Disney Takes on Angel (Studios)

(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.)

Last week, I predicted that, very soon, the wider media is going to cover Netflix’s Q2 struggles (which you read here first). Well, Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg kicked it off with his piece on Monday, showing evidence that the second seasons of Netflix’s hit shows aren’t performing, a point Kasey Moore of What’s on Netflix and I have been making since last year. (Shaw cited Whats-On-Netflix‘s data.) But it’s gotten particularly bad recently:

As I predicted, I think we’re going to see more and more stories along these lines. Shaw and I are using slightly different data cuts, but they lead to similar headlines. After all, it’s not just Netflix’s returning shows that are struggling, but also new shows like Man on Fire, the recently-cancelled The Boroughs and Nemesis. And as I’ll share below, this could be affecting daily usage globally. (It’s still a hit-driven business after all.)

To figure out why this is happening would require a much longer, more thorough deep dive, but to offer some initial theories…

• Netflix front-loaded their 2026 calendar with their biggest TV shows, something I noted at the time.
• Netflix doesn’t have as many mega-hit shows anymore. As I wrote about in my 2025 recap, “despite having eighteen of the top 25 new shows, Netflix only has six coming back in future years” and two of those shows already underperformed this year. And they’ve lost or are losing seven of their top twelve shows in the coming year.
• Netflix changed their UX/homepage layout on 7-May of 2025. This change happened a year ago, but it might explain why shows like The Diplomat underperformed last November. I wonder if this change hampers discovery (or re-discovery) of returning shows.
• Netflix may be too focused on one genre: crime dramas/mysteries. Everyone thinks movie-goers got tired of superheroes…are they tired of murder shows as well? Seemingly, every drama on Netflix is about murder.
• The push to podcasts may be crowding the homepage and making discovery of scripted shows harder.
• We may finally be seeing the impact of social/vertical video on actual TV viewing. Though, admittedly, I don’t love my data options to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

Notice what two explanations I didn’t mention? Binge releasing and the gaps between seasons. Now, those absolutely are strategic mistakes, in my opinion, for Netflix (and other streamers). Releasing shows weekly a year apart would help on average! (The Pitt showed how a weekly-released show that comes out within a year can yield huge viewership.) But notably, Running Point and The Four Seasons did come out within a year of the previous season. And Netflix has always binge-released its shows and it’s always taken them forever to get out new seasons.

So something else is at play, hence my explanations above.

Okay, that’s a lot of strategy right up front. On to this week’s issues. I’ll be looking at a great showdown between Angel’s David (now on Netflix) and Disney+’s Hoppers, an original Pixar film. Plus, one of the biggest shows of last year returns to Peacock (after just a one-year gap). Plus, I’ll look at a super-short Netflix drama, another comedy flopping on Hulu, JLo’s latest straight-to-streaming Netflix film, an Osgood Perkins horror film miss, what recently cancelled show has surprisingly strong US viewership, some hits on Prime Video, a fun new report from Reelgood on LLMs, an awards shows that the trades barely noted, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.

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 June 1st to June 7th, 2026.

You can find a link to my terminology here.)

Film – Disney Takes on Angel (Studios)

It’s probably a bit of an editorial gimmick to pair up two films just because they happen to arrive on streaming in the same week and share the same genre, but I can’t help myself. Especially if they both touch on topics I’ve been analyzing for years here. Like…

• Hoppers, a Disney original animated film that grossed $166 million domestically (which begs the question: does the animation/family genre have an originals problem?)
• David, an Angel (formerly Angel Studios) animated film based on the Bible story that grossed $80 million domestically (which begs the question: Is Angel struggling?)

Kids films have been one of the few bright spots on streaming recently, and these two films provide additional data points for the “streaming versus theaters” and “originals versus sequels” debates. (Reminder: no one film can settle debates like these.)

Here are all the recent kids films on streaming over the last few months:

Let’s start with the disappointment, Angel’s David. 5.8 million hours is a disappointing number for a Netflix Pay 1b film. Yes, it premiered on Angel’s streamer first, but so do Universal films on Peacock. And Angel’s streamer only has 2 million paying subscribers, so that means most Americans haven’t seen this film. Worse, it has a reported $60 million budget. Given its theatrical and streaming performance, this is a solid film for them, but it wasn’t popular, by any means, and probably didn’t make its money back.

