Pictured: Soulcatch, Zom 100, Heartstopper Season 2
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending August 6th, 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.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from July 31st, 2023 to August 6th, 2023, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent,” or CVE, expressed in millions. That is the same metric used now by Netflix in its Top 10 following the June 2023 update in methodology. 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. Heartstopper is warming hearts all over again
Picture: Netflix
English series Heartstopper is gaining a new badge this week with the release of its second season and that badge is for “overachiever”, as the launch of season 2 is so far besting the launch of season 1.
You might think it’s quite common to have a second season that does superior numbers than the first season, but it’s not that common, so kudos to Charlie and Nick; you did really well on that front too. The series is already renewed for a third season.
Heartstopper CVE viewership season 2 vs season 1
2. The difficult summer of Netflix docs
Docs used to be surefire hits for Netflix, but this summer, the results are quite lackluster, and two new docs that launched last week did not move the needle on that front.
Poisoned, for instance, launched with only 5.1M CVEs after five days, besting only two other docs that were released this summer. So it’s getting better, ok, but nowhere near what Netflix docs used to do.
Anoter example last week was the launch of the first doc in the third season of “Untold” docs dedicated to sports stories, and this one was about Jake Paul. Well, it scored the worst launch for a US Netflix doc released Tuesday in my dataset, with 3.3M CVEs over its first six days—another low point for Jake Paul (if that were ever possible).
3. Some international successes on the film front.
Now it’s not all doom & gloom this week because two films did quite break through the noise of numbers. The first one is the Polish film Soulcatcher which did the second-best launch for an original Polish film released on a Thursday with 11.6M CVEs.
We’ve already mentioned Japan as being a territory in full expansion in the charts with series that start to perform well. Still, it’s happening in films too with the launch of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, an adaptation of a famous anime (already in Netflix’s Top 10 but in the TV charts). With 6.6M CVEs in its first four days, it is the best launch for a Japanese film released on a Thursday on record. Something to build on for the future.
4. Split seasons are the worst (for charts’ fans).
We could have mentioned this week the return of the second part of the second season of The Lincoln Lawyer or the second week of the second part of the third season of The Witcher, or even the second part of the first season of Fatal Attraction but Netflix’s methodology for split seasons makes it very difficult to analyze properly (and that was probably one of the lesser goals of those split seasons) as we do not know how the viewing numbers are split between the different parts of the season.
The CVE metric is not useful in that case, especially if we want apples-to-apples comparisons which are something we have always been striving for since we started a year ago this week. So let’s hope that split seasons are not here to stay because it makes this task much harder!