(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.)
Before we get going with today’s jam-packed Streaming Ratings Report, I wanted to highlight the campaign to buy Letterboxd and turn it into a cooperative venture. This is a noble effort, since in today’s tech/media landscape, independent internet resources and communities like this are more valuable than ever.
So check it out! The donation page is here, and I’d recommend checking out Ted Hope’s write-ups on the campaign.
Okay, on to this week’s issue. Normally, Emmy season is busy, busy, busy…but the last two weeks of streaming releases were anything but. Consider that, for the week of 27-Apr, we didn’t have any returning shows! And no specials of any type. That’s basically never happened before. And that impacted the viewership: no show or film has gotten over 25 million hours over the last six weeks of Nielsen viewership. That’s low!
That said, since it’s a double issue, there’s still a lot to talk about. On the TV side, I’m taking a look at the second season of one of the most expensive TV shows of all time, Citadel (season one reportedly cost $300 million) and Netflix’s Man of Fire reboot, this time as a TV show. On the film side, Netflix takes their latest shot at making an animated kids hit, Swapped. All that, Netflix/the BBC’s Lord of the Flies, data on customers’ favorite Star Wars films, Wuthering Heights and Send Help head to streaming, The Boys, The Pitt and Euphoria hold strong, 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 27th to May 10th 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – The End of Amazon’s Big Swings Era?
Around this time last decade, everyone wanted their “Game of Thrones”. (On the film side, every studio wanted their own MCU-style cinematic universe.) In a twist of fate, Netflix already had their Game of Thrones in Stranger Things, though they also spent big money on expensive series/franchises, including making a deal with Mark Millar for his comic book universe. Disney+ deluged their service with Marvel and Star Wars TV shows. HBO made more Game of Thrones spinoffs, and Apple TV+ had/has a slew of science fiction epics.
Seriously, the streamers spent big at the start of the streaming wars.
But probably no one tried harder than Amazon. In particular, circa 2017, then Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said he wanted big budget genre shows for Prime Video:
While their likely billion-dollar-budget Lord of the Rings prequel show was the big headliner, Amazon also splashed big on the Russo Brothers in the form of a globe-spanning spy series, Citadel. I have to write this like most folks haven’t heard of it because…well…most probably haven’t? Which would be fine except it’s been reported that this is literally one of the most expensive shows ever made for television. I mentioned this above, but let me say it again: the first season likely cost $300 million. And then Amazon made spinoffs like Citadel: Diana and Citadel: Honey Bunny.
The good news for the second season? Well, it made Nielsen’s top ten charts:
The bad news? Everything else. This is a good reminder that “making the top ten” does not a hit make.
This remains a classic “streaming versus theatrical” data mistake. In streaming, if a show makes a top ten chart—and sometimes just a top ten chart for a specific streamer—a bunch of people think it’s a hit show (especially the writers at more click-dependent pop culture websites). I literally find a new example every week. As I like to remind folks, though, we don’t do this for box office. For example, this week, Amazon MGM’s Masters of the Universe came in second place…and no one would call that a hit. In other words, we hold theatrical titles to a higher standard than streaming shows and films.
Indeed, Citadel’s 7.3 million hours in its first week is very low. It missed the Samba TV charts entirely. And on Luminate, it only peaked at 8.2 million hours. Those are all poor numbers. By no means is this show a hit. Given the huge budget, you have to call it a miss. (I’m not sure the exact budget for season two.) Here’s how it stacks up to other Amazon second seasons:
We can also compare Citadel to The Boys and the recently concluded Invincible, which both grew their audiences. Honestly, of the shows competing to be Amazon’s Game of Thrones, The Boys has an extremely strong case as the most successful. (Fallout does as well.)
Here’s how the viewership on Nielsen stacks up:
The Boys continues to rack up 15 million hour-plus weeks, and is currently the ninth-biggest season five (looking at “weeks in the Nielsen top ten”). It’s also doing well on Samba TV, peaking at third on those charts. Invincible had its finale on 22-April, and still made the Nielsen charts for one more week.
In other words, both of these superhero shows are trouncing the likely more expensive Citadel. (Though The Boys is admittedly NOT cheap.)
Amazon also put out a datecdote for The Boys, saying the show had 57 million viewers per episode, though they count a “viewer” as anyone who watches any portion of an episode, not by total hours viewed. That does sound like a huge number, but even Amazon admitted it only “ranks among the Top 10 most-viewed seasons of any Prime Video original series”. (I’d much prefer if Amazon just gave us their top ten shows by this metric.)
The question looming over all of this is whether this is the end of the Amazon big spending/big budget/huge genre epics era. And it might be. The Citadel numbers are weak, and Amazon is getting much more viewership on a cheaper budget for something like Reacher. The Boys is ending this year. Even Fallout is likely treading a thin line given its costs, and Amazon’s desire to turn a profit on Prime Video.
Worse, I just don’t think the new leadership at Amazon will spend nearly as much for new shows. Indeed, this quote about Amazon’s Upfronts from Lesley Goldberg stuck out to me:
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — one of the two most expensive TV series ever produced (alongside Amazon’s own Citadel) — received only a few seconds of airtime to promote its Nov. 11 season three premiere. As for Citadel, there was no mention whatsoever of the spy drama starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas.”
I’m sure Amazon will never admit they’ve pulled back on their big spending era, but if Rings of Power continues its downward slide in the fall—as I think it will and I have a feeling Amazon execs agree—it will likely end, not with a big budget explosion, but a whimper.
Quick Notes on TV
- Netflix’s latest scripted series, Man on Fire (a reboot of the Denzel Washington action flick), failed to reverse the “Netflix’s is having a rough Q2” trend I just wrote about in my “Renewals and Cancellations” update and in the last streaming ratings report. In addition to mediocre IMDb scores (only a 6.7 on just 11K reviews), Man on Fire only had 13.4 and 14.0 million hours in its first two weeks on Nielsen. On Samba TV, it had two weeks of fourth and second place. Luminate, though, said it did very well, with 38.3 million hours in its opening, which dropped to 15.3 million hours in its second.
- Netflix also streamed a four-episode adaptation of Lord of the Flies, based the famous book about stranded children who devolve into a state of nature. It looks like a US-only, BBC acquisition, and the short episode count likely hurt it in terms of total hours, getting only 9.4 million hours in its first week and only making Samba TV for one week at tenth place. It made Luminate, but at 4.8 and 4.5 million hours. While it’s likely not that expensive, it didn’t drive that much viewership. Both this show and Man of Fire had short episode counts—seven for Man on Fire and just four for Lord of the Flies—which hurt their longevity on the charts.
- Peacock’s latest scripted show, M.I.A, is a nine-episode crime drama set in Miami from the creator Ozark. As I wrote a lot in my annual recap, crime dramas are doing very well on streaming. Also, credit to Peacock for actually putting out nine episodes. In this case, we had a fairly large gap between Nielsen and Luminate. Nielsen only put it at 5.6 million hours, but Luminate had it at 21.7 million hours. Overall, this one didn’t look too expensive, but like Peacock’s other binge-released series, it likely won’t last more than a week or two more on the charts.
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