Pictured: Shadow and Bone, The Magician’s Elephant, Money Shot: A
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending March 19th, 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.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from March 13th, 2023, to March 19th, 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. Shadow and Bone’s Season 2 return disappoints
Picture: Netflix
Back in 2021, Netflix shared that the first season of Shadow & Bone had been sampled at least two minutes by 55 million accounts over its first 28 days. So expectations for season 2 were relatively high, and suffice it to say that the series disappointed with a lackluster 6.4M CVEs over its first four days.
When we compare that to other launches of recent seasons of US shows, season 2 of Shadow & Bone did barely better than season 2 of Warrior Nun, and we all know how that went down in the end for the series.
CVE viewership for Shadow and Bone season 2 premiere
So let’s hope that the second week is dramatically better because the hopes for a third season and a spin-off that, if trends continue, might soon be subject to dust.
2. The Magician’s Elephant is not quite the family movie Netflix wanted for Q1
Picture: Netflix
Mid-March seems to be, for Netflix at least, one of the periods of the year for family movies.
Last year, The Adam Project was just that, and in 2023, it fell on the animated movie The Magician’s Elephant to fill in the shoes.
Long story short, it did ok. Not great, but ok with 8M CVEs over its first three days.
It’s better than what Scrooge did in December, but it’s not quite Vivo, Back to the Outback or The Sea Beast levels. We will see how it will hold over the following weeks as animated films tend to be slow burns on the platform.
The Magician’s Elephant vs other Netflix Original animated movies
3. Money shot: The Pornhub Story lacks stamina in its first week.
Porn or true crime? Netflix subscribers seem to have spoken as Money Shot: The Pornhub Story launched with 8.7M CVEs over its first five days, far behind the most watched true crime docs released in recent months. That’s one less big mystery of the universe to answer.
Money Shot: The Porn Hub Story CVE viewership vs other Netflix Original documentaries.
4. All Quiet on the Western Front sees an Oscar bump in its 18th week.
Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front was released 18 weeks ago and of those 18 weeks, it managed to stay in the top 10 for all but one, briefly dipping out in week 6.
That’s quite an impressive feat, and this week, the Oscar bump from the ceremony was quite visible as the film doubled its hours viewed from the week before.
All Quiet on the Western Front Weekly Viewership – CVE
It’s a bump for sure but also a moderate one if we compare it to its release when it scored most of its viewing. Another film released on Netflix saw a bump last week, and that was RRR which won the Oscar for Best Original song.