Pictured: One Piece, Disenchantment and Heart of Invictus
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending September 3rd, 2023.
Every Tuesday, Netflix updates its top 10 stats page with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past seven days. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data easily, visit our tool, which has just been updated with even more data from the Nielsen top 10s.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from August 28th, 2023 to September 3rd, 2023, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent,” or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours viewed announced by Netflix by the runtime of films or series. It allows for better comparisons between films and series, but it’s not an audience metric. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season.
1. One Piece is out and it’s doing great but it’s also not a groundbreaking success.
If you’ve been spending time in your Twitter bubble the past few days, you might have come across tweets about how One Piece is breaking records and so forth. Well, we just had the first numbers on its launch, and it’s nowhere near record-breaking. With 18.5M CVEs over its first 4 days, it’s the third-best opening for a series released on a Thursday since 2021.
First 4 days – New Netflix US Series Released on a Thursday
You can find a whole lot of insights in the article Kasey wrote here but let’s just focus on one aspect of this show: can it break into the all-time Top 10 after its first 91 days? The number 10 so far is Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, and luckily, we do have a pretty comprehensive view of how it fared week after week when it launched in May, so we can compare it to One Piece’s launch.
One Piece vs Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story CVE viewership
As you can see, One Piece so far is sailing in a current that will likely make it miss the all-time Top 10 unless it can pull off a massive second week, steer away from the dreaded third-week drop, and finally sail into the calm waters of the following weeks and land in the Top 10. It won’t be easy, and next week will be key.
2. Disenchantment is back for its final season and its numbers show you why.
Last week, Matt Groening’s animated series Disenchantment came back for its fifth and final season, and its launch was not good at all, with 1.4M CVEs over its first three days. That’s considerably less than the launch of the fourth season (and presumably the launches of the first three seasons), and that might explain why season 5 is the final season.
Disenchantment season 4 vs season 5 Netflix viewership
3. Audiences decided not to choose Choose love.
Picture: Netflix
Choose Love is the latest interactive experiment from Netflix in which you are thrust into a rom-com and can decide the outcome of the film. An interesting experiment, but unfortunately, audiences decided not to watch the romantic comedy, which launched with 6.5M CVEs over its first 4 days, the worst launch for a Netflix US rom-com released on a Thursday since 2021. That’s tough love.
Choose Love vs other Netflix romance movies in first 4 days
4. Heart of Invictus misses the charts this week.
Heart of Invictus, another Prince Harry-produced project, missed the chart this week for its debut and did not get into any weekly Top 10 worldwide. It’s good that the former Royals are able to produce passion projects, but it would be even better for Netflix if somebody was to actually watch them.