of rewatching. Maybe that’s the gap between The Electric State and Moana 2.
Well, let’s turn to Samba TV, which measures unique households in their top ten list. And…
In fact, all three of these films look remarkably similar, don’t they? They’re on the same slide, each separated by one spot in the Samba TV rankings, implying yes, remarkably similar unique viewers, but yes, kids rewatched Moana 2 a ton.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get Samba TV “datecdotes” for all these films, just The Electric State. Samba TV did tell us that Moana 2 saw a bump of 620% from PVOD to streaming, but that’s a fairly expected result when you go from “pay $20” to “free” for most customers. Anyways, The Electric State had 1.6 million households watch it in its first three days, which compares poorly to top Netflix films in the same time frame, like Red Notice (4.2 million) The Mother (2.8 million) or Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2.6 million).
Normally, I’d add in Luminate’s data, but they only publish streaming ratings for straight-to-streaming films, so Moana 2 and Kraven the Hunter aren’t eligible. On those charts, The Electric State peaked at 18.2 million hours in its first week, then dropped off a cliff to 5.4 and 2.7 million hours, not great numbers. In comparison, The Union peaked at 28.3 million hours, Rebel Ridge at 25.0 million, Back in Action at 35.0 million, and Carry-On a whopping 43.3 million.
In classic Disney PR fashion, they released a datecdote that Moana 2 nabbed 27.3 million views in five days. Normally, I put up this Disney table for all their film datecotes…
…but I decided to “visualize” the chart:
So Moana 2 is just behind Inside Out 2, and just ahead of Elemental.
As for The Electric State, it nabbed 48 million views in its first 10 days on the Netflix global charts, which is about half of other successful films.
Interest Charts
If we looked at interest charts—which measure customer interest, not actual viewership—Moana 2 mostly wins. On IMDb, Moana 2 leads the pack with a 6.6 on 98K reviews, which is actually really good for an animated film. (Some kids titles get crushed on IMDb if they skew young.) The Electric State dropped below a 6.0 to a 5.9 on 56K reviews, which is poor, though not as poor as Kraven’s 5.5 on 52K reviews. So based on that, Moana 2 still wins.
On other interest charts, all three films underwhelmed. Kraven the Hunter and The Electric State are still on the Reelgood charts, but they fell off JustWatch after one week and two weeks respectively. Moana 2 lasted for two weeks on Reelgood and one week on JustWatch. Moana 2 was below the other two films in interest though, but I’m guessing families knew where this family film was streaming.
One More Thing…
So if we stopped here, just looking at streaming performance, Moana 2 still pretty handily beat The Electric State. Again, for half the budget. For one-third the budget, Kraven the Hunter was a big miss, but also pretty close to The Electric State in terms of viewership.
Of course, you knew I had one more data point that I held until the end. And that’s the most lucrative data point of them all, theatrical box office. Moana 2 finished with over a billion dollars globally, including $460 million in America. Kraven the Hunter did much worse, only getting $60 million globally, so it didn’t earn its budget back. (It only had $25 million in America.)
That last point really brings it all home. At least those films earned some box office, whereas The Electric State had none. Plus, both Moana 2 and Kraven the Hunter had some amount of home video purchases, that again, The Electric State didn’t.
Whenever I compare straight-to-streaming films to theatrical titles, I do want to add the huge caveat that we’re dealing with small sample sizes. Even if a straight-to-streaming film or a theatrical film “wins” a given showdown, it doesn’t prove which release style is right.
But it does prove to me that theatrical films do have a revenue and profit upside that streaming by itself just can’t match.
I’d add, Disney has been slowly increasing the length of their windows, waiting a solid three months for Moana 2. After Cinemacon last week and the slow start to the 2025 box office season, everyone’s talking about “windowing” seemingly. This Moana 2 performance should provide Disney more data that it had an “I’ll wait for streaming” problem, and it needs to retrain its customers to go back to theaters.
