SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " Ratings Report " 27 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
Netflix’s Summer of Bummer
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) Today, I’ve got a guest post from longtime friend of the newsletter, Brandon Katz. I’ve been trying to find time all summer to look at Netflix’s straight-to-streaming film slate, but between a pre-planned trip and Nielsen moving up their streaming data timeline, I’ve been swamped. So I reached out to Brandon, one of my favorite fellow analysts, to write about it. And I feel like he captured the tone and data focus of the newsletter perfectly. You can connect with Brandon on LinkedIn and Twitter. Enjoy! Don’t worry, folks. You’re in safe hands with me. To ease any anxieties about an interloper in ESG’s domain, I’ll start by stealing one of his best framing devices: headlines. Box office flops are covered in the same way the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles eye pizza: with cartoonish insatiability. I would know. I’m a former reporter who wrote nearly identical headlines: Yet, intentionally or not, streaming misses get treated with kids gloves, filtered through a rosy lens: In the last six years, U.S. streaming viewership has become nearly as transparent as the box office, but the data often arrives weeks later, in a number of less intuitive metrics, and with nary an official budget to be found. This plays into the Wall Street-whispering narratives major streamers have been cultivating for years. They get a pass in a way that theatrical studios simply don’t. Subscribe Netflix’s Summer Slate Not a single Netflix original film released between May and August this year opened above 20 million U.S. TV hours, per Nielsen. That benchmark usually serves as the EntStrategyGuy’s floor for a streaming hit on Netflix. None of these films enjoyed a hit-cementing single week of 20-plus million hours during their runs. Netflix’s two best films were true crime docs, Maternal Instinct (16.5 million hours) and The Crash (19.7 million), the best overall week for a film this summer. Great for most other streamers, but not necessarily what we’re used to seeing from Netflix. For an overly-dramatic comparison, Happy Gilmore 2 opened last summer to around 47 million hours (celebrity cameos, baby!). Zooming out, the picture looks even worse. In 2026, Netflix’s five biggest scripted summer films posted the lowest average (28.6 million hours) and median (28.8 million hours) eight-week viewership totals of the past four years. Now, it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect Netflix to deliver a _KPop Demon Hunters-_sized hit every year. But it’s also not ideal to see the size of their hits shrinking over the last few summers. Let’s quickly run through some of the notable summer misses. Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein’s perfectly fine romcom, Office Romance, fell off the charts after 20 million hours in its first two weeks. Top films usually last for four-plus weeks. Starry titles ideally don’t decay that fast either. Homegrown star Millie Bobby Brown couldn’t prevent the snappy Enola Holmes franchise from diminishing returns. At 14.3 million U.S. hours, the third film posted roughly half of what the first two films did in their first two weeks. What’s on Netflix calculated that per-day global views were down nearly 60% from the second movie. The Whisper Man did okay with more than 36 million hours over its first four weeks. But I expected a little more juice from a film featuring Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, and Adam Scott. Kevin Hart’s Ladies First collected just 11.2 million hours total across two weeks. That’s a big miss for one of Netflix’s go-to stars. Plopping into the same bucket are Sunny Sandler’s Don’t Say Good Luck (10.3 million in two weeks) and John Cena’s Little Brother (17.5 million). Meanwhile, English-language originals Color Book (June 19), In the Hand of Dante (June 24) and Heartstopper Forever (July 17) never sniffed Nielsen’s Top 10 at all, despite needing only 2 to 5 million hours to land in the top ten most weeks. (By my count, eleven English-language scripted original films released between May and August did chart). It’s only fair to mention that Swapped (1-May) posted nearly 42 million U.S. hours over five weeks (the longest Netflix original run this summer) and is currently their eighth most-watched English-language film ever worldwide. Remarkably Bright Creatures (37 million, 4 weeks) and Voicemails for Isabelle (27 million, 4 weeks) weren’t bombs either. Still, overall, I think it’s fair to say this was a quieter summer season than we’re used to seeing from the market-leader. You might not realize that given the language commonly used in public analysis. The Twist Despite the starkly black-and-white tone of the coverage, here’s the twist: when many box office bombs arrive on streaming, their viewership looks a whole lot like many of Netflix’s supposedly successful summer releases. Hmm, where have we heard that one before? Masters of the Universe topped out at $65 million stateside against a $170 million budget_._ I’ll admit, Skeletor ripping sleeveless curls as a gym bro and bodyslamming Adam’s co-workers was funny. But, much to the chagrin of my bank account, my laughter doesn’t launch franchises. Yet the He-Man reboot opened to 19.6 million hours (from a Wednesday five-day opening instead of just one weekend), on par with Hoppers on Disney+ (19.4 million). It put up nearly 47 million hours over its first six weeks, bigger than all of Netflix’s summer releases. Pretty darn healthy and likely to land among the 25 most-watched movies on streaming this year. Sticking with Amazon, The Sheep Detectives just barely broke even at the box office with $133 million worldwide (and only $66 million domestic). I never expected cloven-hooved, cud-chewing mammals to be able to bring me to tears. Yet that’s exactly how I found myself at the end of this surprisingly affecting movie (#NoShame). It was likely the unexpected quality in a family-friendly film that powered its streaming over-performance. Sheep Detectives delivered a solid run for Prime video netting 26.2 million hours! How about franchise IP? Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu had the lowest opening ($81 million) and lowest-grossing Disney-era live-action Star Wars film ($178 million domestic). One day before release, its Heat score (19.8%)—audiences who list their interest as a 7/7—fell behind blockbusters Wicked (21%), Superman (23%), Fantastic Four: First Steps (23%), Michael (23%), Toy Story 5 (26%) and Avatar: Fire and Ash (27%), according to Greenlight Analytics. The urgent enthusiasm just wasn’t there. On streaming, Mando opened to weeks of 12.1 million, 6.1 million and 2.7 million hours (21 million total) over its first three frames. Not the numbers Lucasfilm was hoping for nor the numbers of a streaming hit. But they’re in the same vicinity as some Netflix summer releases with $345 million at the global box office to offset a smidgen of the pain. Final Thoughts So why oh why does this nuance gap exist? Four key reasons: Data Literacy: A “$100 million opening” just makes sense. After decades of box office reporting, even casual movie fans are well-versed in the benchmarks of hits and home runs. There’s an immediate shorthand. But “16.5 million” hours doesn’t land nearly as cleanly. Despite leaps of progress, the streaming ratings era is still in its infancy compared to theatrical. The EntStrategyGuy and I met thanks to a late 2010s group chat of data nerds hungry to find a shred of certainty in nebulous streaming performance. I’m not surprised to see “No. 1 on Netflix” still getting misconstrued out in the wild. Timing: By Friday morning, we have the box office’s Thursday night previews totaled, allowing us to better project the weekend’s expectations. From there, ticket sales are reported daily. By Sunday, the film’s fate is usually finalized, at least in terms of public perception. In streaming, Nielsen recently improved its delay to…two weeks. The medium isn’t forced to contend with instant gratification as harshly. Financials: Theatrical film budgets are a mere Google away. Profit and loss is calculated in the cold and unforgiving naked light of day for all to see. But finding the vast majority of streaming exclusive movie budgets requires the forensic investigation skills of a Criminal Minds detective. Also, it’s very difficult to calculate how much revenue/value a straight-to-streaming films provides a streamer. This is why there are so few stories about streaming original movies “losing X amount of money”. On top of that, marketing budgets are far greater for theatrical movies than streaming exclusive movies, which leads to earlier and better awareness. This then translates to a wider pool of potential interest. Narrative Control: Netflix is the only major streaming service to publish weekly first-hand viewership data and annual engagement reports. Naturally, some headlines borrow their first-hand framing**.** Other streamers benefit from their comparative lack of transparency. They may occasionally announce vague performance platitudes such as Apple TV’s Mayday becoming its “biggest film debut on the platform to date over its first 18 days,” and that it ranked No. 1 with left-handed viewers in its first weekend. (Fine, I made up that second one). But, for the most part, they keep first-hand viewership shrouded in mystery to avoid bad press. Especially for outlets that demand multiple articles per day from their writers, it’s an easy (and understandable) way for some reporters to hit their daily article quota by just repeating what the streamers have told them. TL:DR version: Streaming-exclusive movies are asked to do different things than theatrical movies, but that doesn’t mean they should escape judgment. Both still need to draw enough eyeballs to justify their cost within the proper performance contexts. The more cleanly we can inject a little nuance into streaming analysis, the better we’ll understand the audience and content trends that drive this industry. And that’s what all of this is really about: knowing what audiences actually want! Brandon Katz is the Director of Insights & Content Strategy at Greenlight Analytics where he focuses on evaluating the ever-fluid media landscape to unearth understanding, opportunity and value. Greenlight Analytics is the entertainment intelligence consulting company redefining how Hollywood finds, understands, and activates audiences. Prior to joining Greenlight Analytics, he served as the senior entertainment industry strategist at Parrot Analytics, and as a full-time entertainment industry reporter covering the Xs and Os of Hollywood, most notably with TheWrap and the Observer.
PENN Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:PENN) Stock Has Average Target Price of $23.94 According to Analysts
Shares of PENN Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:PENN - Get Free Report) have been given an average recommendation of "Moderate Buy" by the twenty ratings firms that are covering the company, MarketBeat Ratings reports. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, six have assigned a hold rating an
Who Won August and September: Original Films or Franchises?
