Pictures: Netflix
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending December 25th, 2023. This week, we’ll look into the first weekend viewing figures of Rebel Moon – Part 1: A Child of Fire, The Taming of the Shrewd 2, Gyeonseong Creature, and another deep dive into the Netflix Engagement Report.
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 December 18th, 2023 to December 25th, 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. Rebel Moon is struggling for its first weekend.
Rebel Moon will become a test case for various topics related to Netflix and its numbers as it struggled for its opening week-end with just 23.9M CVEs over its first three days (and a few more hours, as the film released in the Americas on Thursday evening, a move that presumably did nothing to boost its numbers), the 10th best launch of a Netflix film released on a Friday in 2023.
First, this launch will put to rest the axiom that advertising is important when it comes to ratings. Rebel Moon has been arguably the most heavily promoted title of the year, with experiences all over the world, teasing all year and especially during TUDUM, etc, and it did not really move the needle for its opening weekend.
Second, this launch also proves that Netflix does not tamper with its numbers. If it had a hand in this, there’s no way it would have released such weak numbers for the number-one film of its 2023 slate.
Finally, that’s possibly an indication that if advertising will not a lot for your film, bad publicity might, and Rebel Moon might have suffered from several self-inflicted wounds: press reviews being released far in advance and not very good, the declarations from Snyder about a better, longer, R-rated cut that might or might not be released on Netflix or just the fact that the film bears “Part 1” in its title when even Mission Impossible 7 proved that it could be a deterrent to viewers, with some waiting for the release of the second part to watch the whole thing.
Even with a great week 2, Rebel Moon will almost certainly miss out on being in the all-time Top 10 at the end of its first 91 days of release, and it might not even be best the launch of Army of the Dead, which got 75.6M CVEs over its first 28 days.
2. Leave the World Behind and Leo are still going strong.
Surprisingly enough, Netflix’s big end-of-the-year hit is Leave the World Behind, which had a great third week and just crossed the 100M CVEs threshold.
It is now the 6th best launch for any Netflix film released since June 2021 and is now perfectly positioned to get into the all-time Top 10, especially as Rebel Moon did not perform well.
Animated film Leo is going after an achievement of its own as it’s trailing The Sea Beast as Netflix’s most-watched animated title after 28 days. We might not have the final word on this fight but it was fun to see while it lasted as the two films got a nearly identical trajectory over time.
3. The Taming of the Shrewd 2 got tamed
Never make a sequel to a romantic film.
That’s one of my core beliefs as an avid rom-com aficionado, and the new Polish rom-com The Taming of the Shrewd 2 might prove just that with numbers as the second film did a really bad launch, falling way behind what the first film did back in 2022
4. Gyeonseong Creature is not scaring many people.
I have to assume that by releasing Gyeonseong Creature during the Christmas break and giving it the “release in two parts” prestige treatment, Netflix had higher hopes for the launch of this series as a possible international hit. But with only 3M CVEs for the first weekend of its first part, it’s an OK launch just by a South Korean standard.
It might pick up in its second week, as South Korean shows usually do, but it’s not a right-out-of-the-gate success.
5. Netflix Data Dump big dive: canceled edition!
Your favorite Netflix series released before 2021 got cancelled after only one season? Well, it might still be watched a lot as the Netflix Engagement Report published two weeks ago gave us a rare glimpse into how titles perform over time on the service.
For this week and this new deep dive, we took a look at Netflix series canceled after just one season and released before 2021, and here’s what we found:
Messiah is the most-watched canceled series of the lot, with 17,000 complete viewings of the first season each day between January and June 2023. The series was noticeably canceled at the beginning of the COVID crisis.
On the podium, “Cursed” was only cursed by a cancellation as the series is still widely watched worldwide. To round out the podium, fan-favorite Julie & the Phantoms is still watched, and fans are still campaigning for it to be revived.
At the bottom, two trends seem to emerge. First, the end of the Kenya Barris deal now makes more sense as his series #BlackAF is not showing signs of great legs. The series was first renewed and then cancelled. The second trend is that sitcoms are not getting much loved by Netflix audiences. Sure, there have been some exceptions, such as That 90s Show lately, but even canceled, they’re not getting that much viewership.
That’s all for this week, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.