(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.)
Yesterday was Veterans’ Day, which meant…my kids were home from school! Again!
First, man, this was something like LAUSD’s fifth or sixth day off of school, and we’re just two and a half months into the school year. Seriously, the first six weeks of the school year had something like four days off. At least three were not national holidays either. As someone who is essentially self-employed, it can be incredibly difficult to weather these days, especially since both members of my team have partners who have to go into an office. It puts a ton of pressure on my team to keep the articles coming out.
I can only imagine how parents/families that work hourly jobs handle these disruptions!
Anyway, what should I do with the kids today? How about a trip to the movies? Let me head over to my movie app, since I have a monthly pass, and there’s…nothing.
Absolutely nothing. Not even a re-release of anything.
Listen, I get that Wicked For Good and Zootopia 2 are coming later this month, but this gap in the calendar is awful. As I’ve written before, kids movies have a better hit rate and total revenue than horror films. (But not better ROI, remember the five factors…) So more kids films should be going to theaters! Help me out, Hollywood!
Okay, on to this week’s topics, including Netflix’s Monster franchise trying to keep the momentum going, the return of streaming’s biggest reality show, a ton of new shows and films coming to CrunchyRoll, a reigning champion returning as the “miss of the week” winner, JustWatch’s quarterly interest charts, the NFL regaining its stride on Prime Video, a star-studded Netflix show underwhelming, all the TV show flops, bombs, and misses, and a whole lot 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, 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 – Update: Vicious is a “Miss of the Week”
Just a quick update to yesterday’s article. In the Luminate film charts section, I wrote that Paramount+’s horror film, Vicious, was an “exclusive”, but my editor/researcher checked, and it’s actually a Paramount+ Original, which was released day-and-date on Paramount+ and TVOD. Interesting! I’m not sure if/when we’ve ever seen that before. But…with just 1.5 million according to Luminate, I’d say that this is probably a “Miss of the Week” winner alongside Maintenance Required.
Even worse, its IMDb score is at a 4.9! On 7.1K votes! I wrote yesterday that anything below a six is “disliked”. Below a five is “hated”.
Television – Chad Powers and the Over-Inflated Valuations of Sports Production Companies
I try to not judge TV shows and movies by how much marketing I see for a given property. My personal experience isn’t representative of the rest of the country, especially different demographics, so it’s tough for me to say that a given show or film is “being pushed” by any studio, channel or streamer.
That said, I sure felt like I saw a lot of advertising for Hulu’s Chad Powers!
For those who don’t know, Chad Powers is the new six-episode, half-hour, Glen Powell-starring Hulu Original. It’s about football—a former college football quarterback comes back in a disguise, or something—and stars one of the bigger young stars today. (Powell also stars in The Running Man film coming out this weekend.)
Oh, and since this show is about sports, guess who’s involved?
That’s right, Peyton Manning’s production company, Omaha Productions. Over the past few years, I’ve been calling out some over-inflated production company valuations, but I haven’t really called out Omaha Productions yet. Maybe I’m biased. In the “Manning versus Brady Talking Head Wars” of the 2000s, I always took his side, and I think he’s hilarious.
But when it comes to over-hyped production companies, well, Omaha Productions can join the non-esteemed ranks of Hello Sunshine and the Springhill Company; their numbers may make even less sense than either company. In just March of this year, the sports production company—“according to sources”—was valued at…$750 million.
(One quick point on these production company valuations. Some folks have told me—including folks who would know, as in they’ve read/negotiated the actual contracts—that a lot of the media valuations repeated by reporters are, frankly, BS. The contracts have terms in them—such as early pay outs, revenue shares, guaranteed returns, et cetera—that mean the “valuation” is basically fictional. I trust these sources, and I think that’s what’s going on. Thus, and this is key, that means that a huge amount of headlines we read in the financial/entertainment press are basically—either wittingly or not—false. That’s a shame.)
So let’s run some numbers on Omaha Productions, Chad Powers, and whether this makes sense…
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