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) I just heard someone say that if you’re reading a pundit or data analyst, and they don’t tell you that they got anything wrong, they’re not a pundit but an “influencer”. I agree with that. You have to tell your audience when you get things wrong, or they won’t (or shouldn’t) trust you as much. Today, we’ve got another edition of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. In general, I’m patting myself on the back (and patting very hard) about a few things like IP at the box office, LIV golf, horror films, crowdfunding movies, superheroes, and old people going to the theaters. That said, I also made a couple of data mistakes on the streaming bubble popping and HBO’s datecdotes, so I’m not perfect. But first, I need your feedback... Subscribe Follow-Ups: What Should We Call Mid-Budget Movies Which Aren’t Cinematic Enough for Theaters But Are Too Expensive to Make Money on Streaming? After I asked for feedback on what we should call straight-to-streaming films that are too big to pencil out on streaming but not really big enough to resonate in theaters, I got some great suggestions from you all, including... “Moldilocks” from John Aboud “Little Big Indie” from Travis Frick1 “Midflicks” from Jonathan Funke. “Extra-Medium” from Jona Nwuke. (Read the explanation in the footnote.) Between these and Brandon Katz—who suggested “Bermuda Budget Triangle”, “The Platform Gap” and “The Distribution Deadzone”—we’ve got some excellent suggestions. And they’re better than my suggestion, the “Streaming Budget Dead Zone”, so let’s take a poll! The winning entry becomes the new term. Loading... RIGHT: LIV Golf is Fully Bankrupt…Is Anyone Else Next? A few years ago, I was always a bit perplexed at all the articles I’d read praising LIV Golf and their strategy to disrupt the PGA. LIV Golf, a brand new professional golf league, offered PGA stars ten times what they made on the PGA Tour to join their new league. And folks praised this strategy for its initial “success” in that a lot of big names did indeed leave the PGA. Yeah, of course the players came over. LIV Golf paid them so, so, so much more! But LIV Golf hadn’t discovered a way to increase potential revenue. So think about this in basic business terms… They paid much more in costs… …but had no real way to increase revenue. That’s not a strategy! That’s deficit financing. It won’t work unless you bankrupt the competition (and then turn around and pay those same golfers much, much less). It’s not a sustainable strategy and only lasts as long as the company/person/nation backing it decides they’re cool with losing money. For LIV Golf, that meant Middle East oil wealth, in particular Saudi Arabian money. Clearly, the current Iran War has hurt Middle East finances, so they need to trim their more exorbitant spending. And LIV Golf was part of that trimming. This should be a major warning for others. TGL’s parent company, TMRW Sports, just got a $1 billion valuation, despite TGL’s (the indoor golf league) horrible TV viewership of less than half a million viewers per match. Unrivaled, the women’s basketball league, just secured a $650 valuation, despite its horrible TV viewership and a new rival (Project B) entering the scene next year. To relate this to streaming, Hollywood should ask which streamers may have wealthy patrons funding their losses. (Let’s be clear: Google, Amazon and Apple.) Could those patrons lose their appetite? For Amazon, probably not. But Apple has a new boss, so maybe! WRONG: My Analysis of the Streaming Bubble Was Missing a Week I’m going to be congratulating myself a lot today, but I make mistakes too, like this data goof. When I last compiled the data on the decline in TV shows, I was missing one week at the end of June. If you look at the first image, you can see that one week was mislabelled as “July”. Mainly, this image got updated to show a 27% decline, not 29%: This change doesn’t really impact the overall analysis, but it is two percent better. By the way, through the third quarter, the decline increased and it’s now a 30% decrease since 2022. (I’ll write/visualize this in an upcoming article.) But I want you to trust me and my data. Especially these days, when many people are using LLMs that I know are inserting faulty data into their charts, I want to keep earning my audience’s faith. So that’s the accurate data. RIGHT: IP Remains Very, Very Popular In July, I wrote a giant (and I mean giant) article on Backrooms, Obsession, and the box office, going over what we know, what we don’t know about what works in theaters, looking at YouTubers, IP, the horror genre, comic book movies, and a whole lot more. The month of August really tested a lot of my theses and, being honest, mostly supported my arguments. Let’s start with IP. Looking at 8-Aug (the weekend after Spider-Man: Brand New Day came out) to 18-Sep (the weekend that Resident Evil came out, which I think provides a nice bookend to this time period), there were seven films based on pre-existing IP: Resident Evil (2026) ($126 million) Practical Magic 2 ($65 million) _Insidious: Out of the Furthe_r ($65 million) Coyote Vs. Acme ($59 million) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie ($53 million) Tony ($15 million) Super Troopers 3 ($7 million) Compare those to the notable original films from the past month—I actually could have included more movies, but here are just thirteen, bringing us to an even twenty films—including.... The End of Oak Street ($54 million) Buddy ($26 million) Mutiny ($15 million) By Any Means ($15 million) The Dog Stars ($14 million) Runner ($14 million) One Night Only ($11 million) Hope ($8 million) Spa Weekend ($7 million) The Uprising ($6 million) Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma ($6 million) Onslaught ($3 million) Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man ($2.8 million) Here’s that in chart form: Five of the top six films in this time period were all based on IP. I made a big chart of films that grossed over $200 million at the box office before Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey hit theaters. Let’s update that chart! By the way, if you want to see how I categorized each film—so another bar chart—here it is: I know that many of my fellow critics/pundits/analysts dislike films based on IP and how Hollywood is making so many of them. And I’m sympathetic to this point of view. As I’ve written many, many times before, you need a balance between existing franchises, new IP, and original films. And Hollywood clearly needs to make more films like Resident Evil (a well-made film from a visionary director) and fewer Practical Magic 2’s (which didn’t get critical or customer buzz). But at some point, critics and pundits need to contend with what audiences are telling them: Movie-goers aren’t showing up to original films. Audiences are speaking with their dollars, telling you they want more IP and franchises. You can try to convince studio heads to make fewer IP-based films and franchises, but the data and numbers aren’t there. Instead, critics need to work harder to convince audiences to show up for original films. Aim your ire/concern at the average person, not studio heads.2 Because they’re just making the films that audiences are telling them to make. WRONG: Original Horror Films Didn’t Break Out I’ll be honest, even though I wrote an article casting some skepticism on the horror genre in July, if you asked me to make a prediction, I would have predicted that, in August, a new, original horror film would have blown up. No, seriously, I just assumed that Obsession and Backrooms presaged a change in audience behavior. But none of the buzzy new original horror films from August—Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Onslaught (not an action film in spite of the ads), The End of Oak Street, Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man, or _Buddy—_broke out. To be clear, exactly one of those films (Buddy) had good “ROI”, but again—I try to be specific in my language—none were “popular” in any broad sense of the word. None of them will be “saving” movies theaters like Backrooms or _Obsession_helped save the summer. The new Insidious film and Resident Evil, both based on IP, were far and away the biggest horror films since July. (We’ll see if this changes in October/Halloween season.) RIGHT: Stay Skeptical about Crowdfunding... I’ve long been skeptical about crowd-investing platforms as one of Hollywood’s saviors, mainly because there’s so much hype/buzz. People need to stay more skeptical about more things, explaining both the potential upside but also the downsides. In particular, the media often hypes crowdfunding at the start and never checks in on the actual results after they’ve come in later. And August gave us our first update! _Ice Cream Man—_directed by Eli Roth—grossed $6 million off of a $5.5 million budget. This is a production of The Horror Section, which was one of the first “crowd investing” studios with 2,400 investors, which means that 2,400 investors probably lost money. They certainly aren’t getting as great of returns as if they had just invested their dollars in the stock market. Hopefully Stiletto (Tagline: “Someone’s Going to Make it Rain Blood!”) does better next month. WRONG: Another Data Goof Here’s another data error. When the first episode of House of the Dragon came out, HBO put out that it had 21.5 million viewers in the first three days, and I read that to mean in the US…but no, it was global. So my US-only datecdotes charts shouldn’t have included it. We never got US-only numbers for the first episode, but for the final episode, HBO put out that it had 11 million US viewers. (And that global dropped to 21 million viewers.) Here’s the updated chart (which I’ve since used in the Streaming Ratings Report): Still, this show is absolutely huge. RIGHT: Superhero Films Remain Very, Very Popular After Supergirl flopped, I read a few takes that “comic book movies are going the way of the Western”. Post-Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that take didn’t age well. To be fair, I have a very nuanced take on the superhero genre right now; it’s down right now, for a lot of reasons. But it’s not “dead”. Maybe _Spider-_Man is just a really popular character? I saw that take, and it’s a fair counter-argument. (But pundits arguing that superhero movies were dead should have mentioned this $1.5 billion counter-argument…) But is it just Spider-Man? The next Avengers film already has $50 million in pre-sales (and I was skeptical that that film would do well) and the Avengers: End Game re-release topped the box office two weekends ago (over three original films). And I wouldn’t bet against Batman or Superman. So maybe it’s just Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and the Avengers. Oh, and Deadpool, of course. And Black Panther. And Wolverine. And probably the X-Men. Plus a well-made Wonder Woman or the Hulk film could break out. But that’s it! It’s just those ten characters/teams. Oh, what’s that? Lanterns is also doing well on HBO? (See previous section…) To be fair, I’m actually pretty sympathetic to the argument that more popular characters—like Spider-Man and Batman—anchor more popular films. In fact, I made that exact argument three years ago when I first wrote about the “Marvel-cession”. In many ways, you can blame The Guardians of the Galaxy for fooling Marvel Studios (and the rest of us) into believing that any character could pop. It turns out, the list of iconic characters is probably smaller than most people think. But it’s probably too early to say that superhero films and comic book movies are dead unless “death” means a slight decline over a longtime. RIGHT: Who Killed Theaters? Old People I get frustrated whenever I see headlines or analysis about how young people are “returning” to theaters. As I’ve detailed(for years), young people have always powered the US box office, despite narratives about “kids these days” and their “phones”. Really, what’s changed post-2020/pandemic is that old people aren’t going to the movies nearly as much. This summer, I saw a movie (from an older director) in a theater near a retirement community, and multiple older people at the theater were talking about how this was their first time seeing a movie in years. I dislike personal anecdotes, so YouGov can fill in the data, best summarized by this headline: “Who killed movie theaters? Not the youths”. According to them, 64% of people aged 18-29 have seen a movie in the last year, but only 30% of 65-and-older. 20% of 18-29 have seen a movie in theaters in the last week and 42% in the last month. Here’s the polling data: Most concerning? Many Americans (17%) think theaters are a worse or much worse experience than watching films at home. Slight WRONG: Hadestown Opens Big A live theater capture of the Broadway musical, Hadestown, made $20 million at the US box office, which begs the question: was I wrong to be skeptical about musicals a few years ago? Yes and no. On the one hand, $20 million is a far cry from being “popular”, so yeah, the genre isn’t that popular overall and Hadestown is one of the more popular musicals from recent years (i.e. the “Taylor Swift Data Fallacy” in action). On the other, I doubt filming this cost all that much, and I don’t think that they spent much on marketing, so this is a good source of ancillary revenue. Smaller Updates WRONG: As I mentioned in a Streaming Ratings Report, I underestimated the budget for Enola Holmes 3. It probably cost more like $50 million, if not more. But... I’m not sure that it really matters? At sub-10 million hours, prices have to come down to make this work. WRONG: Netflix is giving Ink a 27-day in theaters! To quote the kids/YouTubers these days, let’s go! Now I might actually have a chance to see Danny Boyle’s latest in theaters. I’d complained about this in a “Coming Soon” section, but I was heartened to read that Netflix is giving multiple films longer theatrical windows this year. RIGHT: Netflix is sending 4-5 films per year to theaters. Netflix is slowly but surely sending more and more films to theaters, as I cautiously predicted earlier this year. For now, it’s just three big films and a number of awards contenders, but still, this is great news. And they’ll be releasing box office grosses! Just this week, Ted Sarandos confirmed that KPop Demon Hunters 2 will come to theaters (and my guess is it performs in the box office top ten at a minimum). WRONG: Angel has 3 million subscribers! How do I know this? Well, they told Deadline, who reported it. I marked this as “wrong”, since they’ve doubled their subscribers in one year but, you know, they don’t really have a hit film to speak of and they’re still losing money. WRONG: Furious was only renewed for one more season. I accidentally wrote “two more seasons” in my latest “Renewals, Cancellations, Un-Orders and Removals Update”. RIGHT: House of David is ending with its third season. In July, Prime Video renewed House of David for a third season, as I just wrote in my latest “Renewals and Cancellations” report. Well, now it’s ending after that third season. Why? As I’ve been writing, its viewership wasn’t great. I got feedback that this show didn’t cost very much, but it cost enough that its limited viewership didn’t save it. WRONG: Adults was a Hulu original! So I missed Adults when it first came out last year; I saw that it aired on FX and just assumed that it was a linear-first program. Turns out, it aired three episodes on FX, but binge-released the rest of its episodes the next day on Hulu. Huh. So I should have covered it last year! But I just wrote about it. 1 “When I was a kid in the 90s, if you wore a t-shirt to school that wasn’t too big and also wasn’t too small, but somehow didn’t quite fit, we’d say you were wearing an “extra-medium” shirt.” 2 As always, a huge exception is Disney, which barely makes anything original anymore.
Six Flags Entertainment Corporation (NYSE:FUN) Stock Has Average Target Price of $21.50
Six Flags Entertainment Corporation (NYSE:FUN - Get Free Report) has earned a consensus rating of "Hold" from the sixteen ratings firms that are covering the company, MarketBeat Ratings reports. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell recommendation, six have issued a hold recomme
Why I Don’t Think Ride Or Die Should Have Been Cancelled (And What Company Should Save It...)
