Pictures: Netflix / Illustration by What’s on Netflix
The fifth bi-annual Netflix Engagement Report is out in the wild, and for the first time, we’re doing a big deep-dive into a bunch of takeaways and learnings we find interesting and we hope you will too!
Before diving into the data, we want to take a moment to promote our tools! Firstly, we’ve updated our Netflix Engagement Report search page, which means you can now dive into the fifth report in a searchable, filterable, and sortable table, rather than battling with Google Sheets or Excel. We’ve also got various combined reports, including our new 2023, 2024, and 2025 combined reports, so you can see how things are evolving year over year.
If you want even more Netflix Engagement Report goodness, our top 10 search tool allows you to not only search the weekly top 10s but also see all the Engagement Report data for any given title, which will enable you to build graphs.
If you missed Netflix’s blog post on the new engagement report, you can read it here. Highlights of their analysis include:
- Massive engagement: Netflix viewers watched over 95 billion hours from January to June 2025, with ~99% of all viewing captured in the report.
- Enduring Netflix Originals: Nearly half of viewing came from titles released in 2023 or earlier, with Orange Is the New Black, Ozark, and Money Heist each surpassing 100M hours, and films like Red Notice and We Can Be Heroes topping 20M views.
- UK and non-English hits: Adolescence was the #1 series with 145M views, while one-third of viewing came from non-English titles, including Squid Game’s final season (72M views in four days) and other South Korean and Scandinavian hits.
- Rising global storytelling: Scandinavian thrillers like Secrets We Keep (34M) and Colombian series like Medusa (21M) attracted significant audiences, showing strong regional growth.
- Big movie performances: Blockbusters like Back in Action (165M), Tyler Perry’s STRAW (103M), and The Life List (96M) dominated, while non-English films like Exterritorial (88M) and Counterattack (71M) gained global traction.
- Live & anime growth: WWE events drove 280M viewing hours, while anime saw strong engagement from SAKAMOTO DAYS, Naruto, and Studio Ghibli classics.
- Diverse genre appeal: Dramas (Zero Day 61M), comedies (Running Point 41M), and long-running favorites like Cobra Kai and Big Mouth continued to perform strongly.
- Family & kids content thriving: Titles like Ms. Rachel (53M), Gabby’s Dollhouse (108M across seasons), and animated films like KPop Demon Hunters (37M) entertained younger audiences worldwide.
This is the fifth Netflix Engagement Report, released by Netflix, covering global viewership between January 1, 2025, and June 30, 2025.
Most Watched New Netflix Original Movies of the First Half of 2025
We have already examined the most-watched movie launches of 2025 in our dedicated post, but for that, we use the first two weeks. This metric proves to be a reliable indicator, albeit there are a few examples where titles grow from week 3 onwards, although this is rare. Three of these titles are from Netflix internationally, and all of them have broken into the all-time most-watched Netflix Original movies list, whereas only Back in Action has broken through from the English-language titles.
- Back in Action – 164.7M views
- STRAW – 102.9M views
- The Life List – 95.5M views
- Exterritorial – 87.5M views
- Havoc -86.9M views
- The Electric State – 74.2M views
- Counterattack – 71.3M views
- Ad Vitam – 69.8M views
- Kinda Pregnant – 58.9M views
- Nonnas – 57.6M views
Most Watched New Netflix Original Series of the First Half of 2025
Thanks to the shorter runtime, Adolescence easily took the first place position away from Squid Game, which occupies slots 2 and 3. They’re the only two international shows in the top 10, although the remainder are all from the US and the UK. The common theme among international movies that do well is that they’re all in the action genre.
