(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.)
An article on video games by Georg Zoller recently caught my eye. Titled “The Video Game Industries Very Dark Night”, I just had to share it because the situation it describes in the introduction might apply to film and entertainment.
Zoller runs through a series of hype cycles in video games over the last few years, including:
- E-Sports (which I’ve covered before)
- The Metaverse
- NFTs
- Cloud gaming
- Fortnite & Roblox
And now…AI. The video game bubble inflated due to overhyped expectations for these various trends. And now growth has stalled out. Zoller also adds that the video game industry also faces challenges from both consolidation and Big Tech platforms extracting revenue. Could I make a similar list for entertainment? Probably, and I should!
Either way, this mini-history lesson (again, check it out) is clear: exaggeration isn’t helpful; thoughtful, skeptical analysis is. Be wary of hype!
Okay, on to today’s article, where I’m talking about Netflix’s big new movie starring Charlize Theron, Apex, and their big new returning show, Running Point, starring Kate Hudson. Did both titles disappoint? All that, plus I’m also looking at a bio-docu-series about arguably the biggest wrestler of all time, a bunch of shows falling off the charts, a second season record (yeah, it’s The Pitt), video game budgets and mobile devices globally, a big franchise failing to launch a spinoff, 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 April 20th to April 26th, 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – Running Point Tries To Avoid a Second Quarter Meltdown
If it feels like I was just singing the praises of Netflix’s Running Point, it’s because I was! Last article, I anointed it the “half hour” TV series of 2025 (tied with Netflix’s Four Seasons) for last year.
Here’s the chart:
And so I was excited to see if the second season would build on the first season’s momentum. And…
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