(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.)
Want to help me solve a mystery?
Starting on 23-May, my Substack saw a huge boost in traffic from Twitter—It will always be Twitter to me—and I mean huge, seemingly out of nowhere:
(This chart is “social” traffic only under the Stats page of Substack’s dashboard, not all traffic, which stayed about normal.)
I tried to find for an explanation (Did someone link to me? Did an article get shared widely? Did one of my tweets go viral?), but nothing seems to explain it. People are citing me and my articles at about the same rate as always on Twitter. I’ve been posting more social content in the last month, but, ironically, I took a pause the week this increase started. And it’s not a one-off event, since the growth has sustained itself.
I do have two theories. First, perhaps Twitter has (finally) changed its policies, allowing articles that link to outside websites to get more promotion, instead of throttling them. This would be a smart change, since if Twitter sends me no traffic, I see no point in using their platform. In fact, the only reason I noticed this change was that I’ve been debating pulling back on social promotion, and wanted to see the actual data on whether posting more on Substack Notes, LinkedIn, Twitter and Bluesky actually increased traffic to my website.
Second, perhaps Substack changed how they measure websites and/or traffic. I’m not sure how Substack authenticates pageviews, and a small behind-the-scenes change could drive an uptick like this.
I’m curious if other Substackers have seen something similar. You can check under “Stats”, then click on “Traffic” and filter for social media traffic. If you do see this, let me know.
On to this week’s article, there were only one or so notable new shows, but we still have a lot to talk about. I’ll look at that plus a few long running weekly shows, the ceiling for foreign shows and films, a great stat on Tubi’s on-demand usage, check-ins on The Last of Us, The Handmaid’s Tale, Your Friends and Neighbors, Andor and other returning shows, the Kentucky Derby’s big numbers, Broadway shows on streaming/TV, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
But let’s start with my favorite topic: straight-to-streaming films that (probably) should have gone to theaters.
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, and 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 April 28th to May 4th.)
Film – A Case Study in Why Movies Should Go to Theaters
I’m currently re-writing an article on my data philosophy, and it reminded me of two tenets of my data analysis that I try to follow in writing this Streaming Ratings Report:
- Share actionable insights, i.e., make sure your data analysis is useful.
- But also, don’t draw random conclusions from small sample sizes, especially one-off data points.
I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but I read articles every week that boil down to, “This one film/TV show was a hit, so copy what they did.” There’s no attempt to look at larger datasets or trends or anything. (And they rarely try to look at counter-arguments.)
That said, today’s film flop, Another Simple Favor, provides the absolute perfect case study in why more films should be going to theaters:
- The first film, A Simple Favor, was a surprise hit, grossing $53 million in America and $97 million globally back in 2018, off of a $20 million budget. Yay! Plus, Blake Lively’s last theatrical thriller outperformed at the box office.
- The sequel, Another Simple Favor, just debuted with a paltry 6.7 million hours according to Nielsen, an equally paltry 544K households according to Samba TV, peaking at seventh place on Samba TV’s top ten charts, and 9.9 million hours according to Luminate.
- As for the budget, nothing has been reported, but I’d estimate that Paul Feig and the two stars, Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, almost certainly got low 10-figure paydays to return for the sequel.
In short, Amazon MGM Studios took a film that should have made actual money and turned it into a film that probably lost money. Again, you should avoid one-off data points—and hey, here’s a link to one of my most popular articles ever, where I analyzed all the data—but this data point is emblematic of the larger argument:
Films should go to theaters.
(And yes, I owe you a follow-up to that original series, coming this summer.)
Okay, two other takeaways. First up, budgets. If you want a counter-argument to what I just wrote, you might ask, “What about Black Bag? That film went to theaters, lost money, and flopped on streaming”. Excellent point. The Steven Soderbergh/Cate Blanchett/Michael Fassbender spy thriller just came to Peacock and missed all the charts. And it flopped at the box office, grossing $21 million in the US and $42 million globally, off a reported $50 million budget.
In this case, the issue is the budget. At $50 million, Black Bag was just too expensive. At something more like $25 million, the case for making money (mostly in later windows) starts to pencil out. Until audiences start returning to see “adult films” (as in movies made for grown-ups, not porn)—and believe me, I want grown-ups to return to the theaters to see movies made for adults, just like the legions of pundits begging for this to happen—well, you have to keep your budgets in check.
Second lesson: streaming flops still don’t get called out like theatrical film flops, something I’ve dubbed “The Argylle Treatment”. If you want to see the effect in real time, Google search for “Another Simple Favor flop” and find me an article pointing out that this film flopped on Prime Video. As far as I can tell, today’s Streaming Ratings Report will be “breaking” this news to the rest of Hollywood.
Now, compare that to Karate Kid: Legends just this last weekend.
–
–
–
What about Black Bag? Same thing…
–
–
I’m predicting we’ll see the same thing with Fountain of Youth a month from now, especially compared to Argylle last year. And we’ll see what happens with the F1 movie.
Quick Notes on Film
- The biggest film of the week was Netflix’s Exterritorial, opening with 12.8 million. Given that it’s the second biggest Netflix global film of the year, this one looks like more of a global hit than a US hit, as 12.8 million isn’t a big number. (Though twice as large as Another Simple Favor.) As we’ve seen before, foreign language titles have a lower ceiling than other films on Netflix in America, and this is a good example. (With the caveat that these foreign films also get more viewership than they ever would have in the previous age of video/DVD rentals, cable or VOD.) It also has the typical poor IMDb scores of a Netflix film, a 5.8 on 12K reviews. On Luminate, it peaked at 15.2 million hours in its first full week, just behind Havoc’s 18.3 million.
- Netflix’s Havoc—the Tom Hardy-starring action flick—dropped to 10.1 million in its second week, making that a below-average/weak opening. Meanwhile, Despicable Me 4 and Moana 2 both continue to make the Nielsen top ten charts.
- Just to be official with it, the “Miss of the Week” goes to Another Simple Favor, which I wrote about up above. And yes, Black Bag isn’t all that far behind that one, but at least it made money in theaters, VOD and other future windows, and Peacock is a smaller service than Prime Video.
- Other than that, Netflix’s foreign language title, The Biggest Fan, from Mexico, made Luminate with 1.5 million hours. Nickel Boys made its way over to Prime Video and made JustWatch and Reelgood’s interest charts. And Netflix’s special, Conan O’Brien: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, missed the charts. Man, I can’t wait to see what this special looks like next year with Trump in charge of picking the winner.
Television – Two New Netflix Shows Vie for Hit of the Week
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so please subscribe.
We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this post about the Streaming Ratings Report, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
