(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.)
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Okay, back to this week’s Streaming Ratings Report. Compiling the topics for this week’s double issue, I realized that I had two huge topics, and didn’t want to bury one of them behind my paywall, so I’ve split this week’s issue into two parts. Tomorrow, I’ll look at TV, including what the big miss of the week—Hulu’s Chad Powers—implies about Omaha Production’s crazy valuation. Today, we’ll look at films, including whether The Naked Gun, How to Train Your Dragon and Karate Kid: Legends became hits on streaming, another check-in on Encanto vs KPop in America, whether Prime Video has a hit in their John Candy documentary, Apple TV+’s rare film to make the film charts, all the horror flicks that came to streaming, an update on the “default” streamer, the flops, bombs and misses for the week, and a whole lot more.
But we start by shining a light on one giant explanation for October’s crappy box office: straight-to-streaming 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, 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 Sept 29th to Oct 11th.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Film – Straight-to-Streaming Films Try To Win the Streaming Charts
Recently, a lot of analysts covering the U.S. box office noted that, yeah, US theaters had the “worst October” since the 1990s. This was partially driven by a lack of hit films. Over the course of the 2010s, the month of October proved it, too, could launch blockbuster films as well (Joker, Venom, Gravity, The Martian, A Star is Born), partially because blockbusters can happen year-round nowadays. Or at least, year-round as of the late 2010s.
Scott Mendelson, in a take I really liked, noted that three big films missing from October shoulder a lot of the blame:
- Biopic Michael was delayed to next year.
- Action film Mortal Kombat 2 was delayed too.
- Horror flick Saw XI was killed.
Add those films to this year’s October, and it would look a little to a lot better. Fair enough! But those aren’t the only films that were missing…
As I often like to remind folks, streaming still exists, so consider these five straight-to-streaming (STS) films, all from the “tech” streamers:
- Prime Video’s Play Dirty: a heist film from Shane Black, Mark Wahlberg, and LaKeith Stanfield.
- Netflix’s The Woman in Cabin 10: a thriller on a luxury yacht starring Kiera Knightley and Guy Pearce.
- Apple TV+’s The Lost Bus: a survival thriller starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera from Blumhouse.
- Prime Video’s Maintenance Required: a lower-ish budget romcom starring Madelaine Petsch.
- Netflix’s Steve: a prestige drama starring Cillian Murphy.
That’s a lot of inventory to skip theaters. Worse, this trend continues all month. And yeah, it’s my pet peeve that folks love calling out the traditional Hollywood studios over who knows how many issues, but don’t have the same opprobrium for Big Tech (and Netflix), the producer/studios actually withholding crucial supply from cineplexes.
The worst part? None of the films “wowed” on streaming either. Of course, this argument actually goes both ways: were the films sent to a straight-to-streaming death on purpose (they weren’t very good) or does streaming just not work as a launch pad for most films? That’s not a question data can easily answer, so let’s go through each film, in order of best performance to worst.
Prime Video’s Play Dirty had the biggest cast, and it’s a heist film—meaning a popular “genre”—so on paper, it should have performed best. It did lead the pack of straight-to-streaming films, but I’m guessing Prime Video execs didn’t love this performance, since it only opened to 13.1 million and 6.3 million hours according to Nielsen. Worse, it only has 5.9 on IMDb; anything under a 6.5 is below average, and below a six is actively disliked. It made Samba TV for two weeks, but yeah, still not great. Here’s how it stacks up this year so far:
Interestingly, you can see that the theatrical flicks really have bested the straight-to-streaming films over the last two years; the biggest hits on Prime Video since December of 2025 went to theaters first. The big viewership numbers that streaming films put up during the Covid Caveat years (2020 and 2021) seem to have ebbed:
Moving on, nothing slows down Netflix’s barrage of straight-to-streaming films, but their latest thriller, The Woman in Cabin 10, didn’t break 10 million hours in its opening weekend, according to Nielsen. That said, it may have a bigger second week, as it got up to ninth place on the Samba TV charts, and that analytics company said 2 million households watched in four days, a good number for Netflix. Still, it’s not a hit.
It did have a lot of IMDb reviews, but it also had a horrid 5.8 on IMDb on 46K reviews. Not great!
So far not so good, but the slight bright spot is that Apple TV+ had a film (The Lost Bus) make the Nielsen charts. Again, it’s pretty rare for an Apple TV+ film to make the Nielsen charts, so even a very low number (in this case, 3.5 million hours) counts as a “hit for them”. It did get over 8 million hours on Luminate, so again “not a miss”.
And of the films in this section, it has the best IMDb reviews, a 6.9 on 32K reviews. So not a hit, but not a miss either…for Apple.
That leaves our two disappointments, both “misses of the week”. (For my free subscribers, I usually call out my misses of the week below the paywall, but I moved these two up here to better fit the narrative.) Both Maintenance Required and Steve missed the Nielsen and Samba TV charts, and only made Luminate, but on the very low end, 1.5 million and 0.9 million, respectively. Maintenance Required looks small—close enough to “TV movie” budget, hopefully—but Netflix’s Steve is a prestige award hopeful, and Netflix’s awards contenders almost never get great viewership.
Listen, I doubt the last two films on this list would have “saved” October. But any of the first three had a chance, especially The Lost Bus. But October is packed with films that might have done well in theaters, like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Twits (kids films often break even in theaters), A House of Dynamite (people seem to like it and it did get a limited release in theaters), and more, not to mention Frankenstein could have been a perfect Halloween film.
I just wish that this was a conversation I read and heard more often.
This isn’t, by the way, just about me “loving” theaters, though I do love theaters, and I’m definitely in that rare group of moviegoers who goes to the movies almost monthly. But besides “the art” and love of it all, from any business rationale, these films need to go to theaters to justify their budgets. This isn’t an emotional plea to put films in theaters; it’s the rational look at the data.
Quick Notes on Film
We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out…
- …an update on the new films coming to each streamer and which streamer is dominating these charts….
- …how The Naked Gun, How to Train Your Dragon, and Karate Kids: Legends did on streaming…
- …what streamer users click on first…
- …whether KPop bested Encanto through 17 weeks…
- …all the flops, bombs and misses for the week
- And a lot more…
…please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
