(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.)
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I used to be a regular columnist for The Ankler, so my writing lived in two places on Substack: on this newsletter and for The Ankler. But this newsletter is the place to read all of my writing, now and going forward. (I still get emails about the best place to read my work and how to subscribe to support my writing and analysis.) If I do write anything for The Ankler—which I will, occasionally, in the future—I’ll give you a heads up. I don’t have any plans to leave the Substack platform, for now, since the network effects of being on here are more than working for me.
Okay, on to this week’s Streaming Ratings Report, which is a double issue (since I’m still deep in the data for my 2025 summary) and we’ve got a very fun, very juicy topic to open with:
- Horror films continue to struggle on streaming platforms.
And I’ll check in on two Hulu TV shows that finished their runs. All that, plus a surprising horror film miss for Peacock, The Madison’s strong outing, Amazon’s latest theatrical film to come to streaming, a long-running Netflix show falls off the charts, an Apple TV show fails to launch after a strong season one, Disney+ misses again, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
But we start with the latest sport to come to Netflix. 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 March 23rd to April 5th 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Sports – MLB Opening Day! Now On Netflix!
Are sports on streaming just boring now?
On 25-March, Major League Baseball—and I’ve been told it’s not “the” MLB, so I won’t make that mistake again—had its opening day and for the first time, that meant games on Netflix. And the reaction was…fine.
Netflix had 3 million folks tune in for the New York Yankees vs the San Francisco Giants (two major market teams). And that’s right around NBC-Peacock 3.2 million for the Arizona Diamondbacks versus the Los Angeles Dodgers. And that’s right around Fox’s Saturday Night Baseball that week which had 2.6 million viewers. Even the midday game on NBC and Peacock had 2.3 million viewers!
Again, fine.
(As a note, since some folks have asked me, it appears that NBCUniversal combines Nielsen’s numbers with their own in-house streaming numbers, and that’s how they can get such high viewership figures. But we really shouldn’t compare current viewership numbers to anything before 2020.)
Yeah, I would say the novelty of streaming sports has worn off, with one huge caveat: everyone kinda hates it?
As a reminder—and a lot of economist types forget to include this in their analysis—the “value created” by selling a good or service is the value customers place on it minus the price they pay. That’s the definition of “consumer surplus”. (Read all about it here.) This is taught day one in Strategy 101 class, by the way.
Streaming, for years, generated a lot of value because it was sooooo cheap. (Those low prices are gone, by the way.) But when it comes to sports, a lot of folks are realizing that the user experience is way worse now than in the cable bundle. Maybe cheaper, but also worse. In particular:
- Customers can’t record sports, allowing them to rewind or skip ads.
- Customers sometimes can’t start games later.
- Customers can’t easily switch between streamers and hence sporting events.
All to say, yes, sports are here on streaming, but it’s a worse experience than it was before. And may not be much cheaper for much longer.
Film – A Quick Check-in On the Theatrical-to-Streaming Horror Pipeline
Sometimes you sit down to write a Streaming Ratings Report, and the films just naturally cluster around a topic. For instance, during the weeks starting 23-March and 30-March, the theatrical flicks Anaconda (2025’s Sony reboot of the 90s cult classic), 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (the latest entry from 2026 in the 28 Days Later franchise, also from Sony), Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (the sequel to the 2023 hit for Universal) and Primate (the original film from Paramount) came to various streamers.
Let’s start with the biggest hit on streaming, Anaconda, arriving on Netflix. It topped the Nielsen charts the week of 23-March and was the top film on Samba TV too:
That’s good, though the Nielsen figures aren’t quite elite, with only 12.2 million hours in its first week and 11.3 million hours in its second week. Given these numbers, and it’s $65 million domestic box office (on a reported $45 million budget), I wouldn’t call this a hit by any means, but it isn’t a miss either.
As to the horror theme, of the films I’m looking at today, this is definitely the least scary and that helps explain why it performed better than the other films below. It also tried to thread the “comedy-horror” line, which is always tricky, but with a PG-13 rating, it has a higher ceiling than an R-rated horror film. With only a 5.5 on IMDb on 60K reviews, it’s not beloved either.
Here’s a chart of the top “horror-adjacent” films over the last few years:
This film, like the next one, is from Sony, which means it came to Netflix. In 2025, I often speculated that meant that Sony’s films should have a big caveat next to them. Last year, due to Netflix’s growing ad-tier, Sony films on Netflix just didn’t reach as many people. Well, these films don’t have that excuse any longer. Due to their new theatrical output deal, Sony films are available on all Netflix subscription tiers, including their ad-supported tier. In the case of Anaconda, that didn’t really put its viewership on par with other top Netflix originals this year. (The Rip opened to over 23 million hours, for example.)
In the case of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, I think the previous film soaked up more of the nostalgia rewatch viewership and that left this one with just a $25 million domestic gross. This is more of a traditional horror film, though it also has some very strange elements, including zombies getting high. (Sonny Bunch thinks Ralph Fiennes should be nominated for Best Supporting Actor. My editor/researcher is forcing me to include a sentence saying that he wholeheartedly agrees with this take.)
On Nielsen, it opened to 4.9 million hours, which actually compares well with the 4.4 million the first film had. Though again, the first film reached fewer viewers due to Netflix’s ad-tier limitation. Again, anything under 10 million hours is poor, and under 5 million hours is a bad streaming film performance. Its IMDb is relatively strong, a 7.3 on 94K reviews.
At least “low viewership” isn’t “missed all the charts” entirely. So what do I say about a film like Five Nights at Freddy’s 2? This film just made the top 25 for films at the domestic box office…
And yet…crickets on streaming.
No, seriously, I thought something must be wrong because Peacock announced that Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 came to streaming on 3-Apr, and this didn’t make a single viewership or interest chart I track. I even double checked to make sure I had the date right, since I at least assumed it would have made an interest chart. The previous film did very well since it came out day-and-date with the theatrical film, so this miss is surprising. Here’s Peacock’s recent horror outings, with Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 missing:
In this case, I do wonder if the four-month-long gap hurt its streaming performance or if Peacock is just small. Overall, I’m a big fan of long windows to help the (more profitable) theatrical window, but it could have had an impact there.
In contrast, it’s not like Paramount has the long windows excuse for Primate, their horror film that came to theaters in January. Primate also missed all the viewership charts, but it made the Reelgood interest charts this week. At only $25 million in domestic box office, this one wasn’t a huge smash and Paramount+ is a much smaller service than its rivals.
Add it all up and I’ll repeat my main take on horror: this genre has terrific ROI in theaters, when made for the right (read very low) price. But on streaming, horror films struggle compared to other broader fare.
Quick Notes on Film
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