(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 dive into sports and film streaming data, I wanted to give everyone a quick head’s up.
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Okay, on the second part of this week’s Streaming Ratings Report, sports and film. The big story is Project Hail Mary going up against Enola Holmes 3, plus another big weekend for UFC.
All that, plus a check-in on The Sheep Detectives, how UFC’s price tag stacks up to Taylor Sheridan’s shows, Netflix’s latest documentary trying to beat its scripted films in performance, the latest horror film to barely make the charts, CBS’s Big Brother performing well, a fine start to the year for book sales, a controversial standup returns to Netflix and all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
But we start with one of the most important questions in streaming film….
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, JustWatch and Reelgood interest 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 June 29th to July 6th 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Film – Another Round of Theatrical (Project Hail Mary) vs Straight-to-Streaming (Enola Holmes 3) Showdowns Tests The Most Important Question For Streaming Films
I love regularly updating my “What I Got Right/Wrong” column because it forces me to hold myself accountable. More folks should look at their record and say, “Here’s what I got right and here’s what I got wrong.” Folks who instead say, “Look at my record, I only get things right” are probably getting lots of things wrong (and not telling you about it).
Anywho, my biggest call of my calls is that theatrical films outperform straight-to-streaming films, the centerpiece for one of my most popular and longest columns ever.
And this week provided a really fun test for that hypothesis. No one week will settle the “Do films do better in theaters or going straight-to-streaming?” debate, because that’s not how data works, but this week does provide some data that isn’t great for my side of the debate!
Specifically, one of the biggest films in theaters this year, Project Hail Mary (PJM), came to Prime Video. I wondered earlier this year if it would shatter records when it came to streaming, so I actually made a poll for it:
Well, it did not set records. (At least not yet, hold on to this thought.)
If you’re Amazon-MGM-Prime-Video-Channels-Freevee-IMDb-Twitch-Audible-Studios [not their official name], you were hoping that PJM put up a massive streaming performance. This film grossed over $344 million and became the first blockbuster of the year. If Red One, a huge disappointment for Amazon at theaters in 2024, could become their biggest film ever, what would happen for a film that actually did well at the box office? Especially since it debuted for the Fourth of July weekend, historically a great weekend for streaming.
Well, it turns out, it’s complicated.
Project Hail Mary ended up with three weeks of 14.3, 15.4 and 11.7 million hours so far. Here’s how that stacks up to other Amazon streaming films…
You can read those numbers as both positive and negative for Project Hail Mary (and by extension the theaters-versus-straight-to-streaming debate). First, PHM never actually topped the 20 million hour mark, my unofficial “blockbuster in streaming” bar. Again, films like Red One ($97 million domestic), The Accountant 2 ($65 million), and five straight-to-streaming films all bested it.
Yet, PHM still landed at seventh place overall for Amazon for all time. If PHM makes the charts again next week, then it could pass several of those films. The real outlier is Red One, which just smashed it. And honestly, I wonder if it did better since it was a Christmas film released during Christmas (like Candy Cane Lane as well). I’d add, Project Hail Mary also came to MGM+ before it came to Prime Video, so that definitely muddles the data here and some customers watched it there first.
Plus, Amazon can look at the upside. I mean, yes, this looked like a very pricey film to make, but it still made $344 million in America and $683 in total globally.
Now, normally the performance of one film wouldn’t give me too much pause. Again, “data analysis” requires more than one-off examples. But Avatar: Fire and Ash came to streaming as well, and it also failed to eclipse 20 million hours. And it was a big, big film in December. (Though it’s widely considered to be a disappointment compared to its second film. This would make me worried about a sequel. Disney/Fox wants a lower budget.)
So, arguably, two big theatrical films underperformed on streaming. That said, The Sheep Detectives had weeks of 10.6, 9.4 and 6.2 million, which puts it in Amazon’s all-time top ten too. (Which is more than Netflix’s Fourth of July film, as you’ll see.) But it notably only had $60 million in box office, compared to PHM’s $300 million.
Overall, looking at the “films for adults” theatrical titles, we’re not seeing as big of a boost on streaming as we used to. But this is a good reminder that data is mostly correlated, not causative or perfectly correlated. In some cases, so many folks rushed out to see the biggest films in theaters that it naturally cannibalizes some streaming viewership. But given how much folks pay to see things on the big screen, that trade-off is always worth it!
Also, kids animated films remain the exception to this trend. Zootopia 2, Hoppers and GOAT have crushed it on the viewership charts, respectively, well outpacing every straight-to-streaming animated film but one (KPop Demon Hunters).
But what makes this week so interesting for the test case is that Netflix also had a huge film come to streaming, and it didn’t do well either. This might honestly just be a streaming issue…
Netflix took a big swing as well, Enola Holmes 3. For those not familiar, the “3” does indicate this is the third in a series of films starring Millie Bobbie Brown, one of Netflix’s more bankable stars, playing Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister. Here’s how it’s performed over time:
In my head, I remembered Enola Holmes as one of Netflix’s bigger films, but it never actually broke 20 million hours. Still, the current weeks of 8.4 and 5.9 million hours are even lower than previous outings. As I just mentioned, that’s worse than The Sheep Detectives. Worse, its IMDb scores have trended down over time, with the current film only at a 5.7, down from the previous films 6.7 and 6.8.
