(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.)
One of the TV shows I discuss below really illustrates what elites (mostly-higher income, mostly-college educated) like to watch and discuss versus what ordinary Americans like to watch. The show is pretty popular (even though it’s coming to an end after this season) but almost no one writes think pieces about it.
Now, normally when people write paragraphs like that, it’s code for “rural” or “conservative”, but trust me, that’s not the case with the show I’m talking about.
But first, we’ll discuss the Oscars. This report covers the week of 16-Mar, and since the Oscars aired/streamed on 15-Mar, this is the week after the big night. We’ll also look at two shows that have grown their audiences over time. All that, plus The Pitt climbing the season two charts, KPop Demon Hunters almost catching Encanto, The Madison has a great second week for Paramount+, an absolutely horrible sports anecdote, a strange trend on the Netflix global charts, BTS’ live show on Netflix, another Apple TV star-studded drama that didn’t chart, a new YouTube record, more big baseball numbers, all the flops, bombs and misses, and more.
Let’s dive 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 March 16th to March 22nd, 2026
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Film – Oscar Update for 2025 (in 2026)
Most years, despite the relatively big viewership of the Oscars telecast, the films nominated for Best Picture (and others that get nominated in the big six categories) don’t see a big enough boost to push them onto the Nielsen top ten list. Recently, though, this trend has reversed. See…
(Last year, Anora wasn’t out when the Oscars premiered, but did make the Nielsen charts when it came to Hulu two weeks after the ceremony.)
Both One Battle After Another and Sinners seemed to hit a critical acclaim/customer interest sweet spot: both were popular films, so folks had heard of them, but not everyone saw them in theaters—especially One Battle After Another—so they had a good run on streaming. Sinners had 4.7 million hours according to Nielsen and One Battle had 3.5 million.
Of course, the rest of the Oscars films outside of F1 and Frankenstein mostly missed the viewership charts entirely. And did poorly at the box office. This matches the long term trends I’ve made charts about before…
(I included some animated films nominated for Best Animated Feature as well, partially for context. I still think some of those films should have gotten Best Picture nominations.)
See, not great. This year, though, I did come across some Nielsen data from Sean McNulty, who got his hands on “viewership in the first 30 days” for a few Oscar films, a different time period than the usual weekly Nielsen top ten lists. Here’s his data in chart form for six films that had been on streaming for 30 days when he published on 12-Mar:
(Sean used views, so I converted that breakdown to hours as well, to share both data looks. Since this looks at the first thirty days, the numbers are slightly higher than the first four weeks of data for the two films that made the full four weeks [Frankenstein & Sinners] above.)
Unfortunately, those numbers still aren’t very big and the Oscar ceremony’s viewership backtracked from last year’s gains. According to Nielsen, viewership dropped to 17.86 million live viewers, down from 19.69 million last year. Here’s my chart tracking the popular and blockbuster films each year compared to the viewership:
So the ratings dropped, even though by my “metrics”—which is just counting the number of “blockbuster” and “popular” films—showed a slight uptick in popular films and a decline in blockbusters. Does this refute my contention that the Oscars need to nominate more popular films to drive viewership? I still don’t think so.
- First, blockbuster films matter. And I increasingly think it’s not just close blockbusters (both Dune: Part Two and Sinners of the last two years were just above $250 million in domestic box office), but massive blockbusters near or well over $500 million domestic.
- Second, as for the three popular films, I debated even giving that label to Frankenstein. I’m not sure that film was actually popular, even though it sixth biggest film on streaming in 2026. In general, there is still a gap between streaming and theatrical films in the public consciousness. If we say that that film was just “meh”, then the Oscars’ total popular films look even worse. (Send your films to theaters!)
- Third, I can’t emphasize how small the other films in content were; Hamnet and Bugonia both below $25 million US (even after the Oscar boost in awareness), Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent below $10 million and Train Dreams was a “dog not barking”.
Overall, I still think the Oscars need even more popular films competing for the actual Best Picture film, and I made my case back in January for which ones I thought would do best.
One last data point, because I find it fascinating. YouGov polled Americans on whether they saw these films and wanted to watch the actual show, and you can see there was a big gap between those who said they’d watch and actually did.
I’d emphasize that the number of folks who didn’t see any Best Picture film is the biggest hurdle to the show’s actual viewership increasing.
Quick Notes on Film
- Netflix’s Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a straight-to-streaming film based on the BBC TV show, and honestly, I expected more from it. It made Samba TV for two weeks, but unlike other high-flying Netflix Originals—think War Machine or The Rip—it didn’t hit first or second place on those charts, showing up at 8th and 9th place. On Nielsen, it only had 6.7 million hours, and anything under 10 million hours is a weak outing for a Netflix Original film. The good news is it probably didn’t cost that much (and likely had a load of tax credits helping fund it), but it’s not a hit. Also, as I mention for BTS below, this film will likely succeed or fail based on its UK viewership, and American viewership is an extra.
- Wicked for Good just landed on Peacock and it nabbed 5.1 million hours in its first week, which is way, way down from Wicked last year at 15.1 million hours in its first week. So this is a disappointment, even though it’s just over my 5 million hour threshold for an okay launch. One also can’t make the “well, it’s Peacock and that platform is much smaller,” because I’m comparing it to Wicked on Peacock!
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