- Adolescence – 144.8M views
- Squid Game S2 – 117.30M views (note: this was released in late December)
- Squid Game S3 – 71.5M views
- Zero Day – 61.3M views
- Missing You – 58M views
- American Murder: Gabby Petito – 56.1M views
- Sirens – 53.3M views
- The Night Agent S2 – 53.2M views
- Ginny & Georgia S3 – 48.1M views
- American Primeval – 46.5M views
All Engagement Reports Most Watched
With five reports now in the wild, what are the biggest titles in terms of views over the period from January 2023 to June 2025? Here are the combined top 20s for both TV and movies. As always, the views metric tends to favor movies due to their shorter runtimes, but series consume more viewing hours.
TV
| TV Series Name | Hours Watched | Views |
|---|---|---|
| Squid Game: Season 2 | 1,460,200,000 | 203,800,000 |
| The Night Agent: Season 1 | 1,397,200,000 | 170,600,000 |
| Adolescence: Limited Series | 555,100,000 | 144,800,000 |
| Wednesday: Season 1 | 983,800,000 | 144,400,000 |
| Fool Me Once: Limited Series | 827,500,000 | 129,000,000 |
| Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story | 834,700,000 | 128,800,000 |
| CoComelon: Season 1 | 371,700,000 | 125,200,000 |
| Bridgerton: Season 3 | 984,600,000 | 123,300,000 |
| Peppa Pig: Season 6 | 234,100,000 | 115,100,000 |
| Ginny and Georgia: Season 2 | 1,011,500,000 | 103,500,000 |
| Baby Reindeer: Limited Series | 398,600,000 | 100,400,000 |
| CoComelon: Season 2 | 277,600,000 | 98,600,000 |
| ONE PIECE: Season 1 | 744,200,000 | 98,400,000 |
| The Gentlemen: Season 1 | 654,600,000 | 97,900,000 |
| CoComelon: Season 8 | 102,400,000 | 96,100,000 |
| Squid Game: Season 1 | 786,600,000 | 94,600,000 |
| Bebefinn: Season 1 | 233,400,000 | 92,200,000 |
| Little Angel: Volume 1 | 337,700,000 | 90,600,000 |
| Avatar The Last Airbender: Season 1 | 630,000,000 | 86,900,000 |
| The Perfect Couple: Season 1 | 440,900,000 | 86,400,000 |
Movies
| Movie Name | Hours Watched | Views |
|---|---|---|
| The Boss Baby | 436,300,000 | 267,300,000 |
| Sing (2016) | 393,200,000 | 218,400,000 |
| Extraction 2 | 439,400,000 | 212,500,000 |
| The Mother | 414,000,000 | 212,400,000 |
| The Super Mario Bros. Movie | 321,800,000 | 209,900,000 |
| Leo | 369,600,000 | 207,200,000 |
| Leave the World Behind | 485,500,000 | 205,100,000 |
| Damsel | 356,700,000 | 194,500,000 |
| Minions | 291,800,000 | 192,500,000 |
| Shrek | 279,500,000 | 186,400,000 |
| Carry-On | 369,900,000 | 185,000,000 |
| Trolls | 281,500,000 | 181,700,000 |
| Minions: The Rise of Gru | 266,100,000 | 181,300,000 |
| Lift | 313,600,000 | 175,800,000 |
| Hotel Transylvania 2 | 262,700,000 | 175,300,000 |
| Paw Patrol: The Movie | 245,100,000 | 171,100,000 |
| Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch | 241,900,000 | 168,700,000 |
| The Secret Life of Pets | 240,300,000 | 165,700,000 |
| Murder Mystery 2 | 250,500,000 | 165,200,000 |
| Back in Action | 313,000,000 | 164,700,000 |
Licensed Animated Movies Still Rule The Roost
Examining the combined report, the biggest titles in terms of views are mostly animated. The Boss Baby tops the charts with 267.30 million views, with Sing picking up 218.40 million. Netflix’s own Leo still appears to be the biggest Netflix Original animated title (although KPop Demon Hunters seems to be on the hunt for that particular crown) with 207.20 million views. DreamWorks and Illumination titles dominate the most watched movies list in general, so why is this happening?
