The Killer, Escaping Twin Flames and Blue Eye Samurai – Pictures: Netflix
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending November 12th, 2023. This week, we’ll cover The Killer, Escaping Twin Flames, Robbie Williams, Blue Eye Samurai, and The Billionaire, the Butler and the Best Friend.
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.
Missed our last top 10 report? We covered All the Light We Cannot See, Nyad, Locked In, and Wingwomen.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from November 5th, 2023 to November 12th, 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. The Killer gets rid of the competition this week.
Netflix treated The Killer like royalty last week and made sure that no other program would take away its thunder as it released no new English film or new English series. The Killer had the whole week to itself and it did a good launch with 27.9M CVEs over its first three days.
That’s the fourth-best launch of the year for a US original film that is not a sequel and a solid start for what is, in the end, a prestige Netflix film.
2. Escaping Twin Flames is no burning success.
If Netflix let The Killer have all the space on the release calendar last week, that wasn’t the case for documentaries, where it crammed three new docuseries on Wednesday, all of which had very weak launches.
Let’s start with Escaping Twin Flames, which did one of the worst launches for a new true crime docuseries of the year, with only 4.1M CVEs in its first five days.
3. Not many people let Robbie Williams entertain them last week.
One trend in 2023 has been the release of documentaries and documentary series authorized by stars. Think Arnold, Sly, Beckham, Pamela Anderson, etc. Robbie Williams is the most recent one, and let’s say that it’s not the one that will rock the charts as the docuseries launched with 3.9M CVEs over its first five days, just a notch above At Home with the Furys.
4. The Billionaire, the Butler and the Best Friend did a good start.
The third docuseries released last Wednesday was a French docuseries about one of the wealthiest women in the world and how she got embroiled in a sprawling story culminating with involving former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
That resonated well with audiences as the docuseries reached the Top 10 TV in 63 countries last week (compared to 35 countries for Robbie Williams and 18 for Escaping Twin Flames) and secured 3.8M CVEs over its first five days, one of the best launch for an international docuseries released on a Wednesday, besting two other French docuseries (in blue in the following graph).
5. Blue Eye Samurai is not really slicing and dicing through the charts.
If you follow Netflix on X, you might have noticed that the account tried really hard to promote Blue Eye Samurai, a new gory and violent animated series set in Medieval Japan. Last week, the series failed to break into the Top 10. For its whole first week since release last week, it did manage to chart, and with 2.9M CVEs for its first full week, the numbers are not good if we compare them to other animated series.
Now there’s a silver lining: animated series have had a tough time charting in the Top 10 since 2021, bar a few significant exceptions, so the fact that it did for its second week is already a success. It was a very small success but a win nonetheless.
That’s all for this week; let us know what you think in the comments below.
For more insights from Frederic, check out Netflix & Chiffres – a French-language newsletter that dives into Netflix’s top 10s as well as Nielsen charts and more.