Overall, I don’t love Angel’s choice to send David to Netflix. Their streamer is supposed to be their revenue growth engine, as they constantly repeat in their quarterly reports. But they’re training audiences to wait for their hit films on Netflix or Prime Video (as happened with Sound of Freedom). Of course, I can explain why: they need the cash and Netflix likely offered a good paycheck to rent this film. But that also flies against the narrative that Angel is crushing it. In this case, I think the need for cash outweighed their need to grow the streamer.

Don’t get me wrong, they do have a devoted fan base, and they can open some films to $10 to $20 million opening weekends, and they had a big hit in Sound of Freedom. But the hype for this company doesn’t match the actual performance.

Speaking of hype…Disney.

Unlike Angel, which can have a film make $80 million and get glowing write-ups in the trades, if Disney’s films don’t eclipse $250 million at the box office, they’re a disappointment. Hoppers seemed to fall right on the edge. It wasn’t as big a disappointment in the press as Lightyear, Elio or Wish, but also clearly not a smash like their recent sequels Zootopia 2 or Inside Out 2.

But what about on streaming? Hoppers is, like its box office, right in the middle. It got 19.4 million hours in its first week, just shy of the 20 million bar for popular among kids films. On Samba TV, it opened in eighth place then went to sixth. 

Yes, if you squint, it does seem like sequels have now moved past originals on streaming. Disney was able to launch originals during the pandemic (Turning Red, Luca and Soul) but those now look like “Covid Caveats”, meaning they were unique to that locked-down time period (which hopefully doesn’t happen again anytime soon).

I realize I sound somewhat negative, but honestly, this 19.4 million hours on streaming, not to mention the $166 million in box office dollars, actually seems like a rebound by Disney/Pixar to me. 

This is the original hit film—meaning not based on popular IP—that Disney needed after misses like Wish and Elio. 

It seems clear to me, and hopefully Disney, that they need to make originals at a lower budget than the sequels to clearly popular films. They also, of course, need to make both sequels to popular films and original films to find the next Zootopia, Toy Story or Frozen. They need to replenish their supply of franchises. Hoppers wasn’t that, but also wasn’t such a miss that it makes original films too expensive to make.

While we’re here, let me check in on some past kids films. Sony’s GOAT (on Netflix) had 5.5 million hours in its fourth week, while Netflix’s Swapped finally fell off the charts after a five-week run. Zootopia 2 showed back up with 4.3 million hours (it’s had great staying power) and KPop Demon Hunters just showed up at the bottom of the charts with 2.8 million hours. That film is a monster.

Quick Notes on Film

• Netflix’s other big release was Office Romance, a JLo romcom on Netflix. Netflix has leaned into the Jennifer Lopez business in recent years—her sci-fi action film, Atlas, peaked at 18.0 million hours, less than Madame Web the same year—but this one did worse. On Nielsen, it only notched 10.9 million hours, just above my 10 million hour  minimum for success. Luminate was also light, at 16.7 million hours. Office Romance did a lot better according to Samba TV, getting to second place then moving to first. Though that probably means it was a light week on streaming overall, not that Office Romance did well. (That’s why I prefer actual numbers, to track velocity.) I’ll probably write a full article on this, but while the media focused on the disappointments at the box office in May and June (The Mandalorian and Grogu, Masters of the Universe, Supergirl, Disclosure Day), streaming films have been faring even worse.

• Netflix’s true crime doc The Murder of Rachel Nickell made Nielsen with 2.9 million hours and Luminate with 4.2 million. Interestingly, it’s a documentary about their new TV show, The Witness. (See below.) Neither number is enough to say, “hit”, but for a documentary, it’s also not a miss. For context, The Crash documentary is a genuine hit for Netflix, doc or no, as it made the charts for a fourth week this week. (It peaked at 19.7 million hours.)