Speculating, it comes down to several factors. Firstly, as we’ve noted before, kids’ titles are by default more bingeable. Whether it’s because your kid watches them multiple times a year or even daily, they consume hours like there’s no tomorrow. Another significant factor, in my opinion, is that many of these animated titles are constantly available on and off Netflix. Freshness is the most significant driver of viewership on Netflix in any given weekly top 10. So, when a title like Minions remains available for 3 months, disappears for 6, and then returns for another 3, it receives a boost from Netflix, which promotes the title higher up within its UI and encourages more plays. Finally, Netflix has extensive global access to Universal’s animation library, with their titles appearing on and off Netflix in quick succession all around the world, and animation is a popular genre.
How is WWE Performing on Netflix?
For this section, I will refer to the excellent breakdowns by Brandon Thurston for Wrestlenomics. There, he has been breaking down the viewership for WWE every single week, and for the Engagement Report, he did another solid job examining the viewership for each live event. While we’ll cover the Netflix viewership below, there’s some excellent analysis on how it compares to other distributors in the past and present on this page.
As you may know, Netflix now has the majority of WWE events, although they are currently only available internationally. In the US, Netflix only has the rights to WWE Raw.
As we’ll witness with most live events streamed weekly on Netflix, things start strong and then quickly reveal their actual viewership in week 2, which presents a more accurate snapshot of who’s watching from week to week, rather than just tuning in because it’s new.
- With RAW, the average views are 3.4-3.5 million (note that June 30th’s RAW was only available for one day, which skews the lower figure). That’s more than double the 1.6M USA Network had last year albeit that’s only in the US.
- For WWE SmackDown, viewership ranged from 1 million views to a low of 700,000 (excluding June 27th, as it only had 3 days to accumulate views), with an average view count of 854,167.
- WWE NXT drew the lowest average of 196,429 per episode including special events.
- For the special events (also known as PLE/Premium Live Events), views ranged from 1.5M for Backlash to 3M for Royal Rumble 2025 (excluding Night of Champions as it released June 28th).
Here’s all the WWE viewership in graph form:
What’s the takeaway with WWE? Firstly, WWE fans are loyal and will turn out week after week, regardless of where it’s streaming in the world, and don’t see wild swings week to week. On the other hand, we’re not currently seeing increased discovery for live events within the Netflix UI, so it’ll be interesting to see how this trend develops over time and whether Netflix’s viewership remains steady, declines, or eventually increases. We know that Netflix’s new UI is designed to help promote live content, so as that rolls out, we’ll see if it has the desired outcome.
Netflix Experimenting with Weekly Live Shows Is Still in the Early Days
Sticking with live events, we had a few of those this half of the year, in addition to the WWE. Pop the Balloon LIVE seems to be the biggest winner, bringing the successful YouTube show over to Netflix. Things kicked off strong with 3.4 million views for the first episode, although they dropped to two-thirds of that in weeks two and three before finding a relatively stable floor of around 600,000 views.
John Mulaney’s live experiments continue Netflix’s, let’s say, soft performance in the past with talk shows. The first episode performed quite well, garnering 1.6 million views during the period (presumably with most of that viewership heavily front-loaded), but that fell away the next week, settling at a steady level between 300,000 and 500,000 views.
Of course, the show, like many other talk shows, looks to other platforms for exposure and views. Most of the clips and monologues from the show have wound up on Still Watching Netflix YouTube Channel, with views sometimes reaching the mid-6 figures, but more often with a few tens of thousands of views currently. Veteran late-night executive and producer Nick Bernstein spoke with Matt Belloni on The Town podcast and compared this viewership to that of traditional late-late night television. Whether that’s a glass half full or half empty, take given the state of late-night on traditional TV and the fact that Netflix is global… We’ll let you decide.
