The Sandman holds well in week 3, The Gray Man ends its 28-day run, and High Heat might be a slow-burn success. All the big stories from the Netflix top 10s. Here’s your top 10 report for the week of August 15th to August 21st, 2022.
Netflix updates its top 10 stats page weekly with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past 7 days. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data easily, visit our tool.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from August 8th to 14th, 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 either. 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 renewal of The Sandman may still be up in the air but its evolution on Netflix is very promising.
Picture: Netflix
Neil Gaiman tweeted about how a renewal for The Sandman was still nowhere in sight, and the series needed to perform incredibly well. Three weeks after its release, how are things going?
If we take a closer look at the evolution of CVE (in millions) for the series and if we compare them to other freshman seasons English series released over the last few months it’s holding its own.
Note: The CVE number for the third week of The Sandman includes the runtime of the bonus episode released on Netflix last Friday.
(Green: renewed series / Orange: series in limbo / Red: canceled series).
The Sandman is on track to be the most watched new English series (excluding limited series that do not need to worry about renewals) of the last twelve months after its first four weeks but will that be enough?
The show looks expensive and is produced by Warner Bros Television, so we may need to wait a bit more to hear about a decision from Netflix.
2. The Gray Man ends its first 28-day run at 4th (or 6th!?)
253 million hours in 28 days, that’s the magic number for The Gray Man.
This number allows the movie to rank 4th on the all-time Top 10 list for English films. But if we take a closer look at the CVE metric, The Gray Man is, in fact, 6th behind Extraction and The Adam Project, which were both shorter films.
CVE hours compared for top movies including The Gray Man marked in red.
3. High Heat might be a slow burn success.
High Heat is the first Mexican telenovela from Netflix. With 39 episodes lasting 40 to 50 minutes, it is definitely an anomaly in the sea of content released by Netflix as the years tick by.
Its launch seems low compared to other series but amid a very long series, it fared well in its first three weeks.
CVE hours for High Heat
Can it go the way of Cafe con Aroma de Mujer and end up in the all-time Top 10 for international series?
This remains to be seen but we can expect it to double or even triple its number of hours viewed next week and have a very modest drop week after week due to its size. Some series are meant to be binged but this one will probably be a slow burn week after week.
Missed any of the big stories from the Netflix top 10s last week?