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) So…I recently came across a Reddit thread, talking about films on streaming, wondering why there are no reliable sources out there for streaming ratings data. Sigh. Honestly, as annoyed as I am that so many still don’t realize that we have streaming ratings, I somewhat get it. Until now, there was such a long delay between when a show or film came to streaming and when we got its viewership data; I understand why people were confused. (But, as you know, this just changed.) Also, even back in the day, how many people knew how well films did on television? Luckily, as a reader, you’re in the know. Okay, on to this week’s issue. I want to take a look at Prime Video cancelling Ride or Die and whether I agree with that decision. Overall, we didn’t have any breakout hits (no TV shows landed over 20 million hours according to Nielsen) but we have a lot of steady performers on the streaming charts. Plus, we’ll look at where $50 million in missing box office dollars went. (Spoiler: straight-to-streaming.) All that, plus new episodes of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Supergirl heads to streaming, a new YA show does well on Netflix, the viewership for the Daily Wire’s $50 million fantasy show, what TV show hit-maker can’t make streaming hits, CD sales, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of September 7th to September 13th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Television - Ride or Die Is a Hit…But It Got Cancelled? What The Data “Says” I hate the phrase “here’s what the data says”, even though sometimes I find myself using it. If data just told us everything, we data folks would be out of a job! Data is often messy, complicated and nuanced. When it comes to strategy, many of the best decisions can’t actually use “data”, since it’s vastly too complicated to model. Anyways, I’ve been singing the praises of Prime Video’s Ride Or Die this summer, a show that did very well for them. And yet…it got cancelled. Now, usually when a show gets cancelled, a bunch of websites say “a hit show got cancelled”... Here’s the thing, though: in this case, they’re right! The data “says” that this show was a hit. Specifically, out of 522 first seasons to make a week on the Nielsen charts since 2020, it’s the 75th biggest. On Amazon, Ride or Die is eighth out of 41 first seasons: That’s top 15th percentile all time, almost exactly, which is my definition of a “hit”! I mean, outside of Reacher, Amazon needed a hit this summer! (Admittedly, Off Campus did well for Amazon in the spring, but Ride or Die performed even better.) So what happened? Why did Amazon cancel one of their rare 2026 bright spots? Well, Deadline reported a reason—which I’ll get to—but I’d break it down into three relevant questions: What is a given streamer’s reasoning? Is that reasoning sound? Could the stated reason not be the real reason? According to Deadline, Amazon felt the show “over-indexed” in middle-aged women. (This was based on leaks from within Amazon.) The logic is this: Amazon already reaches this demographic because of unlimited two-day shipping bundled with Prime, so they don’t really need more shows like this. Now, it’s my job to ask if that’s a good reason, and I’ll be honest, in this case, I don’t think it is. Sure, this show may “over-index” in middle-aged women—I’ll just assume that’s the case here—but I think folks often oversell how important over-indexing actually is. When a show is a “hit”, it isn’t a bit bigger than its rivals; it’s usually multiples bigger. For example, Elle only made the charts for two weeks at 8.3 million hours each. So Ride or Die was 80% bigger in its first two weeks, and likely had a much stronger hold, with its terrific 13 million hours in week three. Ride or Die was nearly three times bigger than Sterling Point through three weeks too. And that means that _Elle, Sterling Point a_nd other Amazon YA shows need to not just over-index a little with younger women (assuming that’s who Amazon prefers over middle-aged women), but massively over-index. Otherwise, more people in that demo (and a bunch more besides) likely watched Ride or Die. (I’ll try to explore this concept more in a future article.) And don’t get me started on how Ride or Die did compared to a certain (very, very popular, possibly the world’s most popular) YouTuber’s reality show…which didn’t make the charts after its first week and likely cost much, much more than Ride or Die. All to say, Amazon-MGM Studios/Prime Video can tell reporters that this show didn’t reach the right audience, but that excuse feels weak to me. So this leads to the third question: could other reasons have come into play? Yes! Renewal or cancellation decisions rarely (I’m tempted to say “never”) boil down to one variable. At its simplest, it’s two things: budget versus viewership. But often factors like critical acclaim, ownership and, yes, personal opinion come into play. In this case, Amazon has a new executive running things, and this show isn’t owned by Amazon-MGM Studios (unlike Elle). And yes, it may not have indexed with the right target viewers, too. Likely all of those factors came into play.1 My guess is ownership ended up mattering most. Amazon doesn’t own Ride or Die. It’s actually produced by another major studio. Fortunately/allegedly, this show is being shopped around. I can think of one brand new CEO who should consider it for one of his two major streamers…especially if he wants to rebuild goodwill in Hollywood. His name is on this list of exec producers of Ride or Die… If David Ellison needs some goodwill—and he does—rescue this female-led show tomorrow and grab some good headlines for a day. The data justifies it. Quick Notes on TV We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… How The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives latest season did on Hulu, post-controversy... Whether Supergirl soared on HBO Max... Why the box office is losing money due to the streamers... The viewership for the Daily Wire’s $50 million fantasy show... Updates on The Gentlemen, Lanterns, Outer Banks, King of the Hill and more... What former hit-maker has three streaming flops in a row... Whether The Mandalorian and Grogu popped in week two... All the flops, bombs and misses... And a whole lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you want an idea of just how much content you’d get in a full issue, check out this older issue. Coming Soon! Oh man, we’re almost caught up! We just have two more issues, then the streaming Ratings Report will be coming out just two weeks after a TV show premieres! Next issue, I’ll be looking at the first two weeks of the NFL Thursday night games on streaming, a huge new spinoff, Reacher’s Neagly on Prime Video, and the latest edition of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix, the return of Slow Horses on Apple and MobLand (quietly one of their biggest shows) on Paramount+, and Dancing with the Stars on both ABC and Disney+. Plus I’ll take a look at animation for adults in 2026. The week after, a ton of movies are coming to streaming: Toy Story 5 on Disney+, Backrooms on HBO Max, Jackass: Best and Last on Paramount+ and The Breadwinner on Netflix, plus a Unabomber film on Netflix and a romcom on Prime Video. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey have a show on Apple, along with a game show inspired by Willy Wonka that everyone seems to hate. Long term, some crazy (but hopefully crazy like a fox) IP news. FX ordered a new Sons of Anarchy show from Charlie Hunnam, but it’s not about the biker gang. No, it features the show’s cast playing themselves in a new “meta-thriller”. Huh. And a lot of the cast is coming back. Next, Ryan Gosling is producing a Flintstones movie about a “grown-up Bamm-Bamm Rubble”. Also, huh. This one is in “early development” so we’ll see what happens. Both projects are based on IP, but also seem to have crazy takes on the IP, which I like.
Flutter Entertainment PLC (NYSE:FLUT) Stock Has Average Target Price of $155.37
Flutter Entertainment PLC (NYSE:FLUT - Get Free Report) has received an average rating of "Moderate Buy" from the thirty-one ratings firms that are covering the company, MarketBeat Ratings reports. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell recommendation, nine have given a hold reco
Starz Entertainment Corp. (NASDAQ:STRZ) Stock Has Average Price Target of $32.71
Starz Entertainment Corp. (NASDAQ:STRZ - Get Free Report) has earned an average rating of "Moderate Buy" from the nine analysts that are presently covering the firm, Marketbeat Ratings reports. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have issued a hold rating, four have
Looking at the Ugly Side of the Paramount-Skydance Merger...And How I’d Fix It
A Message from Our Sponsor Certified Fresh with 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, FX’s Adults is an ensemble comedy series about a group of twenty-somethings in New York leaning on each other to navigate love, work, friendship and family. Don’t sleep on “The Sitcom of the Moment” - Awards Buzz All Episodes now streaming on Hulu on Disney+. Watch The Teaser Trailer... (Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industr(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Before we dive in, I wanted to congratulate Broadcast Now for being the first to report that Netflix’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast has been cancelled. (I saw this in a write-up by Kasey Moore of Whats-On-Netflix.) More importantly, I wanted to note that, as of yesterday, none of the other trades had reported the news yet. I have half a guess that eventually one of them will report this. Anyways, it’s time to take a break from my deluge of streaming ratings reports to continue my analysis of the Paramount Skydance Warner Bros. Discovery (PSWbD) saga. As I noted last week, a lot of times when folks use the (sometimes cliched) “the good, the bad and the ugly” framing for an article, “the ugly” section is just more bad. Or very, very bad. In this case, yeah, I do think it’s ugly. In more than one way. Unfortunately, we’re only going to have time to tackle one of those ways today: the ugly pile of debt to finance this deal. (In a future article, I may cover the entire process for how it went down, which was very, very ugly.) Last issue, I explained why I liked this deal in a vacuum. Unfortunately, “vacuums” don’t exist outside of space. Let’s dive in. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - The Ugliness of the Paramount/Warner Bros. Merger More than one person sent me a note speculating that the big problem with Paramount Skydance buying Warner Bros. Discovery is the “Warner Bros.” portion of the deal. In fact, that’s a take I read a lot about Warner Bros., ever since they caught Netflix’s, and then Paramount-Skydance’s, eye. In short, multiple companies (Time, AOL, AT&T, Discovery) have bought and then regretted buying Warner Bros. Since it’s nearing Halloween, you could almost say it’s like the folks think WB is cursed! It’s a haunted studio—like the town of Derry in movie studio form—and whoever takes possession of it will fall into misery! Yet...I just don’t like that story, because it doesn’t explain the “why” behind why those deals fell through. Especially when Warner Bros. has continued to succeed as a TV and film studio in the intervening two decades. Lord of the Rings? Harry Potter? Game of Thrones? Everything HBO? Considering it never fully owned a broadcast TV channel, this media company has done pretty well. So what went wrong? Well, in recent years, companies bought Warner Bros. instead of the other, smarter option. Explaining POCD (And Applying It to Mergers & Acquisitions) As I explained last issue, one of my favorite frameworks is the POCD tool for evaluating venture capital investments: People Opportunity Context Deal The bar to invest as a VC is high. (Or I might say “was” since cheap interest rates made life easier last decade.) You review a thousand prospectuses, get pitched by a hundred, and invest in the ten best, with the hopes that one of those ten would pay for the rest. That means every element of a deal needed to pay off: you needed the right people running the companies, who could capitalize on the right opportunity, in the context of an industry that was ripe for disruption. If you could then not overpay, you could make some money in a smart deal. The analogy isn’t perfect here, but close enough. For a merger or acquisition to work, you need the combined company (which is the opportunity) to make more than the price you need to pay (which is the deal). Note: the people and context still matter, but with M&A, it’s a little more straightforward: does the opportunity exceed the cost? And usually with Warner Bros., it hasn’t. If you want to find out the single biggest mistake made by the Warner Bros. suitors over the last few years (and my simple fix) become a paid subscriber. I’ll also touch on who I think Paramount-Skydance could (shockingly) consider buying next, TBD, and more. Sign up here.
