Pictured: Bird Box: Barcelona, Quarterback, Survival of the Thickest
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending July 10th, 2023. Titles covered this week include Bird Box Barcelona, Survival of the Thickest, Quarterback, Sonic Prime, Burn the House Down, and Nimona.
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 July 10th, 2023 to July 16th, 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. Bird Box: Barcelona is seen and watched
Spanish spin-off to the first Netflix hit movie Bird Box is starting quite well with 16.3M CVEs over its first week-end, one of the best launch for a European Netflix film. Now, it’s not doing the numbers a Bird Box 2 would presumably do but this might be enough to reach the International all Time Top 10 in the coming weeks if it holds well in the next weeks.
Bird Box Barcelona vs other Netflix Original International releases
Another sign Bird Box: Barcelona is not behaving like a Bird Box 2 for audiences is that the first Bird Box is nowhere to be seen in any weekly Top 10 for last week. Usually, when a sequel is released, the first film also manages to make its way back into the Top 10. Not in this case.
2. Nimona holds really really well
We said a few weeks ago that Nimona didn’t get off to a particularly good start but over the past two weeks, its hold has been nothing but impressive.
In its third week, its hours viewed only decreased by 30%, the best hold for any Netflix animated film released over the past two years, better than The Sea Beast or Back to the Outback. Now, sure, the film started very low but it might be one of the summer’s longest sleeper hit for Netflix.
Nimona vs other Netflix Original animated movies
3. Survival of the Thickest might not be fit enough to survive
Last week saw the launch of yet another Netflix US series called Survival of the Thickest and adapted from Michelle Buteau’s life story. With 3.7M CVEs over its first four days, it’s one of the lowest launches of the year for a new English series, on par with Unstable. So it might still be renewed, just like Unstable did (before the strike though so we’ll see) but it’s not looking good.
Survival of the Thickest vs other Netflix launches in 2023
4. Quarterback is the latest sports docuseries to fail to meaningfully resonate with global audiences.
You can’t blame Netflix for trying in 2023 to launch sports documentary series: Full Swing (golf), Break Point (tennis), Tour de France: Unchained (cycling) and now Quarterback about the NFL. But just like the other ones, Quarterback did quite a weak launch with only 3.3M CVEs over its first 5 days (and we can assume that most of them came from the US).
Quarterback vs Full Swing
Netflix will have a few other tries this year with the newly announced documentary series about the US Women’s soccer team and their adventure during the 2023 World Cup that should be released this fall.
5. Sonic Prime slows down to a halt with its season 2
Back in December, season 1 of Sonic Prime did a great launch, one of the best for an animated series in recent months. Since then, it’s been very quiet for animated series as only one of them managed to chart in a weekly Top 10. Season 2 of Sonic Prime broke the curse but let’s not celebrate just yet as its decay rate from season 1 is very steep, from 7.8M CVEs to 2.4M CVEs.
Sonic Prime season 2 vs other Netflix Original animated series
6. Is Japan the new South Korea for Netflix? Not yet but Burn the House Down shows promises.
Over the past few months, Netflix Japan has been steadily churning out new series that slowly increased their viewership one by one. Burn the House Down was released last week and it did the best launch for a new Japanese Netflix series, besting The Days and Sanctuary.
It still needs a breakout hit to truly become a new South Korea for Netflix but so far, it’s been very encouraging.