(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.)
Oh man, it’s weeks like these where I just say to myself, there’s way, way too much to write about!
But I’m not complaining. Honestly, it’s a great problem to have. I hope you enjoyed part one of this week’s Streaming Ratings Report, which covered the viewership of three movies with a combined budget of nearly $600 million. In particular, I loved that datapoint on The Irishman; I probably need to write a mini-dive article on how well films do over holiday weekends.
Before I dive in, though, let me repeat one point: each week I review streaming viewership in America.
Repeat: in America.
Every so often, I read someone who asserts that this somewhat invalidates my analysis because I don’t look at global ratings, and I don’t think that’s a fair complaint. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t in one market—especially a huge, extremely lucrative market like America, with the world’s largest GDP and over 350 million people—still matters.
Frankly, we just don’t have the same quality of data to make the same calls in the rest of the world. Sure, I’d love to write up a UK/Europe/Rest of the world report (say monthly) at some point, using the scant data we do have, but I can’t do that unless I can build out a team. And I can’t build out my team until more people subscribe.
Onto the ratings. We’ve got a lot to look at, including Disney+’s Daredevil: Born Again, two new Hulu shows and Paradise’s season finale, two incredibly buzzy Netflix shows that missed the charts, whether Luka saved the NBA (he got close!), my favorite Samba TV datacut, HBO’s White Lotus, AMC’s Dark Winds, Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time, Reacher, and House of David’s debatable budget, Netflix’s Beauty in Black, Love is Blind’s latest strong run and 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 March 3rd to March 16th.)
MiniDive Television – Disney’s Daredevil: Born Again
If I listed off my favorite Marvel heroes, Daredevil would make my personal Mt. Rushmore, which is why it pains me a bit to say that I don’t think his latest show did well. (I try to divorce my personal feelings from the performance of a given show or movie.)
This isn’t to say Daredevil: Born Again did poorly, just it isn’t a clear cut hit, sort of like Beast Games for Prime Video. For example, Daredevil: Born Again missed the Nielsen charts entirely. In its defense, it is coming out weekly and is technically a “season one” (though it’s a spinoff of the previous Netflix series). But it came out on a Tuesday, so it should have had more chance to make the charts.
Daredevil: Born Again also missed Samba TV, but having fewer episodes shouldn’t hurt it on that chart, which measures unique households.
It did make Luminate, but on the low end, with weeks of 4.0 and 6.5 to start. That puts it a little above Agatha All Along, though that show did make it to six weeks on the charts. (As a reminder, Luminate started publishing top ten lists only last March, so we don’t have a lot of big Disney+ shows in the data set.)
On the plus side, Daredevil: Born Again made multiple interest charts, though I discount that somewhat because Marvel shows like this tend to do well on interest charts, often making them throughout their runs. On IMDb, it has a very high (8.5) rating on an okay number of reviews (34K) for a Marvel show.
Lastly, for data, we could use Disney+’s datecdote, which said the first episode drew 7.5 million views in its first five days on Disney+. That compares to 9 million in the first six days for Shōgun or 9.3 million for Agatha All Along in its first seven days.
Really, this show is still suffering from the cardinal sin (pun intended for the Catholic hero) that Marvel (notably not Marvel Studios/Kevin Feige, but Ike Perlmutter) made years and years ago: sending Daredevil to Netflix (in the mid-2010s) not the silver screen, like superheroes of his popularity are supposed to go.
Marvel Studios/Disney could use a grittier, non-cosmic, street level and, most importantly, cheaper superhero film right now. And Daredevil would have been perfect.
Quick Notes on TV
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