The Streamers Tried To Conquer Labor Day…and Whiffed
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) What? Another Streaming Ratings Report already? You betcha. Nielsen has moved up the release of their Streaming Ratings data by two weeks, which means I’ve got two extra issues to get out. But I love this change because it will make this report more timely and easier to publish regularly. This week—with the viewership data for the week of 31-Aug—we’ve got some huge, huge topics to discuss. On the film side, two theatrical films (The Mandalorian and Grogu on Disney+ and Scary Movie on Paramount+) contend with two non-Netflix straight-to-streaming films (Mayday on Apple TV and The Runner on Prime Video). The streamers went all in to win Labor Day weekend in America. And we have a bunch of TV shows to analyze, both new shows (Netflix’s The Gentleman, Hulu’s Chad Powers, and an Alix Earle reality show) and weekly shows like Reacher, Ted Lasso, House of the Dragon and Lioness. All that, plus nepotism in Hollywood, some eye-popping fantasy football stats, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of August 31st to September 6th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Film - A Slew of Labor Day Disappointments? A lot of streamers released big new films this week, why? My theory is that the streamers know that four-day weekends can propel streaming films to glory. But if you’ve been reading more over the last two years, you know that big holiday weekends aren’t driving big viewership numbers the way they did post-Covid. And interestingly enough, Netflix didn’t put out a big new film this week. But four other streamers did, trying to take advantage of the holiday with some (not cheap) swings, including… The Mandalorian and Grogu on Disney+ (a Star Wars film that cost $165 million and made $177 million at the US domestic box office) Mayday on Apple TV (rumored $100 million budget, no theatrical release) The Runner on Prime Video (at least a $40 million budget, but likely $50 to $80 million, no theatrical release). Scary Movie on Paramount+ ($30 million budget, made $108 million domestically). (Paramount+ also released a made-for-streaming film based on the Thundermans IP, and I’ll discuss that later.) So…how’d they do? The Mandalorian and Grogu Leads The Way (But That Isn’t Enough) Let’s start with The Mandalorian and Grogu (which I’ll abbreviate to Mando for most of this article). We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… How Mando, Mayday, The Runner and Scary Movie performed on streaming... How the powerhouse weekly released shows (Reacher, Ted Lasso and Lioness) have accumulate a LOT of viewership… How House of the Dragon finished its run… The latest Netflix show to have a sophomore slump… Whether top creators can drive viewers to their shows… Nepotism in Hollywood and the music business... All the flops, bombs and misses for the week… And more… ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. Coming Soon! Since Nielsen has accelerated their streaming data release schedule, I’ve got a lot of Streaming Ratings Reports coming your way! Next issue, I’ll be looking at the second season of Peacock’s The Paper, the latest season of Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and a very, very expensive Daily Wire fantasy series that’s now on Prime Video. Plus Crew Girl and Dang! on Netflix, a new Tyler Perry film, and one of the biggest bombs of the summer, Supergirl. In the next two issues, I’ll take a look at the return of the NFL to streaming, Toy Story 5 on Disney+, Backrooms on HBO Max, and The Breadwinner on Netflix. On the TV side, we’ve got Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Dancing with the Stars on Disney+, Apple TV’s Slow Horses, a Reacher spinoff on Prime Video, and Paramount+’s MobLand, a Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey comedy on Apple TV, a sequel to a Cosby Show spinoff on Netflix, The Great British Baking Show, and the Unabomber film. And while doing all that, I want to take a look at adult animated shows, Ride or Die’s cancellation, and Netflix’s summer films. So much great stuff! Long term, two bits of comic book news. The X-Men cast has been announced, and go ahead and color me bull-ish, if not very, very bull-ish on this bit of comic book IP. In weirder news, HBO Max ordered a “true crime” show by Jimmy Olsen about Gorilla Grodd being falsely convicted of murder. I mean, what? I don’t know, let’s see what happens.
WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. (NASDAQ:WBTN) Stock Has Average Price Target of $10.88
WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. (NASDAQ:WBTN - Get Free Report) has been given an average rating of "Hold" by the seven brokerages that are presently covering the stock, Marketbeat Ratings reports. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, five have assigned a hold rating and one has
Will Netflix’s Latest Horror Film Save Its Summer? And Introducing a New Data Source...
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) All month, I’ve been polling you, my readers, on how we think the summer’s biggest blockbusters will do when they eventually land on streaming, and I wanted to share the results. First up, how readers think The Odyssey will perform when it comes to Peacock... People are pretty bullish that The Odyssey will smash it for Peacock. I don’t know that it will have as much rewatchability as Wicked did for kids, but we’ll see. It is now Universal’s highest-grossing film of all time. One note: almost half of Christopher Nolan’s films weren’t available for streaming the week The Odyssey came to theaters, including some of his biggest films like Inception, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer and Insomnia. If you did want to watch the others, Prime Video had Memento and The Dark Knight trilogy, HBO Max only had The Dark Knight trilogy (even though Warner Bros. produced most of Nolan’s films), Hulu had The Prestige and Interstellar, and Paramount+ had Interstellar. So you needed at least two streaming subscriptions to catch the rest. Warner Bros. whiffed right here. I know they have long term licensing deals, but they should have tried to get as many Nolan films on HBO Max for launch as possible. Here are the results for Spider-Man: Brand New Day: The audience is a bit more mixed on this one, with everyone agreeing Spider-Man will swing to a big opening, but not necessarily elite or best all time. On to this week’s issue. Netflix continues searching for a hit straight-to-streaming summer film and Lioness and Ted Lasso allow me to look at the difference between a “hit” and a ‘hit for them”. All that, plus new YA/teen melodramas on Prime Video and Netflix, the House of the Dragon finale, USA Network claims a big opening, more big NFL ratings, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. But we start with a fun new data announcement. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of August 3rd to August 9th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe A New Data Source: Reelgood’s Data on Content Libraries Here’s a fun new treat for you. Reelgood—an online service and app that lets users track where shows or films are streaming—is providing data every month for the Streaming Ratings Report on the size of each streamer’s catalogue, along with the new shows and films for each streamer. Yay! Previously, I had pulled “new shows on streamers premiering on the first of the month”: While I liked that data cut, it was a big wonky since it didn’t show all of the new shows or movies that came to a streamer each month. Instead, I would have preferred something like this from Reelgood’s annual report: And now we have it! I’m going to feature Reelgood’s data monthly, showing both total catalogue size and new shows and films appearing on the charts. That’s going to make these two cool new charts. First, here’s the size of various streamers’ film catalogues… (By the way, Reelgood offered to make the charts for me, but I like doing that task by hand to understand the data better.) They also provided data back to last year. Here’s the number of films timeline: And here are the new films on each streamer for the month prior to Aug: As I get used to this data, I plan to keep tinkering with how I display it, but I’m excited to feature it monthly. Today, I’m sharing the film charts; next issue, I’m going to feature TV shows by streamer. Now, in full disclosure, Reelgood is a sponsor of this little-newsletter-that-could. But in my constant quest to figure out what streamer various shows and films are on, I was already a Reelgood user before this sponsorship. I go to their website all the time, and their data is very accurate on where shows are (or have been). Plus, I’ve been sharing their weekly top ten lists for years now, pre-sponsorship. For me, this is a great win-win, since I get to amplify a service I love, and I get a cool new data source to play with. Now, normally folks don’t usually mention their sponsors directly, but as I wrote before, as I start featuring ads in my newsletter, I plan to be extremely open about who is sponsoring my writing so you can trust what I write. Television - Two Big Returning Shows Look Set to Take Over The Charts One key question when it comes to judging streaming shows is whether a show is a “hit” or a “hit for them”. To be clear, the former means a show that’s one of the top shows on streaming, no questions asked. The latter means a show is one of the biggest, for a given streamer. That distinction makes a big difference! It’s really good to be one of the biggest shows on a streamer; it’s much better to be the biggest on streaming, despite the size of a streamer. Because, as we’ve seen now, nearly every streamer—while lacking the number of subscribers or usage of Netflix—can make hit TV shows: Paramount released Landman, whose first and second seasons were among the top two TV shows the year they came out. HBO Max’s The Pitt’s second season is the biggest show of the year so far. Love Island USA was the top show in 2025 for Peacock. And, crucially for today’s discussion: Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy back in 2023, Ted Lasso was actually the top streaming show of the year according to Nielsen! So even Apple TV (formerly +) can make hit shows. It just doesn’t make them that often. And looking at the Nielsen charts this week, we have two prime candidates for this discussion: That’s right: Ted Lasso returned to Apple TV for its fourth season. Did it return in all its expected glory? Sure, though right now it’s still just a “hit for Apple TV”, but we’ll see how long it lasts on the charts. Its ten episodes are coming out weekly. (Smart choice, Apple!) Ted Lasso started out strong, actually making the Nielsen charts the week before new episodes dropped, which is a rare feat. (Shows like Stranger Things or Bridgerton have pulled that off. That’s terrific company to join!) On Nielsen, it opened to 14.4 million hours in its first week, and 16.6 million the week of 10-Aug. Here’s how that compares to previous seasons: Apple put out that this is their biggest TV launch through two days ever, and looking at the chart and Apple TV’s viewership history, I’d believe it. Here’s Apple’s top shows for season two and beyond: Other data tells a (mostly) similar story. Ted Lasso made Samba TV and it has elite IMDb scores, an insane 8.7 on 465K reviews. The only outlier is Luminate, where the latest season only had 7.4 million hours, and no other seasons made the top ten. As you’ll see below, that’s well below some other solid, but not spectacular shows like Sterling Point, Ride or Die or Furious. I’d be surprised if Ted Lasso isn’t bigger than those other shows, but it’s fine for different data sources to occasionally disagree. And while it’s sucky to bring this up, given that Warner Bros. produced this show, I do wonder how the streaming wars may have been different if Ted Lasso landed on HBO Max initially instead of Apple. I don’t think one show can make or break a streamer, but given HBO’s brand, it could have helped bring people to that streamer much earlier in its lifespan. (Though yeah, I don’t love calling out executives for passing on hit shows, since that’s just the nature of the job. Even the absolute best execs will pass on lots of successful shows. The key is not greenlighting the under-performers/misses.) The other show I’m thinking about in the “hit or hit for them” category is Lioness from Paramount+. Like Ted Lasso, its first season missed the charts, but it’s grown its audience since then. Here’s how season three opened: We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… How Lioness did on streaming... Two new melodramas for Netflix and Prime Video... Whether Netflix’s latest horror film saved its summer... Hulu’s Furious and Prime Video’s Ride or Die continuing their strong runs... The latest high profile showrunner to flop on streaming... All the flops, bombs and misses... And a whole lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. Next week, we’ve got a double issue—since the week of 17-Aug had very few notable new shows or films—so I’ll look at HBO’s Lanterns, Prime Video’s Reacher, Netflix’s Tires, Outer Banks (which posted up huge numbers four years ago), an Aussie romance, and another baseball event (that didn’t resonate). And a bunch of movies like the latest dramedy from an Adam Sandler daughter, Don’t Say Good Luck, Camp Rock 3 on Disney Channel and Disney+, Michael on Starz, and more. Later this month, we’ve got a ton of shows and films to analyze! Movies will be the big story, featuring a box office bomb (Supergirl on HBO Max) and an “underperformer” (The Mandalorian and Grogu on Disney+) contending with a bunch of star-studded straight-to-streaming films like Netflix’s The Whisper Man (Adam Scott, Michelle Monaghan and De Niro!), Mayday on Apple TV+ (Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh!), The Runner (Gal Gadot) and The Last Sunrise (Eva Longoria and Maia Reficco) on Prime Video. Plus, a ton of TV shows have sophomore seasons coming out. Will The Gentleman put up big numbers on Netflix or suffer from a sophomore slump? Leanne and Beauty in Black on Netflix seem small, but they both might be bigger than you think. Hulu has a bunch of shows: a new season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (the first after all the controversy last year) and the second season of Chad Powers (from Peyton Manning’s production company and starring Glen Powell). This one flopped last year; can it score a touchdown this year? Same goes for FX’s Adults, which I didn’t track last year; will it hit this year? Peacock’s The Office spinoff, The Paper and Apple TV’s Dark Matter also return for second seasons. And Netflix has more Untold specials featuring Vince Young, Raygun (that horrible breakdancer) and Mr. T. Long term, Paramount+ is rebooting yet another franchise, Clueless, and I’m somewhat bullish on this new show. The talent attached (Alicia Silverstone) and creative Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (of The O.C. and Gossip Girl) also feel solid...if they make it funny like the original.
Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited (NASDAQ:MLCO) Given Consensus Recommendation of "Moderate Buy" by Brokerages
Shares of Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited (NASDAQ:MLCO - Get Free Report) have earned an average rating of "Moderate Buy" from the ten analysts that are covering the company, Marketbeat Ratings reports. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell recommendation, two have i
Six Flags Entertainment Corporation (NYSE:FUN) Given Consensus Rating of "Hold" by Analysts
Six Flags Entertainment Corporation (NYSE:FUN - Get Free Report) has been given an average rating of "Hold" by the sixteen ratings firms that are covering the stock, MarketBeat Ratings reports. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell recommendation, six have given a hold r
The 98 Biggest TV Show Flops, Bombs and Misses in the First Half of 2026
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) In July, I updated my look at how the “streaming bubble” popped since 2023, showing the decline in streaming TV shows over time. But after compiling and analyzing and writing about over one hundred TV show flops in the first half of 2026—I counted 99 “nominees” and there are even more honorable mentions—I couldn’t have told you that the number of shows is going down. When it comes to scripted, English-language TV shows, it feels like we have as many bombs as ever. I don’t keep a specific count, but some streamers probably had as many flops as they’ve ever had.1 That’s right, it’s time for part two of my analysis of the biggest flops, bombs and misses on streaming in the first half of 2026. Two weeks ago, I took a look at films. Today, TV shows. If you want to read the full methodology for how I assemble this list, you can find it at the bottom of this article. In short, this list is… ...scripted and unscripted TV shows,...from the nine major streamers,...in the US (using US-only ratings),...excluding true crime, kids and foreign-language shows,...that got no/poor ratings,...from Jan-2026 to the end of June-2026. Reminder: this article does not represent my personal opinion—many of these shows are great!—but I follow the data, and a miss is a miss and a bomb is a bomb. Also, price matters. If a TV show costs north of $100 million, it needs to get lots and lots of streaming viewership to justify that budget. As with past editions, I ordered this list by streamer, going from best (fewest flops) to worst (the most misses)—taking the size of the flops into consideration—and like the last edition, three or four streamers vied to take the win/loss of having the most flops. (But the actual winner is no surprise.) I try to avoid tooting my own horn too much, but seriously, in just under 5,000 words (including the methodology section) I provide a mostly comprehensive overview of the eight major streamers (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+, and Apple TV) for the first half of the year, mentioning most of their hits and all their misses. It summarizes the entire first half of 2026! If you want to support this work, please subscribe. Subscribe Tubi Big Mood Boarders The Freak Brothers Twenty Twenty Six Honorable Mentions: Busted on Bodycam, Deestroying the Pitch, Destination World Cup 2026 I don’t think that Tubi spends all that much making or (mostly) licensing these original TV shows—Big Mood, Boarders and Twenty Twenty Six all come from the UK—but they’re not free and they didn’t chart anywhere. Winner: The Freak Brothers Have you even heard of this show? It’s an animated comedy...that’s on its third season! And Pete Davidson, Woody Harrelson, John Goodman and Tiffany Haddish all provide voice talent for it. Yes, animated shows don’t cost as much as live action shows, but cheap isn’t free! So a show with this level of talent needs to perform better. Disney+ Daredevil: Born Again Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord Honorable Mentions: Behind the Attraction, Donna Hay Coastal Celebrations, We Call It Imagineering Disney+ doesn’t make all that many original shows anymore. They had two flops, and one was animated. Their one not-a-miss show, Wonder Man, got just good enough viewership to not be considered a “miss”...but it’s since been cancelled. At this point, Disney has pivoted entirely away from making big budget TV shows for Disney+ to making...almost nothing for Disney+? Sure, Disney’s spending circa 2019-2022 was unsustainable, but now they’re pivoting too far in the other direction. At some point, Disney needs to stop shifting strategies so wildly. Really, Disney should have made fewer shows for Disney+ at launch and the shows they did make at that time needed to be made at more reasonable budgets. And they should adopt that strategy now. Winner: Daredevil: Born Again Daredevil, the Marvel Comics character, is on my personal Mount Rushmore of favorite superheroes, so it pains me to give him the win/loss today, but this show deserves it. I’ll repeat my hot take from last spring: “Based on his popularity, Daredevil should be in movies, and probably ones that cost a lot less than the MCU’s usual price tag. Disney/Bob Iger/Ike Perlmutter (who, based on reporting, made the decision) made a huge mistake selling TV shows to Netflix in the 2010s, thus limiting this character to the small screen. Daredevil could have anchored Marvel’s post-Infinity War plans, and if he did, the MCU would probably be in a better place than it is now.” HBO Max We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… What four streamers had the most misses... HBO’s strong start to 2026… The caveat to Peacock’s turnaround this year... Paramount+’s key man problem… What country isn’t delivering hits for Netflix or Hulu... The cavalcade of stars on a streamer where no one is watching their shows... Across nearly 5,000 words of analysis… And a lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
Accel Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:ACEL) Receives Consensus Recommendation of "Moderate Buy" from Analysts
Accel Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:ACEL - Get Free Report) has been assigned an average recommendation of "Moderate Buy" from the seven research firms that are covering the company, Marketbeat Ratings reports. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have assig
The Fierce Battle For Kids’ Eyeballs...Plus Two “Devils” Face Off
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) During the week of this report, Spider-Man: Brand New Day hit theaters and went on to become one of the biggest films of all time. So, you know what that means! It’s time for a poll! Recently, Project Hail Mary came to Prime Video and became a top five film for them, but didn’t smash streaming records, a feat I cautiously thought it could accomplish. Can Spider-Man 4 do better? To set the stakes, some of the biggest films of all time do just okay on streaming. Wicked, Top Gun: Maverick, and Barbie come to mind... But unlike those films, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a Sony film which means it’s headed to Netflix, the world’s largest streamer. Now, per friend of the newsletter and my go-to Netflix expert, Kasey Moore of What’s on Netflix, Sony films usually appear on Netflix 120 days after they premiere, which means Spidey 4 would land on Netflix on, checks notes, 28-November, one of the two biggest streaming weekends of the year! But Sony occasionally delays its biggest hits for a bit longer, to give them more time to make money on PVOD, so Spider-Man: Brand New Day might not swing onto Netflix until late December or even February 2027. Loading... Okay, on to this week’s issue. Since The Super Mario Galaxy Movie made its way to Peacock, I’m looking at the true workhorse of streaming viewership: kids films. And the surprising film that bested most Netflix animated movies. All that, plus Hulu has a new show that might be a hit (for them…?), two “Devils” square off on streaming, Zendaya tries to find some streaming magic, Netflix’s I Will Find You continues to do well, House of the Dragon tries to break into the season three top ten, some big NBC sports and summer programs, what friendly neighborhood Spider-Man character actually generates the most viewership on streaming, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of July 27th to August 2nd, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Film - As The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Hits Peacock, How Have Kids Films Fared in 2026? Like Mario hopping on a Koopa, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie landed on Peacock on 30-July. (Yeah, I kinda forced that Mario reference.) How did it do? Great, just like the first film. It got 13.0 million hours on its opening, and that’s good enough to take second place among Peacock films on the Nielsen charts all time: As I mention all the time, Peacock just isn’t the world’s biggest streamer—in fact, nowhere close—so its films struggle to put up numbers like Netflix (or even Prime Video and Disney+). So this is a solid debut for that streamer. And as we saw last time, The Super Mario Bros. Movie had a HUGE second life on Netflix when it moved streamers. This chart doesn’t even show how long the first Mario lasted on Netflix: a whopping, KPop-esque 31 weeks. For NBCUniversal, though, the big win was the second Mario movie grossing $429 million in America and over $1 billion globally. But yeah, to add a very strong streaming performance only makes its success even greater. Illumination pretty clearly has another hit franchise on their hands. This is a good time, though, to check in on kids films so far in 2026. We’ve had a few big, big titles, a rare Netflix success, and some disappointments. Let’s start with the top animated films since November of 2025, over their first four weeks on the charts, along with a few of the “best all time” animated films: (As a reminder, if a film doesn’t make the Nielsen top ten lists, I don’t have data for it, so it gets a “zero” in terms of viewership. Now, it had some viewership, but I don’t know what it is, so it gets a zero.) I added a few titles to get an idea of what the best of the best looks like in terms of animation. And you can see, through four weeks, Zootopia 2 can now claim “one of the biggest streaming films of all time” titles. GOAT too did surprisingly well, besting Netflix’s biggest films (Swapped and In Your Dreams) through four weeks. When I’ve talked about how films can have varying performances on streaming compared to their box office, this is what I mean. Goat just managed to gross even $103 million at the box office—so it’s popular, but just barely—but did very well on streaming. Of course, what set Encanto and KPop Demon Hunters apart from the rest was their absolutely insane longevity. Here are the kids film charts through eight weeks to show that: And really KPop Demon Hunters just kept going, and no 2025 or 2026 kids films have had that sort of longevity. I can’t wait to see the sequel in theaters. Film - Two Devils and a Drama As I wrote last week, in the past, theatrical-first film flops weren’t eligible for “Miss of the Week” or “Miss of the Year” honors/dishonors, but since so many more films go to theaters first these days, I’ve made them eligible now! But it’s complicated. You see, this is a Streaming Ratings Report, emphasis on streaming, which makes analyzing this week’s two biggest streaming misses—The Drama on HBO Max (A24’s dramedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson) and Prime Video’s The Devil Mouth (a killer shark movie starring young attractive people)—somewhat tricky. The Drama isn’t eligible for Luminate, but The Devil’s Mouth only had 1.5 million hours in its first week: The Devil’s Mouth notched 5.2 million hours according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, The Drama missed the charts entirely. Not great! But Prime Video is a much bigger streamer than HBO Max. That said, HBO Max titles are on Prime Video, but I think Prime Video prioritizes their original/exclusive titles, which helps boost their viewership. Complicating this further, The Drama made $48 million in the US—while A24 sells foreign distribution; the $57 million of overseas grosses helps A24 sell overseas rights for money in the future—off of a $28 million budget (which seems low for Zendaya and Pattinson, so they might have backend). The Devil’s Mouth, though, had zero dollars at the box office. The other stats for The Devil’s Mouth are bleak, and by “bleak”, I mean horrendous: a 4.7 on 15K reviews on IMDb (yikes) and a 46 on Metacritic (double yikes). The Drama, though buzzy online, only has a solid (but far from elite) 7.1 IMDb score on 121K reviews and a 59 on Metacritic (which is far, far lower than I’d have guessed). So which film is the “Miss of the Week”? I’m giving it to The Devil’s Mouth for one simple reason: it’s a horror film. And almost all horror films, even poorly reviewed horror films, should get a shot in theaters to at least try to recoup some of their budgets. The Drama made money at the box office and The Devil’s Mouth didn’t. It’s just like the situation last issue with Obsession and Masters of the Universe. Sure, Obsession didn’t pop on the streaming charts, but at least it already made it money at the box office. And as we’ve been seeing for years now and we’ll see all fall, theatrical films just do better on streaming. After all, the big “devil” winner this week was actually The Devil Wears Prada 2 with 14.8 million hours according to Nielsen. That’s right, The Devil Wears Prada 2—one of the box office success stories of May—came to streaming and parlayed its $220 million box office into 14.8 million Nielsen hours. Disney also put out a datecdote that it had 15.2 million “views” globally in five days, but again we don’t have a lot of great context for what that means. Here’s how it stacks up to other Hulu films, since I’m categorizing this mainly as a Hulu title (though it was also on Disney+): Share Quick Notes on Film We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Whether Hulu has a new hit show on its hands... The top first and third seasons of all time and which shows are climbing those charts… What version of Spidey is the most popular... What sport and TV show are performing better on NBC than the NBA... All the flops, bombs and misses... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. Coming Soon! Next week, wow, things stay so busy. One of streaming’s biggest shows of all time, Ted Lasso, returns along with new YA-ish shows from Hulu (The Shards, from Ryan Murphy) and Prime Video (Sterling Point). The Challenge moves to Paramount+, plus My Life with the Walter Boys returns to Netflix and Futurama returns to Hulu. And Netflix has a new horror film, The Last House. Lots to talk about! All month, things stay busy. We’re talking Reacher on Prime Video! Outer Banks and Tires on Netflix! Lanterns on HBO Max! UFC 330 on Paramount+ and the MLB Field of Dreams game on Netflix. And a ton of smaller films come to streaming. Long term, the VMAs are back on 27-Sep! I feel like I haven’t heard much about this show in past years, but I’m seeing more news coverage and buzz for this show than in past years. I’m curious to see how it does.
