(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.)
While this report usually focuses on streaming originals, in January, a bunch of shows headed to Netflix from other streamers, like HBO Max, Peacock or Hulu. (See the TV section below.)
Thus, I have a reporting question I’d like to hear from the audience on. If you’re a writer, actor, director, or below-the-line worker who worked on a Warner Bros. show, either a streaming show that was on Hulu (like 11.22.63, Castle Rock or the Veronica Mars reboot) or a TNT show (like The Closer, Rizzoli & Isles or Southland) that just made its way to Netflix, did you get a boost in your residual/participation checks? I’d love to know. Shoot me an email.
The big topic this week is Netflix’s big new action/mystery film, The Rip, then I’m covering the deluge of Warner Bros.’s (Discovery?) TV shows making their way to Netflix, what this means, strategically, for the streaming wars, and why the traditional studios may be committing the same strategic mistake of the 2010s.
All that, plus the return of Hijack, one of Apple TV’s biggest shows all time, a recently-cancelled Hulu show…which just made the charts, a new Agatha Christie mystery on Netflix, the final season of Netflix’s The Upshaws, Landman’s S-tier run, some excellent analysis from Jen Topping on YouTube viewing, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
We’ve got a lot to get to, so let’s dive right in!
(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 January 12th to January 18th, 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Film – The Rip Rips The Ratings…But Leaves Me Wanting More
Of the celebrity production companies I’ve targeted my exacting eye towards—Omaha Productions, The Springhill Company, Hello Sunshine, Higher Ground, all the other athlete production companies—Artists Equity has so far evaded my gaze. For those who don’t know, that’s the company founded by Jason Bourne and Bruce Wayne, Will Hunting and Chuckie, er, Matt Damon (CCO) and Ben Affleck (CEO).
Honestly, I applaud their restraint in not splashing the trades with some buzzy (and likely untrue) valuation number that would have “valued” their company well above what they could actually sell it for now.
(Side note: it amuses me how articles describing CandleMedia’s struggles seem to treat the production-company-content bubble as something they didn’t help create. As if they had unwittingly invested at the top of a streaming content bubble, not that their aggressive bidding and buying helped inflate said bubble. I expect something similar to happen when/if the AI bubble pops. Something like, “It’s not their fault they invested at the height of the market,” when all the cash sloshing around is what helped inflate said bubble.)
Anyways, here’s Artists Equity’s output to date. I’d say they have an average hit rate and probably a bit of a spending problem on their big projects:
I’d say seven films were misses (or worse, “MIA” as most folks haven’t even heard of them), as I doubt anyone could tell us much about films like Kiss The Future and Small Things Like These. Air and The Instigators were both fine (at best), but probably below that and didn’t earn their money back for their distributors. (But Artists Equity likely earned their production budgets back as part of their distribution deals.) The Accountant 2—the one piece of Type 1 IP, meaning sequel—is the lone hit, a solid performer for Prime Video last year.
In other words, Artists Equity could really use another splashy hit. Did they get one with their latest sale to Netflix, The Rip, starring Damon and Affleck?
Sure, it’s a hit. But is it a splashy, standout success? Probably not.
On Nielsen, it had 23.2 million hours in its first week, and 23.0 million in its second, so it didn’t really have a “binge release curve” bump. That 46 or so million hours is good for sixth place since Dec-2024, which is definitely top 15% of films released in that time period. Overall, it ranks 16th among the 464 first-run movies to ever make the Nielsen charts going back to 2020, so again top 5%.
The Luminate numbers were strong, and it had the third biggest opening week going back to May of 2024 at 40.1 million hours. (As a reminder, my Luminate data only extends to May-2024, whereas their data set goes back further in time for paying subscribers.)
And the film topped the Samba TV charts, displacing Landman for a week:
Samba TV also had a datecdote that 9.5% of households watched in the first four days, but that’s a new metric for them, so we don’t have much context for what this actually means. If they use it going forward, we’ll have to build a new dataset using this metric.
Lastly, the IMDb scores aren’t terrible! A 6.8 on over 100K reviews! For Netflix, that’s good! (Especially considering some of the notes they said they were given.)
So why do I feel so underwhelmed? Let down? Disappointed? I get that not every new streaming film will smash records, and with four to five years of data, it’s harder than ever to set all time records. But we’ve seen some films do terrifically well on their opening weekends—Wonder Woman 1984 wayyyyy back during Covid (37.5 million hours), but even Hocus Pocus 2 (45.4 million) or Happy Gilmore 2 (48.2 million)—and a film with this creative team should have aspired for those heights.
Those are all sequels, but Leave the World Behind (32 million opening) and Carry-On (28.2 million) both did better than The Rip. You could say that many of these films had December openings, so they had a better situation, but then I’d argue that Netflix probably should have put this one out in early December. Heck, Back in Action—can you remind me who was in that one?—did 2 million more hours than The Rip, and it came out last January.
Listen, for Artists Equity, the production check and producing fees likely helped keep the lights on for 2026, so this is a win for them at a $100 million production budget. But given the talent attached and the platform involved, I’m still a little disappointed by this number.
(And yes, it should have likely gone to theaters, but I’ve covered that topic ad nauseam.)
Quick Notes on Film
- Paramount+’s disappointing theatrical pic The Running Man (it only made $68 million globally) arrived on streaming on 13-Jan, and made the Nielsen charts, but on the low end at 6.3 million hours. On the one hand, for Paramount+ (and it was on MGM+, but that’s not tracked on Nielsen’s streaming charts), that’s not terrible, landing in the middle of the Paramount+ films’ performance. On the other hand, anything under 10 million hours isn’t great.
- Zootopia continues to make the Nielsen film charts, seeing a bump due to the sequel having a terrific run in theaters. Hulu’s Prey also made the Luminate charts, likely due to its sequel getting ready to arrive on streaming. Lastly, Suitcase Killer: The Melanie McGuire Story was a Lifetime film on Hulu, and it just arrived non-exclusively on Netflix. It made the Nielsen and Samba TV charts.
- One Battle After Another made the streaming film charts for a third week, making it a genuine “hit for HBO Max” since it’s still on the charts five weeks after its debut. It likely would have made the top ten in December, but for the Christmas film dominating the charts. KPop Demon Hunters had 4.9 million hours this week, so that’s still a beast, while People We Meet on Vacation only bumped to 10.3 million hours in its second week. Meanwhile, Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story fell off the Samba TV charts. The Samba TV charts have been fairly brutal to any non-Netflix films, as only one—The Grinch—made the top ten in the last five weeks. (See above.)
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