Pictured: The Noel Diary and Wednesday
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending November 27th, 2022.
Netflix updates its top 10 stats page weekly with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past 7 days. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data easily, visit our tool.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from November 21th to November 27th, 2022, 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. However, in its latest letter to shareholders, Netflix used the CVE metric to talk about The Gray Man, so there’s value in this metric, however imperfect it might be.
1. Wednesday has an insane start.
Surprisingly (not), a young adult revival of a beloved IP is doing wonders on Netflix but what’s surprising here is the magnitude of its start. With 50.6M CVEs over its first 5 days, that’s more than double what Dahmer did over its first 5 days. That’s also more than 4 times what the previous Thanksgiving series did (that was True Story with Kevin Hart).
Wednesday vs Dahmer, True Story, Clickbait, God’s Favorite Idiot Viewership Graph
Now the big question about this launch is how high can Wednesday go?
If we take a more overall bird’s eye view of the biggest Netflix series of 2021 and 2022, here’s how Wednesday is performing so far after 5 days.
Wednesday vs Netflix’s other biggest shows
From there, there are two paths forward: an even higher second week that would send Wednesday far above Stranger Things 4 and Dahmer in the 120-140M CVEs region after 28 days or a more traditional second week for new seasons of returning shows (or returning IPs just like Wednesday and The Addams family) that would show a decrease and place it around the 100M CVEs mark after 28 days. It’s not in the Squid game territory yet and probably will never be but it’s a stellar launch.
2. The Noel Diary does an OK start.
Alongside Wednesday, Netflix released a typical Christmas romance with The Noel Diary over Thanksgiving, and it did an OK start with 21.8M CVEs in 4 days.
That’s the third-best launch for a romance film released on a Thursday, quite a far cry from Falling for Christmas with Lindsay Lohan (that still is a huge hit three weeks after its launch).
The Noel Diary vs. The Royal Treatment, Falling for Christmas and Love in the Villa
3. Some follow-ups on Elite and Warrior Nun
This week, the 6th season of Elite dominates the non-English series ranking. But as we wrote last week, the sixth season is attracting less watch time than the previous season to the tune of 35% less, which is the same gap as after three days.
Elite season 6 vs season 5 viewership graph
The second follow-up is about Warrior Nun S2 because it will probably disappear next week from the charts. Its third week is not showing the signs of improvement we wrote about last week for its second week. If we compare to other second seasons of English-speaking series, here’s what we find.
Warrior Nun season 2 vs other shows – those in green are renewed and those in red are canceled.
As for the previous weeks, Warrior Nun is on a path that does not bode well for its future. But with such a dedicated fandom, you never know what Netflix would do. A third season seems hard to get, but maybe a wrapping-up film or a shorter final season?
Everything and anything’s possible.