Pictured: Through My Window 3, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Mea Culpa
It’s time for another rundown of the big stories from this week’s top 10s for the week ending February 25th, 2024. This week, we’ll be covering Avatar: The Last Airbender, season 6 of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, Mea Culpa, Can I Tell You a Secret? and a check-in with One Day a few weeks on. We’ll also have another Engagement Report Deep Dive looking into Netflix Original docs!
As a reminder, you can find the full top 10 list for this week on the Netflix top 10 satellite site or by using our tool that allows you to search per title.
In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from February 19th, 2024 to February 25th, 2024, 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. Avatar: The Last Airbender is blowing away the competition.
This was one of the riskiest projects from Netflix in recent years. With many creative issues during its production, a highly rumored budget (somewhere between $200M and $300M or even higher), and a new take on a beloved license that could have been another Cowboy Bebop.
But Avatar: The Last Airbender is now tracking more like One Piece, with a massive launch to the tune of 21.2M CVEs over its first four days and the second-best launch for a new Netflix series released on a Thursday (excluding limited series).
Avatar: The Last Airbender vs other Netflix renewed/canceled show
The series should be renewed quite quickly, but if there’s one thing that Resident Evil taught us, it is that for series based on existing IPs, the numbers for the first week are “easy” to get as people are drawn to them. What matters now will be how the series holds up in the next two to three weeks. If it considerably slows down next week, it might not be able to justify the price tag of the Volume technology it uses (remember 1899, anyone?).
If it keeps going strong, a renewal should be announced promptly.
2. Through My Window 3 is holding well.
Just like seasons of series, film sequels tend to lose steam sequels after sequels, but what’s important is how much they lose from one installment to the other. In the case of the Spanish romantic drama Through My Window, the decay rate between films is relatively low, especially between the second and third films, showing that fans of the films were here to watch the final film when it came out.
3. Tyler Perry does it again with Mea Culpa
Mea Culpa won’t beat Netflix heavy-hitters but Tyler Perry is a bankable name for Netflix. With 16M CVEs over its first three days, its launch was just a notch under the launch of A Madea Homecoming, another Tyler Perry-produced Netflix film with several decades of built-in fans to boot. So that’s quite good, all things considered.
Mea Culpa vs A Madea Homecoming and A Jazzman’s Blues
4. A look back on One Day
When we mentioned One Day two weeks ago, it was concluded that the launch of the limited romantic series was quite disappointing.
Two weeks later, a miracle happened as the series held well. That could be thanks in part to getting a surge through Valentine’s Day and no doubt part to its quality. It’s managed to gain many new fans and get an impressive multiplier of x3.5 between its first four days and its first 14 days, the second best in class in my dataset for English-speaking series released on a Thursday, just behind Beef. That’s the sign of a sleeper hit.
One Day vs other Netflix Original limited series from day 4 through day 14
5. Can I Tell You a Secret? does a good launch.
The true crime docuseries of the week is the British series Can I Tell You a Secret? and in its first five days, it’s done well, launching with 6.5M CVEs, the second-best launch for a British docuseries (and the first if you count its British setting).
6. Formula 1: Drive to Survive stalls in its sixth gear.
When season 5 of Formula 1: Drive to Survive launched, it was a great launch, with just a slight decay rate from the launch of season 4, something that’s quite rare and precious to have if you want to get renewed often. But that’s a bit different with the launch of season 6 which started with only 2.9M CVEs, quite a steep decay from the 4.1 and 4M CVEs of season 4 and 5.
The series is already reportedly renewed for a seventh season.
7. Netflix Engagement Report Deep Dive: The very first Netflix Original docs.
The documentary world was entirely ablaze after the latest Oscar nominations, which saw five international docs get nominated, without any doc released by a streaming company. Netflix missed out with American Symphony or The Deepest Breath, for instance; two Oscar hopefuls and some observers pointed out that there’s a “resentment towards certain kinds of success,” meaning that docs released by streamers are looked upon unfavorably by the doc community.
Now, in what can only be described as a trolling move by Netflix, we learned this week that Netflix bought the last remaining doc without a distributor, To Kill a Tiger, and bought itself an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary.
That move will probably kill any chance for the doc to get awarded by the Academy, but it gave me the idea to take a look at how the first Netflix docs are fairing ten years after their release. I only looked at global Netflix Original documentaries, excluding The Square and Print the Legend, two documentaries unavailable globally (with the former actually leaving Netflix). Here’s how they were still watched during the first six months of 2023:
It’s interesting to note that two sports docs are in the top two spots, which might indicate a lasting effect of sports docs and one of the reasons why Netflix got into the “sports-adjacent programs” business, to quote them.
That’s all for this week; feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.