What Box Office Bomb Crushed Obsession on Streaming?
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) Before we get into this week’s issue, let me ask you for some suggestions. At the risk of coining too many names for too many things (hence my dictionary of terms...), I need a name for straight-to-streaming films that are too expensive to justify a straight-to-streaming release, but not big enough to justify a theatrical release. Like some of the films I highlighted in last week’s tally of the biggest film flops of 2026 so far: Hulu’s Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, Pizza Movie or Never Change! They don’t feel like “made for TV movies” (think Hallmark and Lifetime movies, cheap Netflix romcoms, or Disney Channel Original movies, for example) but they don’t feel big enough for the big screen. They’re not “cinematic” enough, so to speak. As I wrote... “I still need a name for this middle zone of film that’s too expensive to go straight-to-streaming but too small to justify a theatrical release (with all the PR, distribution, marketing and whatnot costs that go along with it), the Goldilocks zone of streaming film death.” Friend of the newsletter Brandon Katz has suggested the “Bermuda Budget Triangle”, “The Platform Gap” and “The Distribution Deadzone”. I love that first one. I’d offer up the much wordier “The Streaming Budget Dead Zone” or “the Goldilocks Zone of streaming film death” but that last one isn’t accurate since, unlike Goldilocks’ porridge, these films are the opposite of “just right”. That’s the problem! Anyway, if you have any suggestions, let me know! On to today’s Streaming Ratings Report. As you can tell by today’s headline, things are going to be spicy! I’m looking at a box office bomb that did really, really well on streaming, somewhat challenging a few different narratives. And another Netflix series declined in its second season. All that, plus Wicked: For Good switching streamers, The Hawk continuing its strong run, _The Bear’_s finale season finally dropping off the charts, the WNBA posting a big viewership number, “shallow libraries”, a sitcom spinoff failing to launch, more big budget IP flopping on Paramount+, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of July 20th to July 26th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Film - The Latest Theatrical Success Story on Streaming In the latest edition of “Flops, Bombs and Misses of the First Half of 2026”, I made a crucial change: I started including theatrical films with the streaming misses. The streamers have collectively—including Netflix, but not to as big of an extent—stopped making a lot of straight-to-streaming films, and the ones they do make aren’t as expensive as in the heyday of the streaming bubble. After the following two films bombed in theaters, you’d guess that they’ll be included in my next collection of flops, bombs and misses six months from now: Masters of the Universe on Prime Video (only $64 million domestic box office) Mortal Kombat II on HBO Max ($79 million domestic) But you’d be wrong! Masters of the Universe, a reboot of the He-Man franchise, a toy from the 1980s, came to streaming on 22-July and did great! This long-gestating project—it’s been at every studio for years, and came close to getting a greenlight at Netflix—then finally came to theaters in June, and showed up on streaming less than two months later. (I don’t love this short theatrical window.) It surprisingly grabbed nearly 20 million hours on its debut: That means, wait for it, Masters of the Universe is currently the eighth biggest film on streaming through two weeks. My rough bar for “hit” is shows or films in the top 15%. Ergo…Masters of the Universe is a legit, streaming hit! (One quick caveat: if it falls out of the top ten next week, it will move to 13th overall, just on the edge of the top 15.) Of course, that’s the data for just 2026. Here’s how it stacks up to Prime Video’s theatrical films: That drop into its second week is typical for Amazon films, but also a worrying sign. I have a feeling interest in this film is front-loaded and we’ll see it drop off after this. As for Mortal Kombat II, in this case, the viewership numbers roughly match the theatrical outing, with only 4.1 million hours in its first week. Here’s how it stacks up to other HBO Max films: The best defense of this number is that, as a relatively violent rated-R film, Mortal Kombat II never had a good chance at breaking out. So now it’s time for a little big of “Entertainment Nuance Guy”: First, yeah, my headline is obviously facetious, since Masters of the Universe besting Obsession says more about horror as a genre than it does that film. Second, I read and listened to quite a few “nobody wanted this IP” takes about Masters of the Universe, and that’s not really true. At least enough people wanted it to power a 20 million+ hour debut! Third, both this film and Mortal Kombat II were considered “average” by viewers, but not great films, with a 6.4 and 6.3 respectively on IMDb. That’s just shy of the level needed to be a word-of-mouth hit. Fourth, in the olden days, strong word of mouth could transform a box office miss into a cable/DVD hit, like Austin Powers or The Shawshank Redemption. We haven’t seen a lot of examples of that on streaming, though. And there are far fewer ways to monetize the post-theatrical life of a film these days. Fifth, Prime Video has shown an ability to push their own titles well, likely because they control the Amazon Fire TV ecosystem. Add it all up, and here’s my nuanced take on Masters of the Universe: it was a box office bomb, but, shockingly, a streaming hit. Unfortunately, while being a theatrical hit saves your film financially, being a streaming hit does not. Both Masters of the Universe and Mortal Kombat II had big budgets and needed to make more money in theaters to justify them. So…Straight-to-Streaming or Theaters? We’ve hit a really fun point in the streaming calendar, since the films that came out in theaters in April, May, and June are now arriving on streaming. So the “Do theatrical releases help streaming performances?” question is gonna get a fresh round of updates nearly every week. No single week will answer the question, but we may get some insights. For example, so far in 2026, it looks like theatrical films are lasting longer on the weekly Nielsen film charts. Here’s a list of films that have made the charts in their fourth or fifth week of release, separated by “for kids” and “general entertainment”: It certainly seems like theatrical films are lasting just a pinch longer on the charts, with Project Hail Mary being the current five-week champion. One Battle After Another did well for HBO Max too, and even The Sheep Detectives made it four weeks. The only exception to this trend? Obsession, which only lasted two weeks on the charts. You might tempted to overreact to this news. Don’t. Obsession is a huge horror hit, but horror just doesn’t do as well on streaming. By the way, here’s the Google Trends for various theatrical and stremaing films: Plus, when it comes to Netflix in four months, Obsession may have another big boost. Quick Notes on Film Note that when I write, “the streamers have pulled back on straight-to-streaming films” that doesn’t mean “abandoned” because Netflix is gonna Netflix. On 24-July, they released 72 Hours, a Kevin Hart comedy. Along with Eddie Murphy, Mark Wahlberg, John Cena and Adam Sandler, Kevin Hart is a streaming film star now. Did this latest one work? Not really. It only garnered two weeks of 13.2 and 12.2 million hours on its debut, well below the 20-million-hour hit threshold. It also was poorly received critically—a 44 on Metacritic—and by customers—a 5.4 on IMDb on 21K IMDb reviews. We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… The latest Netflix true crime doc to pop on the charts… How The Bear finished its run… Netflix’s latest Western to return to streaming… What Paramount+ animated film flopped… And what sitcom also missed… All the flops, bombs and misses… And a whole lot more… ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. Coming Soon! I’m behind by a week, so we’ve got two issues coming your way this week, including one in a couple of days or so, then we’ll be all caught up**.** Next issue, inspired by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie coming to Peacock, I’m going to take a look at the workhouse of streaming TV: kids films. Plus The Devil Wears Prada 2 continues theatrical films’ big run on streaming. All that, plus another surprise hit on Hulu, Lioness on CBS, and a whole lot more. Long term, LeBron James is filming his own “Last Dance”-style docu-series, surprising no one. But as I’ve been writing about a lot this summer, this genre is really overrated, so whoever ends up buying it (reportedly ESPN) really shouldn’t pay too much for it.
MrBeast Sales Slow, Angel Stock Falls, MUBI and Neon Look for Hits, and Will an NBA Franchise Set a Sales Record?
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) You probably remember egg prices spiking a few years ago. This led to a lot of debate between the pro-market/pro-competition/antitrust/Neo-Brandesian crowd and the center/center-right/center-left/abundance/libertarian crowd over the cause, whether it was the avian flu outbreak or whether industry consolidation led to price fixing, using avian flu as a convenient cover. Basel Musharbash wrote a whole investigation at BIG looking at it. Well, two years later, we have our answer: it was price fixing. The Justice Department found proof, via emails, of price fixing. Indeed, just the threat of an investigation brought prices down two years ago: I bring this up because at least half a dozen of my favorite political writers and pundits, who were skeptical about price fixing at the time, haven’t written any mea culpas on this issue. It’s really dispiriting and makes it much, much harder to trust their work on other issues. If you take a hard stand on an issue, then you get it wrong, you need to explain how and why you got it wrong. Or update your priors. This is how epistemological bubbles are formed! All of which is to say, it’s time for another installment of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. Last issue, I mostly focused on the “wrong” side of the equation, so today’s is a bit more balanced, but with one big mea culpa (though I still stand by my original concerns). Let’s dive right in! Subscribe CORRECTION: UFC Didn’t Release Subscriber Data (But Seems to Have Bragged About It Internally) In my analysis of the viewership of UFC Freedom 250, I wrote... “Paramount has also released datecdotes bragging about their subscriber numbers. Earlier this year, they claimed that the first UFC fight on Paramount+ brought in 1 million subscribers.” Well, that datecdote did not come from a PR rep, but from great reporting from James Faris at Business Insider. The actual quote was this: “Paramount’s flagship streaming service generated about a million new subscribers on the day of its first-ever UFC event, Paramount product chief Dane Glasgow told employees in a town hall on Tuesday morning, three staffers who attended the meeting told Business Insider.“ This wasn’t the biggest goof in the world; even Faris emphasized to me that this is more a “clarification” than a correction. Still, it sounds like, internally, the folks at Paramount were very happy about this result—and I’m guessing they were happy with this news getting out—even though the gains didn’t last through the quarter, dropping to 700K adds. RIGHT: MrBeast’s Struggles Continue... I’m very skeptical about MrBeast’s burgeoning media “empire” and, in particular, its $5 billion valuation, as I wrote earlier this year and last year. Sure enough, according to Business Insider, regarding its “booming” consumer products division_:_ “US sales volume grew 13% year-over-year in 2025, following a 33% leap the previous year, according to a presentation deck dated May 2026....A February 2025 investor deck viewed by Business Insider showed Feastables’ net revenue more than doubled in 2024 from 2023, to $215 million, and was forecast to grow 74% in 2025, to $375 million.” [Emphasis mine.] If you told investors that you projected 74% growth but delivered 13%,1 that’s not ideal. But it’s not just MrBeast. Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime had sales drop in half for their energy drinks. It’s one thing to build a successful entertainment company and an entirely different thing to succeed in the heavily-consolidated-but-also-very-competitive consumer packaged goods space! CPGs are dominated by a few firms with very wide moats compared to YouTube, which has few barriers to entry. These businesses require different skill sets and have completely different business environments. WRONG: Does the NBA Have an $8 Billion Bidder? Almost as soon as I published my article about the NBA’s finances, casting skepticism on NBA expansion, I saw this Front Office Sports headline: One group “claims to have already raised $8 billion” for the Vegas expansion team. I mean, wow. That’s just $2 billion less than what the Los Angeles Lakers were valued at when they were sold just last year. And they’re arguably the most popular team in the NBA. (Side note: the new owner is now under an investigation for fraud in how he went about financing the Lakers and the Dodgers purchases.) So much for the “dried up” language I used in that article. (This is why I usually stick to my “Entertainment Nuance Guy” tone in articles...) I went off old information—from April, when I read/heard about the NBA downplaying expansion efforts—instead of doing a quick double-check for new news. That said...if you read the article, the market for Seattle is “slow”, with just one reported bidder. So I wasn’t entirely off. This goof has annoyed me since I first published it, mainly because it undercut that article’s real point, which I stand by: NBA franchises are really overvalued right now. Now, I get why NBA teams are overvalued. When it comes to owning sports teams, it’s basically never wrong to assume that some rich person somewhere will care more about owning a team (or just being part of a group since they’re so expensive) than the actual financials. There are only so many teams to own, and opportunities to buy in preferred markets don’t come along very often. This explains why the teams sell for such high multiples (usually above a 10 to 12.5 revenue multiple, which is very high). You only need one person to overpay! Beyond the ultra-wealthy luxury good explanation, I worry NBA teams are becoming speculative assets. More and more private equity investors are buying into NBA teams. But the value, in owning a team, comes from selling it later, not any meaningful relationship to revenue or profit growth. In other words, the newer NBA owners are increasingly expecting someone later to buy their inflated asset. That’s not sound economics; that’s the “greater fool” theory at work.2 At some point, actually making money has to matter. Especially since revenue growth is now below the growth of the stock market. (And this matters because the NBA doesn’t have easy levers to pull to drastically lower their costs—half of their revenue has to go to players and then you actually have to run a team, including coaching, training, travel, media expenses, and more—or raise revenues aside from one-off expansions in America and overseas.) I just don’t see how investors make their money back buying NBA teams, except for selling at a higher price later on down the line. But if revenue/profit growth continues to slow, at some point, someone will be left holding the bag. RIGHT: Baseball and Basketball are about equally popular. Related to the above, I wanted to cite two quick pieces of evidence for one of my other theories: that the NBA and MLB are about as popular as each other, but the NBA gets much, much better media coverage. One YouGov survey has that fans prefer basketball to baseball by 52% to 48%, which I’m guessing is within the margin of error for that poll. That’s virtually even, meaning they’re about the same popularity. Over on NBC, a recent Red Sox-Yankees game averaged 4 million viewers, higher than Sunday Night Basketball’s average of 3.4 million on the same network. A Yankees-Dodgers game averaged 3.9 million two weeks ago. Not every game averages this much, but it shows you that baseball isn’t far off from basketball, depending on the matchup. Altogether, the NBA is just slightly more popular than baseball, but NBC is paying MLB a fraction of what they pay the NBA, a point I’ve made before. RIGHT: Angel, MUBI and Neon Updates... I’ve long been skeptical about many of Hollywood’s buzziest startups/smaller indie studios. It’s not that they don’t make great movies—films like Anora and Everything Everywhere All at Once are amazing—or that they’re not (rightfully) pushing the majors to make better films, but...they get a ton of hype, and that hype often doesn’t live up to the reality or difficulty in scaling up. Starting with MUBI, well, The Wall Street Journal wrote a feature on MUBI’s struggles last April, best summarized by the subheader “After Sequoia valued Mubi at $1 billion, a left-wing revolt sent the indie film company into a tailspin”. MUBI lost $7.3 million on $200 million in revenue in Q4 2025, but reportedly hit a record 1.7 million subscribers at the end of Q1. As for Neon, Department M purchased a “significant stake” in the company earlier this year. How much is that “stake” worth? According to Deadline, “No financial figures for the Neon-Department M deal were disclosed.” So...that’s not great! If it was a big valuation, we’d hear about. Also, I found this curious: “Both Neon and Department M already have separate partnerships with Qatar. The Qatar Film Committee has a slate deal in place with the former, and a biopic production pact with the latter.” Color me skeptical about much Middle Eastern investment dollars. See: LIV Golf. Finally, as for Angel (formerly Angel Studios), their stock very, very slightly popped last month after Young Washington ($20 million budget) which made $45 million in the US, but their stock is still way down from its opening. Smaller Updates RIGHT: The WGA should focus on antitrust concerns! I’ve been on this for years. Post-WGA/AMTPT deal in 2023, I wrote an article for the Ankler calling on the WGA to focus and organize against industry consolidation. Sure enough, the WGA filed a lawsuit against the Paramount-WBD merger, and people are organizing around this issue now. I wish this energy had coalesced earlier (specifically to lobby Washington much earlier), but better late than never! WRONG: Actually, the chip shortage might be due to market manipulation. In my last “Long Reads for the Long Summer” article, I shared an article about how LLMs are causing memory chip prices to spike, which will make all electronics more expensive. Well, turns out, three RAM manufacturers control 90% of the market, and now a private lawsuit accuses them of price-fixing. So yeah. WRONG/UPDATE: The Odyssey will hold! Two weeks ago, I wrote, “As of this moment, we haven’t had a super-blockbuster, though The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday could all cross the $500 million mark. (At this point, The Odyssey would need a very strong hold to get there.)” Well, it’s safe to say it’s going to have that hold! It only dropped 30% in weekend two and IMAX screenings are sold out all month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is also off to a great start. RIGHT: People are rushing to get shows out yearly. I’ve long been bullish on yearly, weekly-released shows, and Leslie Goldberg at The Ankler wrote about how many people in town are now listening. WRONG: Mark Carney reverses Canada’s stance on homegrown production. After writing about Canada installing domestic production quotas, Canada has backed off. WRONG: I don’t trust Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s online “views”. When I originally wrote about the latest Spider-Man film’s record-breaking trailer, I thought this was just YouTube views, but after watching this Corridor Crew video and doing more research, well, it’s all social views of the trailer globally. Really? That stat includes TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts views. Basically, I don’t trust it anymore. (This film will probably set record, but I trust the pre-sales data more.) RIGHT: Celebrity Production companies are still struggling. I’ve written about this for years, but the company that I didn’t track was Kevin Hart’s HartBeat, which was valued at $650 million but is struggling now and might just end soon, especially after Kevin Hart pulled his endorsement deals. And Bad Robot is moving to NYC. CORRECTION: SpongeBob is a “second run” title. In my 2025 recap article, I had _SpongeBob SquarePants_labelled as a “library” title, when it is still a “second run” show, with new episodes still coming out on Nickelodeon. CORRECTION: In my last “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong” update, I offered a correction from Doug Creutz and misspelled TD Cowen. Thanks, Grammarly! 1 Though he could have increased prices to make up for the gap, he couldn’t have increased them that much. 2 There’s a theory, which I think that Daryl Morey created and Bill Simmons popularized, that, to be successful building your team, you only need a handful of bad GMs in the league to take advantage of. To be clear, Daryl Morey’s theory was also for signing bad contracts, that you could always get out of bad contracts. Basically, there’s always someone who will make a bad trade. It’s not the same exact thing, but similar enough to the Greater Fool Theory that I really like it.
The Streaming Bubble Keeps Popping
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) One of my rules is “never bet against PE [private equity]”. This isn’t to say that I agree with their methods or tactics or strategies or financial innovations (aka shenanigans). Just that in the long arc of financial history, they’ve tended to return very good returns to their shareholders. That said, their forays into entertainment have left me...skeptical. I’ve written before about PE’s production company/celebrity production company roll ups, and those haven’t really worked out. Some PE groups tried to “roll up” an industry that isn’t “roll-up-able” for lack of a better term—since the barrier to entry for starting a production company is very low—often paying top dollar for celebrity production companies at the height of streaming valuations. So yeah maybe we can bet against PE when they venture into filmed entertainment. I’ve also noted that studio lots seemed to be a bubble back in 2022. Sure enough… Yikes! That sure sounds like some private equity guys lost some money. The only caveat being that holding a lot of land in Los Angeles is always valuable. But that wasn’t the pitch and likely real estate investment companies overpaid for said land. I mean, Goldman Sachs had to repossess it after all. (Technically, I’m not sure these buyers were traditional private equity, but PE was buying LA studio lots earlier this decade.) All to say: I call out bubbles when I see them, and they often pop. Anywho, my most famous bubble call was the “streaming bubble”, specifically that the major streamers were making too many shows and films. And that it could all come crashing down. Notably, I made this call before the strikes of 2023, but those strikes potentially accelerated the popping. And now it has indeed popped. One of my most popular articles of last year made that exact case. A year later, it’s time to update that analysis. The bottom line is that the streaming contraction continues. Credit where credit is due, Luminate—an analytics company whose data I use weekly in my streaming ratings report—called this out in a recent report I saw highlighted in both Bloomberg and The Hollywood Reporter. But I’m adding my data to their look, including streaming films and kids TV shows. I’ll also provide some other data that all tells the same picture. Let’s dive in! Subscribe The Number of Streaming TV Shows, Films and Specials Is Declining AGAIN in 2026 Let’s get right to the data, starting with my dataset. Specifically, each week I track every “notable” title to come out on streaming. I try to grab every title on every major streamer, meaning if it’s a first run or original or exclusive, I track it. This helps me call out the “dogs not barking” and the misses/flops each week. So that will be our first series of charts, my weekly collection data. Let’s start with the raw TV show, film and special data, by week. Note: As the years have gone by, I have actually added more sources (going from just one source to five sources) to find new titles, meaning that this data collection is, likely, more accurate now than in the past. Which means my team and I are more likely to have undercounted titles in the past rather than today. I like to cut the data several different ways. Here’s that same look, by quarter, to more sharply show the trends: And here’s the data just looking at the first half of each year. That’s the same data, just cut three different ways with three different time periods. Note that films, TV shows, and specials are all down by 25%, 42% and 17%, respectively, from 2022. The good news is that the number of films and specials actually increased year-over-year from 2025 to 2026, but not enough to offset the 25% decline in TV shows. Now, I also look at kids shows, and here they are pulled out on their own: And here’s that by quarter: This really seems to be a notable area of pullback by the streamers. Kids shows are down 80% from 2022. This reflects some formerly Disney+ shows going to cable TV first, but also pullbacks from HBO Max, Prime Video and Netflix. I also categorize the TV shows by English language and non-English language, and that also reveals a lot of where the drop comes from: And here is by the half-year: In this look, the good news is the drop for English language shows seems to have stabilized in the last year. But the bad news is the long term decline from the 2022 peak. Other Data So I wasn’t the only person to notice this decline in the number of shows. I have a few other data sources for this, though most only go through the end of 2025. As I said, Luminate beat me to the punch, so let’s look at their data. We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… What TV loss streaming didn’t make up for... How Netflix has changed their programming slate over time… Ten more images charting the decline of production... What type of films aren’t being made anymore... The good news (for movie theaters)… And more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
UFC Freedom 250 Fails to Knock Out The Ratings
