Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending December 11th, 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 December 4th to December 11th, 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.
1. Wednesday crosses the 1 billion hours viewed mark
Picture: Netflix
It took 60 days for Dahmer to cross the billion hours viewed mark.
It only took Wednesday 19 days with a shorter runtime! That’s how huge Wednesday is. Updating from last week, here’s how it compares to the other big Netflix successes:
Wednesday vs Netflix’s other biggest hits viewing hours
Wednesday is still on track to land around 175-185M CVEs after its first 28 days, a territory that used to be a no man’s land stuck between the 200M+ from Squid Game and the previous ceiling of around 100M from Stranger Things 4.
I don’t have any info, but I would guess Netflix itself is pretty surprised about Wednesday’s performance, especially compared to Stranger Things 4 which was already setting a high bar. We should see Wednesday hang around the Top 10 for several more weeks, so we’ll see how it evolves.
2. Troll is the first international film from Netflix to compete with American blockbusters
In its second week, Troll keeps crushing it and is already the number-one international film in the all-time chart after only 12 days.
Troll is effectively breaking the glass ceiling that plagued international films so far, from what we could see in the charts. The previous record for an international film after 28 days was the 69M CVEs for The Platform, the Spanish dystopian film. That was the highest for any international film, with other successes orbiting around the 40M-50M+ mark.
After 12 days, Troll is already at 75M CVEs, a trajectory that sends it playing in the big league with the other major American Netflix films of the year.
Here’s how it compares to The Adam Project, The Gray Man, Purple Hearts, Hustle, and The Man from Toronto.
Troll vs other big Netflix movie hits of 2022 in viewership
I predict it will finish its 28-day run around the 90M CVEs mark. We’ll see if we hear anything about a sequel in the coming weeks.
3. Harry & Meghan breaks a record
People love Royals and we had more proof of that fact this week with the launch of the first part of the docu-series Harry & Meghan.
Per Netflix, it is the biggest launch ever for any docuseries and there’s no denying that if we look at the numbers. Comparing it to the other 60 other documentary series that managed to break into the Top 10 over the past year and a half, it more than doubles the number of the CVEs of the closest one in my dataset (and that series was released on a Tuesday, while Harry & Meghan was released on a Thursday). If we compare its performance to the other two documentary series released on a Thursday, it’s in an entirely different league.
Harry and Meghan viewership vs other big Netflix docuseries releases
4. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio makes a pretty good start.
At first, when I looked at Pinocchio’s numbers, I was a bit surprised at how underwhelming its launch was. But if we compare it to other animation films released on a Friday on Netflix, it did a pretty good start, the second best, to be precise behind The Sea Beast, with 13.8M CVEs.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio viewership vs other Netflix animated movies
The upcoming Christmas holidays and the great word of mouth should carry it pretty nicely over the next few weeks but we’ll see.
5. Why Warrior Nun and Half Bad: The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself were canceled
Two series were canceled this week and if you’ve been reading these reports, neither should have surprised you.
The first one was the cancellation of Warrior Nun after two seasons and despite a huge campaign online to save it, that did not translate to any meaningful uptick in viewing, especially when compared to the other season 2 of 2022 so far.
Warrior Nun season 2 viewership vs other Netflix shows in 2022
The other cancellation was for Half Bad: The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself. When comparing it to other UK Netflix series of the year, it was lagging behind Vikings: Valhalla and Heartstopper, both of which were renewed for two more seasons.
Half Bad: The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself viewership vs. other shows
Sure, there are other factors to consider when Netflix decides to renew or cancel a series. Still, most of the time, just looking at the numbers is enough to understand if or why a series is eventually canceled or renewed.