Elsewhere on the live event front, it does appear that the Screen Actors Guild Awards had a nice bump in hours watched and views rising 53% year over year:
| Title Name | Runtime | Hours Watched | Views |
|---|---|---|---|
| The 31st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards | 2:06* | 9,100,000 | 4,300,000 |
| The 30th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards | 03:15 | 5,900,000 | 1,800,000 |
Is 18 months the sweet spot for TV licensing?
A great hobby horse of mine is licensing. For a period between 2019 and 2023, licensing almost became a thing of the past. However, due to numerous factors that I won’t repeat, this has changed substantially in recent years, with newer and older titles from almost all of Netflix’s main competitors now coming to the service. There is a twist, though; they’re staying for many years like they used to, but for 1-3 years, depending on the title. While some may not be happy about the series leaving so soon, particularly with those with big episode counts to binge through, there is a reason for it: the fall off in viewership is quite large.
Using Ballers from HBO as an example demonstrates this perfectly. It starts off incredibly strong, but as the engagement reports demonstrate, by around a year, most of the viewership has now gone away, and by the last 6 months, it’s on Netflix, viewership is edging close to zero. Licensing beyond this point seems inconsequential to viewership, so Netflix might as well save the money and move on to the next show.
If you want to leverage the learnings from the perspective of a rival distribution company with its own streaming service, you may only want your show to appear on Netflix for 3-6 months to help drive people to your own platform. However, those deals seem hard to pull off.
Why PULSE, The Recruit and The Residence Got Canceled
This is an interesting one! While Deadline suggests that the numbers for these shows indicate Netflix has a very high bar for renewal (which is largely true), we can glean some insights into why these three specific shows were canceled. If you stack up the weekly top 10s and then tot up the post-top 10 weekly average through the end of June, you get some insights.
The Recruit is perhaps the most clear-cut cancellation, but The Residence is a bit of a headscratcher, as it appears to have maintained relatively good performance after its Netflix top 10 run, even gaining more viewership than Ransom Canyon per week, despite that series being renewed. Of course, budgets and other factors like completion rate come into play, so we’re almost certainly missing a piece of the puzzle.
| Title | Release Date | Weeks in Top 10 | Views in Top 10 Period | Post-Top 10 Views | Post-Top 10 Weeks | Post-Top 10 Weekly Avg | Total Views (Jan–Jun 2025) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PULSE | April 3 | 4 weeks | 20.2M | 6.0M | ~9 weeks | ~667K/week | 26.2M |
| Ransom Canyon | April 17 | 4 weeks | 23.3M | 5.7M | ~7 weeks | ~814K/week | 29.0M |
| The Residence | March 20 | 4 weeks | 22.9M | 10.4M | ~11 weeks | ~945K/week | 33.3M |
| The Recruit S2 | January 30 | 3 weeks | 15.3M | 8.8M | ~19 weeks | ~463K/week | 24.1M |
Ms. Rachel is coming for CoComelon’s Crown
Rewind just five years ago, and the only kids’ show that could grab headlines back then was CoComelon, which was known for topping the charts week-in and week-out. That eventually led to the commissioning of even more episodes, an exclusive spin-off series, and even a mobile game (which was recently removed); however, as we’ve covered, it has slowly been losing ground in the top 10s over time. So what’s next? Ms. Rachel. As highlighted numerous times by friend of What’s on Netflix Emily Horgan on her Substack, The Kids Streamersphere, the YouTuber has instantly found success on Netflix. In fact, Ms. Rachel was the seventh most watched show overall for the first half of the year.
There is a caveat, though. Its views don’t quite tell the whole picture, given that only one season is available with only a handful of episodes, which certainly gives it an unfair advantage. So if you stack up all the CoComelon content on Netflix (17 seasons across CoComelon and CoComelon Lane) for the period, you come to 273.20 million hours watched. Ms. Rachel’s single season of four episodes: 162.10 million hours watched. Incredible.
Given the news that Netflix is set to lose the main licensing rights to CoComelon in the coming years, they’ve already found a suitable alternative.
