(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.)
It’s that time of year! Time for the EntStrategyGuy’s 2024 Viewership Report, starting with all the film “flops, bombs, and misses” for the second half of 2025.
Wait a second. I just realized that many of you might not be familiar with this series. My audience has grown by nearly a third in just six months, and over 10K of you weren’t around for my last viewership recap.
So first off, let’s go over what I’ve got in store for you this month.
Every March, I begin my giant recap of streaming viewership for the year before, starting with the TV show and film flops for the second half of the year, then three or so articles sharing all the best-performing shows, then I close with some articles on who won and lost the year. Even though it’s 2026, this series provides a permanent record of what worked on streaming the year before.
Yeah, I don’t release my analysis at the beginning of December (like some outlets do), since the year hasn’t finished. Heck, I don’t even release it in January. Instead, I wait to get all the data (Nielsen releases their data to the public four weeks after the reporting period), and then I wait for all of the 2025 TV shows to fall off the charts—this year, I’m still waiting for Fallout to fall off the charts—and then I start the laborious process of going through it all.
Starting today, as I do every six months, I share all the “flops, bombs and misses” on streaming from the half year. Today, we’re looking at movies. In the next installment, we’ll look at TV shows.
If you want to read the full methodology for how I assemble this list, you can find it at the bottom of this article. In short, this list is…
…scripted and unscripted films and specials,
…that went straight-to-streaming,
…from the major streamers,
…in the US (using US-only ratings),
…excluding true crime, short films (anything shorter than thirty minutes), “making of” specials, and foreign-language films,
…that got no/poor ratings,
…from Jul-2025 to the end of Dec-2025.
As with past editions, I ordered this list going from best streamer (least number of flops) to worst (the most misses), taking the size of the flops into consideration. Reminder: this article does NOT represent my personal opinion—many of these films are great!—but I follow the data, and a miss is a miss and a bomb is a bomb.
In the past, if a film made a viewership chart—and that just meant Nielsen at the time—that could save it from making this list. But since Luminate only features straight-to-streaming films, many more films make the charts, but usually with tiny numbers. Those small viewership figures, then, confirm that many of these films flopped. I focus on streaming films, but I include notable theatrical films that flopped on streaming at the end.
Why This Matters
I think this exercise really, really matters. Why?
Even today, way too many people in Hollywood/the entertainment industry have no idea what works and what doesn’t.
From talent to below-the-line workers, from movie studios to production companies, from journalists to critics, people don’t hear about the flops. Back in the 20th century, the news media and industry trades widely shared (and often mocked) movies and TV shows that bombed. Today, far too many titles go under the radar and get no notice. Or, worse, people think that streaming TV show flops and streaming film misses were actually hits, especially if they’re buzzy. True, it’s better today than, say, 2021 or 2022, but I still see pretty clueless statements in the media or from the people I talk to.
Plus, when it comes to films, the press widely covers box office failures; they don’t cover streaming flops nearly as much, leading to “The Argylle Treatment”.
Heck, I’m partially to blame, since the section on what TV shows and streaming films flopped usually lives behind my paywall each week in the Streaming Ratings Reports.
One final note: I’m obsessed with fairness and any possible objections to my analyses. Today’s article is no exception. Even writing something like “streaming film performance” has a lot of subjective components that make apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.
For example, collecting data for HBO Max, I didn’t find very many film titles in the back half of 2025…because HBO Max doesn’t have very many original TV shows or films anymore. Instead, HBO’s content goes to HBO first. Is that unfair to the tech companies that don’t have pre-existing linear channels? By definition, they’ll have more film flops. (I’ll discuss this situation in the first section below.)
Conversely, the tech streamers make a lot of big budget straight-to-streaming films that are clearly unprofitable, but I left out many of their biggest film flops if they got even mediocre viewership. If anything, in terms of profitability and ROI, Prime Video and Netflix should have more misses. So am I being unfair to the traditional entertainment companies?
I mention all of this to let you know how much time and energy I put into my analysis and my emphasis on judging everything fairly, or at least as fairly as I can.
Okay, let’s get into it. This article is over 5,000 words (which is thirteen pages in my word processing application), detailing all the streaming film flops and misses, but also insights and analysis, including…
- The struggles of most streaming films. I would argue that everyone (really, everyone?) in town knows about the American box office’s struggles. I would argue that far, far fewer people know that streaming films are struggling almost as much, if not more so. (The last streamer I cover conveys that pretty well.)
- Why one of Tubi’s “hit” films probably isn’t. And same for one of Apple TV’s “hit” films.
- Why kids films, thrillers and horror films need to go to theaters.
- How Apple Studios’ overspending on films.
- And the reasons why Netflix is cutting back on their film production.
Let’s dive in!
HBO Max
Nominees: None.
Honorable Mentions: None.
Winner: HBO Max
As far as I can tell, based on my weekly data collection and multiple searches online…HBO Max didn’t release any streaming exclusive films or specials in the last six months of 2025. (Some TV shows are still coming out that are HBO Max exclusives, as we’ll go over next time.)
So, as I asked in the introduction…is this fair to everyone else?
Prime Video, Netflix and Apple TV, especially, don’t have other networks where they can send their content first; it’s all on their streaming platforms. Disney, NBCUniversal, Skydance-Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery all have other places to send their films or documentaries, so it feels like I’m grading on a curve.
