Pictured: My Life with the Walter Boys, Leave the World Behind, and The Archies / Netflix
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending December 10th, 2023. This week, we’ve got much to cover, including Leave the World Behind, My Life with the Walter Boys, The Archies, Leo, Blood Coast and a first look at the Big Netflix Data Dump.
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. You can browse these top 10 numbers using our tool.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from December 4th, 2023 to December 11th, 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.
Table of Contents
1. Leave the World Behind is catching fire all over the world.
Julia Roberts is still a movie star who can attract eyeballs as her first Netflix feature film by Sam Esmail launched with a bang with 41.7M CVEs over its first three days, the fourth best launch of the year, ranging in the same “top tier” of launches as The Mother, Extraction 2 and Murder Mystery 2.
2. My Life with the Walter Boys is starting nicely.
The latest Netflix US series, My Life with the Walter Boys, aimed at young adults, did a fine launch with 7.5M CVEs over its first four days. That’s higher than Obliterated released last week and if we take a look at the fate of the new Netflix US shows of the year, I would say it has a very, very decent chance of being renewed as it’s probably not very costly.
3. The Archies flopped hard.
Netflix did the job for this one, hyping its release since it was first announced. Still, the Indian adaptation of the Archie comics, the same ones that inspired Riverdale, flopped hard for its launch with only 2.2M CVEs over its first four days, the worst launch for an Indian film released on a Thursday in our dataset.
More broadly speaking, Leave the World Behind sucked all the oxygen out of the charts this week, with the best Top 10 total views for the English Top 10 since the change of methodology from June, whilst the international Top 10 recorded its worst week since June.
4. Leo is still going strong
Animated film Leo is on its third week in the charts and after 14 days, it is still going strong, chasing the record set by The Sea Beast as Netflix most-watched animated title.
With the holiday season on the horizon, that might help it break that record.
5. Blood Coast triumphs in a lackluster week for the international titles.
French action series Blood Coast did a fine launch, too, with 5.6M CVEs over its first five days, and the best launch for a French series was released on a Wednesday. But that’s not saying much as it’s nowhere near the best launching European new series released on a Wednesday, especially the Polish limited series High Water, still the reigning champion of that category.
6. A first look into the Big Netflix data dump.
Yesterday will be forever known as the Big Netflix Data Dump Day as the streamer released a snapshot of global viewing hours for more than 18,000 films and shows from January to June 2023. It’s an impressive load of data but one that also has major methodological caveats that make its study tricky. That’s why I will stick with a pretty radical approach when using those numbers.
The first aspect to remember is that not all titles on Netflix are available globally. That makes data for licensed titles pretty impossible to compare on an apples-to-apples basis.
Since Netflix released only hours viewed, the second aspect is to switch those numbers back to CVEs, as it is the best way to compare titles of different runtimes.
And finally, since it is a snapshot from January to June 2023, you can’t really compare the series released in 2016 to the series released at the end of 2022. They’re not at the same stage of their life on Netflix, so it is probably better to compare shows released in the time period.
So, for this new weekly section of the streaming report that will take a look at some titles using this methodology, how watched are season 1 of The OA and season 1 of Canadian time travel series Travelers, more than six years after their launch?
Some people might look at that and say how, that’s low, but I, for one, think that it indicates that a series is never really unwatched on the service. Every day at the beginning of 2023, those two series averaged more than 1100 complete viewing of the whole season per day which is tiny in the grand scheme of things but still quite amounted to 2.1-2.5 million over the course of the six months. That’s not unwatched to me, and I expect more of those comparisons weekly! T
There’s also a very useful tool on our website if you feel like looking through thousands of lines.
That’s all for this week; feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.
Rating: R
