Netflix Top 10 Report: ‘The Watcher’, ‘Someone Borrowed’ and ‘The Curse of Bridge Hollow’

Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending October 16th, 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 October 10th to October 16th, 2022, 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. However, in its latest letter to shareholders, Netflix used the CVE metric to talk about The Gray Man so there’s value in this metric, however imperfect it might be.

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1. The Watcher is watched—a lot.

Ryan Murphy strikes again. On the heels of the success of Dahmer, The Watcher is also a success on Netflix with 22.6M CVE in only four days, the highest launch for an English series launched on a Thursday on the record.

How does it compare to DAHMER, which was launched on a Wednesday? Well, The Watcher has a better start than DAHMER, accumulated 22.2M CVE in five days.

However, it’s hard to imagine that The Watcher will follow in the footsteps of DAHMER for much longer as the series seems not to have the momentum its predecessor had. Its audience ratings are not as good either (6.7/10 on IMDB for The Watcher compared to 8.1/10 on DAHMER).

Speaking of DAHMER, I predicted two weeks ago that the series would end its 28-day run around 92-98M CVE. After 26 days, it is currently at 93.3M CVE, so that looks right on the money.

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2. The Curse of Bridge Hollow does an expected start which isn’t saying much

There is something about Netflix US comedies that is quite notable in the numbers they get:

1. Either they are destined to get a worldwide appeal
2. They are destined for a much more US-centric viewership.

The Curse of Bridge Hollow, starring Marlon Wayans, is in the second category, as expected, I should say.

With 16.6M CVE in its first three days, it’s on par with A Madea Homecoming with Tyler Perry and above Home Team with Kevin James, two movies I would also classify as US-centric comedies.

If you want your film to travel, you need stars such as Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg (34.2M CVE in three days for Me Time) or Rebel Wilson (29.7M CVE in three days for Senior Year).

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3. Someone Borrowed shows that it’s always the summer of love somewhere in the world.

Netflix is a global platform, and sometimes that fact is easy to forget.

But Someone Borrowed is here to remind us that even if the Summer of Love is over in our occidental parts, it’s just beginning in the southern hemisphere. The Brazilian rom-com launched last Tuesday and racked up 15.4M CVE in six days, making it the best debut for an international film released on a Tuesday since Netflix started to release its weekly numbers.