Not really, at least for HBO Max…since HBO didn’t release any scripted straight-to-streaming films in this timeframe either!
(The one potential film was an adaptation of Charlotte’s Web, which had a two-hour-or-so runtime, but it was divided into three 40-min-or-so episodes.)
HBO’s films/specials consisted of four standup specials (including notable names like Marc Maron and Sarah Sherman), eight biopic docs (covering everyone from the New Zealand Prime Minister to ARod, and musicians like John & Yoko, Paul Anka and Billy Joel) and prestige-esque docs like Thoughts & Prayers, Stolen Children and The Alabama Solution. Since I don’t hold documentaries to as high a standard, I think HBO/HBO Max did fine in the last half year. These docs and standup specials are basically the sorts of projects HBO has been making for decades now. This is their lane.
The real question is why every other streamer decided to copy/join that lane, when there wasn’t room in the market for four or five more HBOs.
Peacock
Nominees: None.
Honorable Mentions: Downey Wrote That, Hope in High Water: A People’s Recovery Twenty Years After Hurricane Katrina, Leslie Jones: Life Part 2, The Rise: The New Moneyball, The Rise: WNBA 2024: The Year That Changed Everything
Winner: Peacock
Like HBO Max, Peacock only had a handful of original documentaries (reminder, I don’t include true crime docs in these lists because they’re usually so cheap they don’t count as big misses)…and that’s about it! The especially good news is that they didn’t have any scripted straight-to-streaming films. Nice work! I doubt that very many people watched these docs, but I also doubt that they cost all that much to make either.
And unlike HBO, NBC doesn’t really air original documentaries, so there’s no double standard to worry about either.
Paramount+
- Bodyguard of Lies
- Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado
- Vicious
Honorable Mentions: Ozzy: No Escape From Now
Winner: Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado
Paramount+ doesn’t release much original content these days, so Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado wins by default, but that said:
Send kids films to theaters!
Even if it totally flops and just gets $20 million at the US box office, that’s $20 million more than you made anyway! After the success of GOAT, it’s clear there’s a hunger for kids film by theatrical audiences (which also helps build the movie-going habit).
Worse, the Dora TV show reboot didn’t pop on Paramount+. A theatrical film like this could help build awareness for the brand/franchise!
Tubi
- Checkmate
- Dark Secret
- Ex Door Neighbor
- Get Off My Lawn
- Glamping
- Happy Anniversary
- The Killing Cove
- Lil Rel Howery: Rel Talk
- My Husband’s Mistress
- Naomi Osaka: The Second Set
- Play Dirty (2025)
- Rhythm & Blood
- R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead
- Sidelined 2: Intercepted
- Sugar Mama
- Takeout
- The Thicket
- TKO
- The Ultimate Vendetta
- Wrong Place, Wrong Time
Honorable Mentions: None.
Tubi! Welcome to the club!
I actually covered Tubi in my TV flops and misses article six months ago, but now they’re in the film section as well. And just to be thorough, I actually shared all of their notable films from 2025 with you.
Unlike the streamers to come, Tubi doesn’t spend very much on their films. No, seriously, I’ve seen estimates that some of their films cost $30-40K. Yeah, “K” as in thousand. So even with minimal viewership—most of the films up above, if they even make the charts, get maybe one or two million viewership hours—they still probably made enough money in ad dollars.
Still, we only see Tubi original films show up on the Luminate charts, as we haven’t had one make either Nielsen or Samba TV. Even in success, their viewership figures are low.
One final note: this list is far from complete. Since Tubi releases nearly one original film a week, I only included the most notable films to not ruin the flow of this article with a list of 50 or more ultra-low-budget films.
Winner: Sidelined 2: Intercepted, R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead, The Thicket
Sidelined 2: Intercepted gets the win because people have called this film series a hit, like Awful Announcing here…
To be fair to Awful Announcing, they’re just repeating what they’ve read elsewhere, like how Tubi told CNBC in December that 20 million people have watched the Sidelined films since the first film came out in 2024.
And yet, when the sequel came out, it barely managed 3 million hours one week and 1 million the next. With a 101-minute runtime, that’s not great! And the sequel stars James Van Der Beek (RIP) and looks kinda expensive for a Tubi film; this needed to do better if this is a hit film series with, allegedly, a ton of fans!
R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead is a YA horror film, which can be a tricky balance to pull off: too scary for many kids, but not violent enough for adult fans of horror films. Sketch also struggled to pull off this balance (at a PG rating), though the PG-13-rated Five Nights at Freddy’s obviously did. Plus, it looks merely low budget, not ultra-low-budget like most Tubi films. Based on the IP and look, this feels like a big miss (for Tubi).
Finally, The Thicket, a neo-western starring Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis, only grabbed 2.1 million hours last January. As I wrote at the time, I’d love to see the budget breakdown for that one.
We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out…
- …why Netflix is making fewer films than ever.
- …the killer budget zone for straight-to-streaming films.
- …debunking a “hit” Apple film and a look at Apple’s overspending on their films.
- …whether Prime Video’s films cost too much…
- …even more kids films that needed to go to theaters…
- …why horror flicks need theaters too…
- …and 3,000 more words of analysis…
…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 article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