• Netflix’s Spanish-language film, The Marked Woman, made both the Luminate (2.8 and 2.3 million hours) and Samba TV charts (fifth place for one week). That latter performance is enough to move out of the “miss” range.

• Prime Video’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War made it to a third week on the charts, but down to 4.5 million hours on Nielsen. It also fell off Samba TV after a two-week run. 

• A few library films made either the Nielsen or interest charts, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Scary Movie, Masters of the Universe (the 1987 film), Fast Charlie (a 2023 Pierce Brosnan crime thriller) and Passengers, the 2016 sci-fi film after it came to Netflix.

• Overall, none of this week’s misses felt notable enough to merit “Miss of the Week” honors, but I did want to highlight Keeper, which just came to Hulu. First off, what is Keeper? Have you even heard of it? Well, it’s a Neon horror film starring Tatiana Maslany from…director Osgood Perkins! The director of Longlegs, a breakout hit from a few years ago and Kane Parsons’ mentor on the Backrooms set. Now, Perkins had a 2025 money-maker with The Monkey ($39 mil in the US) but this film made $6 million globally off a $4 million budget. All of which is to say, a lot of horror films come and go every week, and one success does not guarantee future success. (I like this budget though: $6 million, with likely profit share from Maslany. You can make anything at the right price.)
• An original Netflix film from India, Maa Behen, made the Luminate charts at a low 1.0 million hours. Tubi’s I Didn’t Do It, a miss from last week, got 1.7 million hours, and so did Prime Video’s System at 1.1 million.
• Our DNBs include Prime Video’s Groundswell, the third film in their farming/nature doc series, Mexico 86, a dramedy about Mexico getting the World Cup, starring Cassian Andor, and Hulu’s latest standup special, Hannah Berner: None of My Business.
• I can confirm last week’s misses, most notably Netflix’s Ladies First, HBO Max’s The Bride, and Paramount+’s Scream 7.

Television – Streaming’s Biggest Reality Show Returns

Love Island USA’s seventh season did really well, as I noted in my recap of 2025. Luminate called it the biggest show of 2025:

Other metrics weren’t as good, but it was still a top ten show in terms of total hours viewed, no matter how you slice it. Nielsen had it in sixth place and the highest reality show on streaming. Samba TV had it in the top ten, too.

The caveat was always, though, that the show is both long (episodes average 67 minutes) and it has lots of episodes, since it’s a daily show. Add to that eight full seasons of the show, and that could mean a lot of catch-up viewership. (Some of this catch up viewing is on other streamers, as earlier seasons stream on Paramount and Hulu.) This show just isn’t apples-to-apples to a show like The Witness on Netflix this week, which had just three episodes.

So yes, on one hand, we do need to factor in that a lot of episodes will drive a lot of viewership. The caveat to this caveat is that lots of viewership is always a good thing. It means one group of fans is likely very devoted to Peacock, driving tons of usage and lowering their churn dramatically.

And here’s the best news: Love Island’s viewership is growing year over year!

That’s right, while the world worries about Netflix’s second season slump—a trend that’s both worrying and traditionally very normal—Peacock has a hit show that’s growing its audience. Last season opened to 12.9 million hours in its first week, and the current season opened to 21.8 million. Here’s the key chart for Nielsen:

(Note: I am coloring these as “Peacock” and labeling Nielsen viewing as Peacock, though a chunk of this viewership is Hulu and Peacock.)

Here’s how it stacks up to past Peacock seasons; it’s dominant:

Luminate has similarly strong numbers, with its opening week getting 40 million hours for just this season, and a future week logging 45 million. The weakest number is Samba TV, which only has it at third place for a week, before it falls off the charts. 

Two more numbers speak well of Love Island USA. First, a datecdote in the Wall Street Journal said the show has driven 2 million subscribers to Peacock and I buy that number. I tend to be conservative on subscriber growth estimates—see my estimates for Game of Thrones here—and 2 million is within range. It’s also been reported this is a show that costs $40 million per season to make. Compare that to, say, what Paramount pays for UFC rights and it’s not even close what is the better deal.

This show is a hit for Peacock, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Quick Notes on TV

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