Jenna Ortega in “Wednesday,” Meghan Markle in “Suits” and Steve Carell in “The Office”
Courtesy of Netflix; Everett (2)
Netflix released a massive amount of streaming data on Tuesday – with total views of more than 18,000 movies and TV seasons for the first half of 2023.
Overall, it's an almost overwhelming amount of information that suggests Netflix's ability to attract its huge subscriber base (just under 239 million at the end of the period covered in the data dump) – and maybe not a ton more? The statistics shown refer to the total number of hours viewed. This is how Netflix measures engagement across its entire portfolio. However, it is also not the metric that the streamer uses to sort its weekly top 10 lists. These use the “view” formula of total watch time divided by running time, leveling the playing field somewhat for films and series with shorter running times. (And, of course, there are also economic factors and other metrics that influence decision-making and that the company continues to retain.)
That explains why Wednesday ranks fourth on the 18,000-title list released Tuesday, but tops Netflix's all-time ranking of English-language series (which also only covers the first 13 weeks of release). The fourth season of “Stranger Things” had more airtime during this period, but because its total runtime was more than six hours shorter on Wednesday, it ranks first in views.
After studying the huge table, here are a few things that stand out.
A very diverse top 25: DR. Ana-Christina Ramón, director of UCLA's Entertainment & Media Research Initiative – which produces a Hollywood diversity report every year – found that six of the top 25 titles on the list (Wednesday, La Reina del Sur season three, FUBAR, Manifest season four, The Mother and Fake Profile/Perfil Falso) have Latino leads or co-leads. Nine other entries in the top 25 – “Ginny & Georgia” appears twice in each of the two seasons – also feature people of color in leading or co-leading roles. That means 60 percent of the 25 biggest titles on the streamer from January to June include people from the global majority.
Additionally, six of the top 25 – La Reina Del Sur, Fake Profile and the Korean series The Glory, Physical: 100, Crash Course in Romance and Doctor Cha – are in languages other than English (although there are dubbed versions too).
Hard break: The most-watched show that was ultimately canceled is “Sex/Life,” which logged 175.5 million hours in its second season, which premiered in early March, and 126.4 million in its first season (which was available every six months). had hours. The second season received 45 percent less airtime in the first four weeks than the first season (albeit with two fewer episodes), but both seasons ranked in the top 70 titles from January to June.
Hot on the heels of “Sex/Life” is the fantasy drama “Shadow and Bone,” which Netflix dropped in November. There were 292.4 million hours watched across the two seasons (including 192.9 million hours in the second season). Netflix axed several other shows in addition to “Shadow and Bone” as it sorted out its priorities following the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike in November.
No thanks: About 21 percent of the 18,214 entries in Netflix's chart – 3,813 in total – had a watch time between 50,000 and 149,999 hours (rounded to the nearest 100,000), a barely noticeable amount of time when the entire list contains more than 93 billion hours. As far as we can tell, Making the Witcher: Blood Origin is the least-watched movie that a) was a Netflix original, b) was released worldwide, and c) was available every six months. It is a 14-minute behind-the-scenes documentary released on the same day (December 25, 2022) as The Witcher limited series spin-off starring Michelle Yeoh. Blood Origin itself was watched for 65.3 million hours from January to June.
The office is still a thing! At least in other parts of the world. The long-running NBC sitcom has been off Netflix in the US since 2020, but between January and June, its nine seasons were watched a total of 341.1 million hours worldwide.
Here are the top 20 titles on the list again, followed by a few select shows further down the rankings.
At No. 50 is “The Recruit” (146.9 million viewing hours), the spy drama starring Noah Centineo as a young CIA officer. The premiere took place on December 16, 2022. While almost 147 million viewing hours is a high number, The Recruit is 30 percent below the 20th title (Luther: The Fallen Sun) and a whopping 82 percent less than The Night Agent is clearly in first place with 812.1 million viewing hours.
Come in 100 is That '90s Show (95.1 million hours), the streamer's sequel to That '70s Show (which, by the way, streams on Peacock), which featured most of the original cast for at least a few episodes.
At No. 200 is the fourth season of Suits (64.2 million hours), which was the best-selling streaming show in the United States for most of the summer and fall, according to Nielsen rankings. The film premiered on Netflix in the US on June 17, but has been available in other territories for years – which explains the discrepancy between the streamer's weekly top 10 rankings and its semi-annual list. The fourth season never made the global top 10 – only the first season did after its US debut – but the boost from the US premiere coupled with half a year of being seen elsewhere in the world brought the show to a relatively high place in the rankings.
Falling down on Line 1,000 In the table it is the third season of the French animated series Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir with 21.4 million hours. Miraculous is tied to the film Hard Target 2, which is (who knew?) a sequel/remake of the 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme film (although Van Damme wasn't involved). The titles are listed alphabetically, so Miraculous gets the round number.
Our last stop is at the entrance No. 7,830, with the 2014 British film '71 becoming the first of 302 titles to reach 1 million viewing hours. Netflix rounded each show's watch time to the nearest 100,000, so all 302 of these shows and movies were watched for somewhere between 950,000 and 1,049,999 hours. This in turn means that you start with Entry 8,132 (Sr., a documentary about filmmaker Robert Downey Sr.) Every other title on the list was viewed for fewer than 950,000 hours. These 10,082 titles make up the majority of the entries on the list, but collectively they only accounted for 3 percent of the 93.46 billion hours watched.