Pictured: One Piece, Love at First Sight
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending September 17th, 2023. Lots to cover this week including One Piece, Love at First Sight, Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction, El Conde, Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons, and Once Upon a Crime.
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 was updated over the summer with even more data from the Nielsen top 10s.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from September 11th, 2023 to September 17th, 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. One Piece is renewed for a second season.
The hit series One Piece has been renewed for a second season, which we predicted since the first numbers it got, but noticeably, it wasn’t renewed for two new seasons, just the one, meaning that a good season 2 start will be key for the future of the series. It has been in the charts for three weeks now, which allows us to compare it to other series in our dataset after 14 days, and here’s what we can see.
First, One Piece did the fourth-best launch for a new US series released since June 2021 with 42.7M CVEs (excluding limited series).
One Piece vs other new Netflix since June 2021 – First 14 days
If we just look at the new US series released in 2023 (including limited series), One Piece did the third-best launch of the year so far, behind The Night Agent and Queen Charlotte.
It’s good overall but I can’t help but think that if that CVE numbers had been higher by, let’s say, 10-15M, the series would have been renewed for two seasons.
2. Love at First Sight is ending the Summer of Love on a good note.
Netflix has had a pretty terrible “Summer of Love” in 2023 with disappointments all around. Rom-com Love at First Sight with Haley Lu Richardson is the last one in the line-up this year and it did a very decent start with 14.1M CVEs, the best launch for a Netflix US rom-com this year.
Love at First Sight vs other Netflix Original movies – first 3 days
What is puzzling here is that Love at First Sight is a (delightful) Christmas rom-com released in the middle of September. Rightly placed around November, it probably could have done even better. Another puzzling thing is why on Earth would you not name this film Love at First Flight since it talks about how two strangers fell in love during a transatlantic flight. I mean, it was right there.
3. Prestige films season is upon us and two international films launch it.
Every year now, come September it’s the start of “prestige films season,” which will end around the first week of January.
This is when Netflix releases all of its awards hopeful, American films for the most part, but also international films that played during the fall festivals. Last week, two of them were released.
First up is Bille August’s Danish period film Ehrengard, which did a relatively modest launch with only 4.3M CVEs over its first four days, but prestige films are usually not the most watched crowd pleasers, so let’s just say that it’s quite good for what the film is: a Danish period film.
The same can be said for Pablo Larrain’s directed El Conde which did a muted launch with only 1.2M CVEs over its first three days, the worst launch for a film from Latin America released on a Friday.
Who could have thought that a Chilean black-and-white satire film imagining that dictator Pinochet was a vampire who wanted to end his life would not be a massive hit? Audiences work in mysterious ways. But prestige films’ goal is elsewhere. It’s about preserving relationships with talents and have some recognition on the awards circuit, not so much about doing huge numbers on the service.
4. Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons is back for a seventh season and fans are in.
The seventh season of the long-running docuseries Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons was just released and it launched with 1.8M CVEs over its first three days of release. It’s a start quite similar to the one of season 6 (which was released on a Wednesday at the time), so fans of the series are still here.
5. Once Upon a Crime is writing quite a nice story in the charts.
Netflix Japan is on a roll lately after the success of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead over the summer.
They have another quite good hit on their hands with Once Upon a Crime, in which Little Red Riding Hood hunts criminals who committed crimes in popular fairy tales. The film launched with 5.4M CVEs, the fourth-best launch for an Asian Netflix film released since June 2021.
The film managed to break through in Europe and Latin America, which is good for a Japanese film.
That’s all for this week; feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.