The Flops So Far in 2025
Sadly, there’ve been several flops for Netflix so far this year.
- Lost in Starlight (#1413), with only 2 million views, is a disappointing haul of viewership, given that it received quite a push and is one of the first-ever anime titles from South Korea.
- Emilia Perez – Considering this was Netflix’s biggest shot at winning the Oscar this year (albeit with a campaign that imploded quite spectacularly), the movie only rose from 1.5M views from Jul-Dec ’24 to 3.4M for this period, making it Netflix’s 914th most watched movie of the period. In its defence, it’s not a wide Netflix release, but considering the buzz, it’s not a huge bump.
- FUBAR – We’ve already covered this, but season 3 looks as unlikely as any of the shows we mentioned above that were canceled. Considering S1 did 37.3M views in its opening window, 7.5M is a significant drop.
- Sports Adjacent Documentaries – we’ve been beating this drum for a while, but most sports documentaries are just really struggling to find viewership, especially since the explosion in volume. F1: Drive to Survive remains the clear winner, with 10.4 million views for S7 (down from 11.6M views for S6 in the period Jan-Jun ’24), and the new Hello Sunshine extension covering The Academy did a very modest 1.1M views. Race for the Crown only got 2.4M, and there were also substantial drops for Full Speed and Six Nations: Full Contact. The Untold docu-series seems to be working relatively well, however.
- Inside and Other British Reality Series – A week-long rollout is unusual for this reality series that saw the second season transition from YouTube to Netflix. It only pulled in 2.4M views which seems a little low compared to some of Netflix’s other competition series. Sneaky Links similarly struggled with 3.1M views. Battle Camp did 6.3M views and Temptation Island 10.6M.
- Netflix TUDUM 2025? – Considering this event was exclusive to Netflix and had some of the biggest stars and Netflix shows in the world, only pulling in 2.2M views seems a little low. It was also available on Netflix for a few weeks afterward, although the argument could be made that most of the consumption of this event occurred via clips and news articles following the stream.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle
You’ve probably seen a lot of tabloid headlines about With Love, Meghan being a flop, and honestly, for a cooking show, it did pretty well. We know that the series garnered 2.6 million views in its first week on the platform and went on to accumulate 5.3 million views for the entire month. The only comparable comps are titles like Chef’s Table Legends, which achieved 2.2M views across the entire first six months.
Much less impressive is their prior output, such as Polo, which was released last year as the 2,946th most-watched series, with 600,000 views, and fell to 3,436 with only 500,000 views. The tell-all documentary series “Harry & Meghan” continues to garner impressive viewership, now, a couple of years on, with a total view count of 16.6 million views for all of 2023, 2024, and 2025. Their other documentaries, Heart of Invictus and Live to Lead, were not featured in either of the last two reports, meaning each had fewer than 100,000 views. Not great.
A Few Movie Sequel Headscratchers
Looking through Netflix’s movie lists, there are a handful of Originals that continue to pull in impressive viewership numbers year after year. While some have been announced for sequels, those follow-ups don’t seem to be arriving anytime soon. Three titles stand out here. We Can Be Heroes remains a consistent hit, adding another 26.9 million views and landing at #55. It begs the question—why did Netflix tap Robert Rodriguez for another Spy Kids movie instead of a follow-up here? Red Notice is another major player, sitting at #63 for the first half of the year with an additional 23.7 million views. And even The Gray Man, which was originally set to spawn two sequels and a spin-off, managed another 16 million views at #127, proving there’s still plenty of interest to justify delivering on those promised continuations. Leo is another good title that’s ripe for a sequel, but thankfully, that’s already in production.
If you consider the viewership for these is often double that of Enola Holmes, which is getting a third movie, it’s a bit of a headscratcher.
You’ll find more weekly analysis on the engagement reports and Netflix’s weekly top 10s in our top 10 reports that arrive every Tuesday evening!
