Picture: Netflix
Oscar voting just recently ended, and while it looks like it’s Oppenheimer’s night to lose, Netflix still has several titles fighting for the top prizes throughout the biggest night of the movie calendar. In preparation, we’ve been exclusively provided with more data on how these movies performed on Netflix.
As you may have read on What’s on Netflix over the years, we put a lot of emphasis on completion rates with help from data from the London-based Digital i and data from PlumResearch, both leaders in their field. We traditionally use completion rates for series primarily, given that it shows what percentage of viewers are getting through to the final episode. If a TV series has a high completion rate, it suggests the show keeps people hooked through to the final episode. If a show isn’t keeping people hooked, it’s probably not worth renewing.
However, we rarely get completion data for movies. That’s until now.
Sophia Vahdati, a strategic advisor for Digital i, walked us through their VTR metric, which is short for View-Through-Rate. It tells us what percentage of viewers watched the entire duration of a movie.
Vahdati told us, “From our experience analyzing this data over the past five years, over 70% is a high-performing View-Through-Rate for films on Netflix. Similarly to series completion rate, 50% and under is often viewed as a poor performance.”
The panels used to obtain this data include Netflix users in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway.
In case you missed it, Netflix had 18 nominations in total this year (19, if you include the recently acquired doc To Kill a Tiger), so let’s apply the metric to Netflix’s slate of movies and documentaries nominated for an Oscar.
Diving into the results, there are a few surprises here, so here’s the full chart:
| Title | VTR |
|---|---|
| El Conde | 44% |
| Maestro | 49% |
| American Symphony | 53% |
| Rustin | 57% |
| The After | 66% |
| Nimona | 67% |
| Nyad | 69% |
| The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar | 72% |
| Society of the Snow* | 72% |
First is that we’ve known Society of the Snow is a smash hit for Netflix (it now ranks in the all-time most-watched list), and this figure of 72% of people from across a broad range of countries getting through to the end is a remarkable achievement. The Wes Anderson short also performed quite well, considering it’s a little eccentric, to say the least, with over 70% of people getting through to the end.
Picture: Netflix
Maestro is the biggest disappointment on the list and Netflix’s most prominent movie for the awards season, with less than 50% of the people starting the movie not getting through to the end.
* In the case of Society of the Snow, the data only applies to their UK, French, Italian, German, and Spanish panels.
Are you surprised by any of the completion rates for the movies above? Let us know in the comments down below.