On Samba TV, Enola Holmes 3 only made the charts for one week, at ninth place, which is low. Project Hail Mary actually bested it handily in these metrics, making the charts both when it came to MGM+, and again for two weeks when it came to Prime Video:
The good news—and what complicates this debate—is that according to Kasey Moore of Whats-On-Netflix, my go-to Netflix guy, this film only cost $20 to $30 million to make. Given the budgets of most theatrical films, that’s a steal.
The caveat here is what this means for the industry. If $25 million is the right budget for streaming films going forward, well, the industry can’t afford nine figure blockbuster films anymore. In other words, nine figure blockbuster spectacles need theaters. In other words, to really ensure a thriving feature film industry, we need movie theaters and movie theaters doing well.
Sports – UFC 329 is the Second Good Paramount UFC Night in a Row
I hadn’t been tracking the UFC fight schedule in super detail until the folks at MMA Draw asked me for my thoughts on UFC scheduling the return of Conor McGregor to the octagon less than a month after the much-publicized UFC Freedom 250. Given one fight features a (former) top star in the sport and the other was hyped by the president, running them back-to-back seemed sub-optimal, as they rightly pointed out.
Yeah, it is silly to schedule two top engagement events within a month!
Not that it will impact the viewership. In fact, having two big events close to each other may help. The worry, as MMA Draw expressed to me, is that folks can sign up for just these two events and then cancel their Paramount+ subscription. That may happen, but it will be tough to see in the data.
Now, did scheduling these fights so close together help the viewership? It’s tough to say. Fortunately, Paramount PR provided roughly the same viewership metrics as for the last fight. This fight averaged 6.1 million viewers per minute in America, compared to 8.2 million for UFC Freedom 250. That number is key because it allows us to convert that into total streaming hours.
Of course, to do that, I need to know how long the event was, which is actually a bit tricky for mixed martial arts events. In this case, the main event went for over three hours according to news reports. (There were preliminary fights; I assume those weren’t included in the main total, because they’d drag down the averages.) That is notably shorter than UFC Freedom 250, so it makes a difference. This fight ended up with 20.4 million hours, which compares to 31.5 million for UFC Freedom 250.
Again, those are good numbers, though also well behind…checks notes…Love Island USA for the week. (It peaked at 33.3 million hours.)
Anyways, here’s the charts I recently made for UFC Freedom 250, with UFC 329 along side. First, here’s how it stacks up to other Paramount TV shows, which I like because, I mean, these fights aren’t that much cheaper than scripted shows (if at all):
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…
- How UFC 329 stacks up to other Paramount+ shows…
- And whether that means Taylor Sheridan should earn $1 billion per year
- Netflix’s latest documentary trying to rival scripted films…
- Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’s debut on HBO Max…
- Big Brother’s big broadcast numbers…
- All the flops, bombs and misses in film…
- Over seven more bespoke charts and graphs, plus the top ten charts for the week…
- And more…
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Coming Soon!
Broadcast channels (mostly) take the summer off in terms of new scripted shows, but not the streamers! We’ve got big shows and films (including some downright huge shows and films) coming all July. Just next week, we’ve got Netflix’s new Will Ferrell golf comedy, The Hawk, Apple TV’s Anya Taylor-Joy crime thriller, Lucky, Prime Video’s action comedy, Ride or Die (starring Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddington), along with the third season of Netflix’s Quarterback and the fourth season of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On.
Plus, Obsession comes to Peacock, Heartstopper wraps up with a movie, and a new Descendants film heads to the Disney Channel then Disney+.
Things stay busy all month long, covering the fourth season of Ted Lasso, which was the biggest show on streaming in the United States in 2023 and the second season of Netflix’s Ransom Canyon. Lioness and Star Trek Strange New Worlds return to Paramount+, while The Challenge moves there from MTV. Hulu has the latest seasons of King of the Hill and Futurama and big debuts like Furious, an Emmy Rossum crime thriller, and The Shards, a Ryan Murphy/Bret Easton Ellis sexy YA thriller. And a Big Bang Theory spinoff is heading to HBO Max.
Wow.
And there’s a ton of movies, both theatrical films (The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Hulu/Disney+; The Drama and Mortal Kombat II on HBO Max; You Me, & Tuscany and Pressure on Peacock) and streaming films, like The Dink (starring Jake Johnson) on Apple TV, 72 Hours (starring Kevin Hart and multiple Saturday Night Live cast mates) on Netflix, and The Devil’s Mouth, a shark movie, on Prime Video.
Long term, some fun kids news came out recently. Free Willy is getting a reboot from Warner Bros. and the Russo brothers, with a new screenplay from Mary-Margaret Kunze and Jade Halley Bartlett.
But the big, big news is that Disney is rebooting The Mickey Mouse Club with Fulwell Entertainment. Not to throw shade, but I have to ask: what took so long? Like Mickey Mouse (who should always have a kids show like Mickey Mouse Funhouse on the air), Disney, as a company, should always have a version of this show going on. This feels like a no brainer to me.
