(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.)
Today’s article is free for all to read. If you’d like to cross-post it to your newsletter, feel free!)
I like to think I provide a service to my readers by relentlessly focusing on context. Sure, any given film or show might capture the public imagination, but after the interest dust settles, rarely do other news websites look back and ask, “How popular was said thing?”
I try to fill in that gap.
The streaming film of the year was, without a doubt, KPop Demon Hunters. Netflix’s surprise hit (from Sony Animation) dominated news coverage over the summer as much as “six/seven” dominated young kids’ vocabulary. (At around the same time.) Heck, even I just suggested that it deserves a Best Picture nomination!
Yet most folks still probably can’t answer the simple question, “How does KPop Demon Hunters stack up to past streaming films?” Partially, that’s because few websites hoard the viewership data as I do. And even fewer actually ask the historical ranking question.
So today, I want to put KPop Demon Hunters into its proper context. Mainly, I want to answer the question I’ve been asking for months now:
Did KPop Demon Hunters dethrone Encanto to become the most popular streaming film of all time?
To be clear, this isn’t some weird, esoteric request; it happens with box office data every year! (If not every week…) Everyone knows what films grossed the most at the box office, from Jurassic Park to Titanic to Avatar to Avengers: Endgame. Just this week, Inside Out 2 became the highest grossing animated film of all time. (Yeah, rhetorical shade thrown at a certain country whose box office totals are as realistic as their GDP growth numbers.)
Why write about this now? Just look at the Nielsen top ten film charts for the weeks of 8-Dec and 15-Dec, the two weeks I’m covering in my next Streaming Ratings Report:
That’s right! After a whopping 29 straight weeks, KPop has finally fallen off the streaming top ten charts. (Though it may return, more on that later.) Listen, KPop is still a mega-mega-hit and nothing’s going to change that. But if you want to see how it stacks up to the biggest films on streaming of all time, how close it came to Encanto, what other animated film is actually the second biggest in the streaming ratings era, what film surprisingly comes in fifth, and a whole lot more, keep reading.
This article is free for all to read, so feel free to share it widely if you’d like.
Encanto Remains Streaming’s Biggest Film in America (According to Nielsen)
For this data dive, I’m just using Nielsen’s weekly top ten list data, since they’ve put out streaming viewership charts since 2020 and full film top ten charts since the start of 2021.
Let’s not bury the lede: after falling off the charts, KPop Demon Hunters did NOT end up passing Encanto on the streaming charts. Here’s the key chart, the cumulative viewership of each film by week:
Listen, this was a close battle; KPop Demon Hunters ended up only 31.6 million hours lower than Encanto through thirty weeks, yet it still didn’t end up passing Encanto through these first six months. And given that KPop’s viewership has kept declining, I’m confident in saying that it likely won’t make up the gap.
Interestingly, two “library” titles—meaning they came out more than two years before they arrived on streaming—also made the top five biggest streaming films of all time:
Big congratulations to Moana and Home Alone for showing up in the top five, something that surprised me after I pulled the data. I doubt many folks had Home Alone on their “most popular streaming film of all time” bingo card. Moana is a bit less surprising, since it regularly tops Nielsen’s annual viewership charts.
Yes, yes, the caveat for all these rankings is the “films for adults” versus “films for kids” discussion. Specifically, kids films have more rewatchability, so they tend to perform better. But, hey, I’m here to hand out accolades, and when it comes to total viewership, these films are in a class of their own.
Speaking of Home Alone, Christmas films do surprisingly well among the top films of all time. Here’s the top films of all time on the Nielsen weekly chart, by “type” of film: Holidays, kids or live-action.
Looking at just kids films, you can see that Encanto and KPop Demon Hunters had longevity that few other kids films match. Simply incredible. Here are the top films by weeks in the Nielsen top ten, not total hours:
Overall, I think two things are true about KPop Demon Hunters, and its rival Encanto. First, KPop was an utter smash, and Netflix (and Sony) have a legit franchise to build on now. Yet, given the streaming numbers and Disney’s box office totals for Inside Out 2 and Zootopia 2, the last two years, Disney is still the king of kids content.
Caveats and Other Thoughts
You know what else I think separates me from my competition? A willingness to question my own data conclusions. The data world is complicated and messy, not simple and neat.
So even running a quick analysis like this left me with some other thoughts….
- First, we don’t know which film did better globally. Probably KPop Demon Hunters due to Netflix’s larger global footprint, but I can’t prove it. I can reliably say this is Netflix’s biggest film globally through whatever week it’s on, but that’s it.
- Second, yes, KPop Demon Hunters could show back up on the top ten charts in a few weeks. In fact, I expect it too. It got bumped due to the rise of Christmas films during December. Of course, Encanto also showed back up after it fell off the charts. If, at some point, KPop passes Encanto on the weekly charts, I’ll update this analysis!
- Third, Nielsen also publishes annual top ten lists, and KPop Demon Hunters will struggle to best Encanto this year, simply because the former only had six months of data and the latter had a full-year.
- Fourth, Samba TV only started putting out top ten lists on 31-May-2023, well after Encanto hit streaming (in December of 2022). According to their top ten data, KPop is the biggest film since June-2023.
- Fifth, Luminate only started putting out data in May of 2024, so an even smaller sample size, and they don’t analyze theatrical films. (That’s why I focused on Nielsen for this analysis.) Again, KPop is the biggest film in their charts by far.
- Last, yeah, I mean, Netflix, send KPop’s sequel to theaters with a 90-day window, and maybe you, too, can make a billion dollars from an animated film. Or don’t. You do you, Netflix.
