Pictured: Pain Hustlers, Burning Betrayal, Life on our Planet
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending October 29th, 2023. This week we’ll cover Pain Hustlers, Burning Betrayal, Life on our Planet, Sister Death, Nowhere, and The Fall of the House of Usher.
Missed our roundup from last week? We covered Bodies, Old Dads, Big Mouth Season 7, Elite Season 7, and Sweet Magnolias.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from October 23rd, 2023, to October 29th, 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. Pain Hustlers is hurting
When you have Emily Blunt and Chris Evans headlining a new film from David Yates, you have to hope that it will do better than the launch of… rom-com Love at First Sight, for instance. Well, guess what, Pain Hustlers did a bit less for its opening weekend than Love at First Sight, which makes the opening weekend for Pain Hustlers a not-so-good one with only 14.1M CVEs.
It could be down to a number of reasons that we could name: the SAG-AFTRA strike prevented to actors from promoting the film, its core subject (pharmaceutical companies and drugs) was already at the center of Pain Killer was released two months ago, etc. After Reptile, Old Dads, and Fair Play, that’s another Netflix US film that can’t seem to break the mold of an opening weekend in the mid-teens millions of CVEs.
2. Burning Betrayal is all fired up.
One film that is breaking the mold is the Brazilian hot thriller Burning Betrayal which had a a fantastic launch of 14.7M CVEs over its first 5 days, breaking the record for the best launch of a Latin-American Netflix film released on a Wednesday.
Now, it has got some 365 Days vibes around it, so I expect it to drop quite sharply in the coming weeks.
3. Life on our Planet is showing signs of life.
In a very lackluster week for series, both English and international, only two new docuseries managed to get into the Top 10s, and one of those two is Amblin-produced Life on Our Planet. With 5.5M CVEs over its first five days, it did a good launch, the best one for a Nature docuseries released on a Wednesday. Now, that’s not saying much since there are only two other docuseries in that category in my dataset.
4. Sister Death can’t escape the fact it’s a Spanish horror film.
There’s a clearly identified niche for Spanish horror films, and that’s around 6M CVEs over their first three days. An observation that was confirmed again with the launch of Sister Death from Paco Plaza, which launched with 6.2M CVEs, not far from the 6.4M CVEs of Tin & Tina.
5. Nowhere is going places.
Namely, it’s going straight for the second spot in the all-time International Top 10. After 28 days, it reached 73.5M CVEs, besting The Platform, which is currently number 2 in the all-time international chart.
Nowhere won’t beat Troll, but there’s a very good chance it will take the second spot if we compare it to other films for which we have CVE numbers after 28 and 91 days.
In the best case scenario, Nowhere holds well and reaches 94M CVEs after 91 days. Worst-case scenario, it falls quickly and only gets 81.5M CVEs after 91 days, falling short of the 82.8M CVEs of The Platform, but that would be quite a surprise. I guess that it lands somewhere between 85 and 90M CVEs.
6. The Fall of the House of Usher (really) fell.
The Fall of The House of Usher just crossed the 14-day mark, which enables me to compare it to other limited series released by Netflix since 2021.
With an estimated 16.2M CVEs over its first 14 days, The Fall of the House of Usher did a bit better than Midnight Mass (14.7M CVEs), but that’s about it as it is charting in the bottom part of the graph.
Farewell, Mike Flanagan, and thanks for the series. Have a good run at Amazon Studios!
That’s all for this week, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.