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) If UFC fans wanted one image to say, “Hey, Paramount+ is crushing it with their UFC rights deal,” I could provide that image. Here it is: (Reminder: this is my creation of the Nielsen Top 30, since Nielsen doesn’t combine the lists or include sports. I take all three lists and combine them. Some streaming TV shows probably have higher ratings than many of the films on this list.) Look at that! UFC Freedom 250 is number one! It topped the Nielsen “Top 30” list for shows and films that made the top ten the week of 15-June. So if you’re a UFC fan or supporter of Paramount+, that’s the good news for you this week. This program topped the ratings charts for one week. Everything else is bad news, or at least a huge caveat to that story, which I’ll explain today in the first part of this week’s Streaming Ratings Report—for the weeks of 8-June and 15-June—which is a double issue since I’ve been writing on a bunch of topics recently. UFC Freedom 250 is one of the biggest streaming events of the year, and super relevant to Paramount+’s strategy, so it merited its own article. Let’s dive in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of June 8th to June 21st 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Check Out My Interview on UFC 250 at MMA Draw After you read this article, if you want even more thoughts on UFC and Paramount-Skydance/Paramount+, I did a written interview with MMA Draw. They asked me to answer some questions about UFC Freedom 250, and I was happy to chat with them. Find it here: [ The MMA Draw Newsletter Did Paramount really overpay for the UFC? What the data tells us so far If you know the history of American television, you also know that combat sports is often a leading indicator of the future… Read more a day ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Nate Wilcox and Zach Arnold ](https://www.themmadraw.com/p/did-paramount-really-overpay-for?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) I never thought I’d need a combat sports newsletter in my life, but the good folks at MMA Draw publish an excellent one on UFC, MMA, pro wrestling, boxing and more, analyzing both the sports themselves and the politics, economics and antitrust issues that impact them. Check the article and their newsletter out! Paramount+ Has Its Best Sporting Event of All Time…But Was It Worth It? Before we look at the UFC Freedom 250 data in particular, let’s talk about what we can’t say. Namely, let’s start with the lack of comparisons. First off, I’d love to put a chart out comparing this fight to past UFC fights on Paramount+…but we don’t have the data. This is the first time we’ve gotten Nielsen data about a Paramount+ UFC fight. As far as I can tell, Paramount provided data for the first fight, but it was a proprietary datecdote (saying it had “an average minute audience” of 5 million “views”) and then, for two fights, we got the linear viewership numbers when they aired on CBS, but no streaming data. Everything else was crickets. We also can’t compare this fight to other fights/combat sports on streaming, in particular the MMA and boxing, because Netflix also didn’t use Nielsen to track those events, opting for TVision and VideoAmp, respectively. (This isn’t Paramount’s fault, but does still suck.) We also can’t compare to UFC’s fights that used to be on ESPN+, since we don’t have any data for that, plus Disney+ didn’t have marquee fights. The comparisons would not be apples-to-apples. Can we compare to past Pay-Per-View fights? Absolutely not. The comparisons would absolutely NOT be apples-to-apples. That didn’t stop Paramount+, though, who bragged that their UFC events have reached drastically more people than past PPV fights. Duh. Sorry, but I gotta make this point again. A basic tenet of economics is that the cheaper something becomes, the more people consume or buy it. That’s Econ 101. (Sometimes pundits call things “Econ 101” that are actually like Econ 210 or even PhD-level economics, but no, this is really like first or second class basic economics.) Yet I still see one analytics firm consistently say that more people watch films on streaming than PVOD proves streaming which means that the streaming window is more valuable than the PVOD window. No, it’s not! Same thing here. Pay-Per-View events back in the day could be really, really, really expensive! So whole groups of people pitched in to buy them. That increased the perceived value of, say, the Mike Tyson fight. Or a UFC numbered event. So yes, the fact that Paramount+ makes numbered UFC fights essentially “free” if you’re already a Paramount+ member means consumption will go up. Obviously. Same for Netflix and their boxing matches. They’re talking about fights that used to cost consumers, in some cases, $50 in 1996…which is over $100 in today’s dollars. Over 1.6 million people paid that to watch the Tyson-Holyfield fight! Again, streaming is essentially “free”. Or $10 to $20, depending on what streamer we’re talking about and what tier you’re on. No wonder more people are “watching”. (Plus, Nielsen’s out-of-home viewing also helps these numbers.) UFC Freedom 250 Did Well…But I Have A Lot of Worries So what can we compare the fights to? Well, the good news is Nielsen put out that the fight averaged 7.0 million viewers for UFC Freedom 250, which is a solid number for a fight. We also know the length, at roughly 4 and a half hours. (I saw different run times, but this seems to be the consensus considering it started at 8 pm, had a delay and then finished after midnight on the East Coast. If you assume a shorter run time, then yes, the total hours viewed would go down.) That means I have the two numbers needed to add this to my Nielsen database. And then…I can compare this viewership to the NFL: And, uh, not great. But also within striking distance, mainly because the runtime for this event was so long. I’d also add that this event had viewership equal to a regular season NFL game on streaming, but if anything, it was more comparable to an NFL playoff or Super Bowl-esque event. And you can compare viewership to the top football games on broadcast, cable and streaming, and it’s not impressive at all: We can also compare it to other sports that week, including the NBA Finals and start of the World Cup: Again, not great. The NBA generated roughly four times as many average viewers each game for its NBA Finals. The World Cup has similarly big numbers. Also, that’s just a tiny fraction of the 25 most watched sporting events each week. The NBA, NHL and FIFA World Cup had many, many more games racking up hours. We could also compare this to other streaming programs to get an idea of “is this a good investment?” and here is how it ranks compared to other top Paramount+ programs: The worry here? Well, unlike scripted programming, which has rewatchability, older fights/sporting events have very little library value. Very, very few people are rewatching these fights, especially years from now. Paramount has also released datecdotes bragging about their subscriber numbers. Earlier this year, they claimed that the first UFC fight on Paramount+ brought in 1 million subscribers. Then, in their quarterly earnings report, they only ended up with 700K subs. Not great! They claimed they dropped lower-value international subscribers, but that’s why I tend to discount subscriber additions when they’re leaked to the press.1 I expect we may see a bump again for UFC Freedom 250, but I’d caution using subscriber growth so soon after these events to judge the success, since new subs with high churn (see Peacock) aren’t great either. Also, analysts often want to attribute all subscriber growth to their favorite/pet show, and that just doesn’t make sense. The biggest caveat for UFC Freedom 250 and Paramount’s very first UFC marquee event is that these could be high watermarks for the sport. UFC Freedom 250 had an incredible amount of earned media coverage compared to most UFC fights. I mean, it had wall-to-wall national news coverage in the lead up to the event. (The first fight also had a lot of promotion from Paramount since it was first.) Other fights could reach this bar—say the Conor McGregor return to the Octagon—but they’ll be fewer and far between. Was This Deal Worth It? All to ask: is this Paramount deal worth it? In this case, I think the UFC Freedom 250 numbers are more distracting than helpful. This fight did well and compares well to other top sporting events. But we know that the first marquee event was at least a third smaller, if Paramount’s own data is to be believed. And it’s likely the other fights are much, much, much smaller. And then you get to the paycheck that Paramount-Skydance paid. FIFA’s World Cup cost about the same for Fox, but clearly generated multiples more total viewership. (Though it’s only every four years.) The NBA is much more expensive, but until the playoffs, they likely didn’t pay for itself. Even still, Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video likely overpaid. So, in that context, the NBA may be an overpay that makes the UFC look not so bad. But two overpays don’t make an underpay, to paraphrase the old cliché about wrongs and rights. And looking at UFC Freedom 250 as the likely ceiling of MMA on Paramount+, Paramount-Skydance likely paid too much. Share 1 I would love regular reports on subscriber additions by programs, but as is, it’s mostly leaked or rumored in haphazard ways.
Long Reads for the Long Weekend
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) Happy Fourth of July weekend! As has been a tradition of mine going back to the beginning of the EntStrategyGuy website, I’m sharing my favorite long reads of the last year, like I did in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2024, and 2025. Let’s dive right in! Subscribe “Different Prices for the Same Ride: How Uber and Lyft Use AI to Get More Money Out of You“ by Derek Kravitz in Consumer Reports I don’t think surveillance pricing, like the kind described in this brilliant Consumer Reports article, is long for the world—it’s toxically unpopular—but we’ll see if either party takes on this issue. If I ran a political party focused on affordability, I would focus on a few pro-consumer and pro-market policies: Banning non-compete agreements. Ending surveillance pricing Eliminating junk fees (read more here...) Ensuring “right to repair” for consumer (and military!) products Capping excessive app store fees Stopping digital/algorithmic price-fixing tools. Preventing automatic subscription price increases. And more. If you want to fight inflation, there are a lot of great ways to do it quickly. Speaking of higher prices... “Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices Across the Economy“ by Matt Stoller in BIG Again, I think a political party should focus on lowering prices for consumers. And deals like this—Walmart making a deal/forcing Pepsi to offer the lowest prices at its stores and nowhere else—hypothetically lower prices at Walmart...but raise them everywhere else. “15 DUIs, still driving: California’s failure to take repeat drunk drivers off the road“ by Robert Lewis and Lauren Hepler in CalMatters CalMatters does terrific reporting in California, something the Golden State desperately needs more of, and this article is a great example of that. “PugLips: The next insanely popular thing you’ve never heard of…” by Simon Carless in Game Discover Co I thought that this parody article (and yes, it’s a parody, but I was definitely unsure at first) was hilarious and totally nailed how much tech/business journalism feels these days. Actually, three of my favorite articles this year were on hype in the video game industry, including Georg Zoller’s “The Video Game Industries Very Dark Night”—which I linked to recently and wrote a follow-up here—and Owen Mahoney’s “Derek Zoolander, Videogame Exec”. In particular, I like Mahoney’s focus on user experience as a guide to what trends will actually grab hold of customers. “The Matrix Lies“ by Evan Shapiro in Media War & Peace Evan Shapiro’s first person account of his experience with AI was hilarious. I think LLMs capabilities have significantly grown from last summer, and yet...my editor/researcher just had an abysmal experience using an LLM to do a quite basic task (which our LLM normally does each week) and the LLM made a mistake on every single data entry...along with seven different mistakes affecting twelve of the twenty or so entries, including mistakes that are explicitly spelled out in the prompt. That’s a brutal failure rate. Again, if you use AI/LLM for data collection, you need to take a lot of extra steps to verify and check the data. “Ghosts in the Balcony: A Cross-Country Trip to 58 Theaters Fighting to Survive“ by Matthew Frank in The Ankler I thought Matthew Frank’s pitch to head across America to visit theaters sounded insane aggressive at the time—at least it felt that way to someone a decade older than him; man, to be in your twenties again, am I right?—but I knew the result would be great. And it was, a terrific feature by a great young writer. Also, I loved Matthew’s recent article on who’s getting the precious few entry level jobs in Hollywood. (Hint: nepotism.) “Disney erased FiveThirtyEight“ and “Did Las Vegas get too greedy?” by Nate Silver in Silver Bulletin I love media history and analysis, and there’s no one better to get the history of FiveThirtyEight than from Nate Silver, who wrote about his personal experience in one of my favorite pieces from this year. I also loved Nate’s breakdown of what’s causing Vegas’ woes, but I’ll offer one criticism, summarized as “Might I suggest antitrust?” Many centrists/center-right/libertarian thinkers (Nate is self-described as the latter) often don’t consider consolidation or antitrust as factors in policy issues like housing, America’s military readiness, or, in this case, Las Vegas. Even if libertarians want to debunk antitrust/consolidation concerns, I’d love to read that debunking. In this case, Vegas is incredibly consolidated (though it also has been for a long time) and I’d have loved to read Nate at least contending with this factor, since he addresses almost every other potential factor for Vegas’ decline. “Why Microsoft’s Carbon Removal Pullback Is Such a Big Deal“ by Robinson Meyer in Heatmap News I’m a big supporter of carbon removal efforts, but this nascent industry faces a lot of headwinds, including this big move most recently. I think it’s clear that solar panels and batteries should be able to get the world to its carbon footprint goals, but effective carbon renewal remains necessary to prevent the worst impacts of global warming. “AI is killing the cheap smartphone“ by David Oks LLMs and AI will impact the world in ways we’re not ready for, and already, third world countries are seeing the prices of cheap cellphones skyrocket due to the cost of chips skyrocketing. This article by David Oks is a terrific breakdown. “100 Days of Madness: Netflix, Paramount, Warner and the Future of Hollywood“ by Wade Major at Hollywood Heretic Wade Major dove deep into Hollywood/streaming’s financials in this must read piece. Not that I agree with everything in this article (read my take on Warner Bros./Paramount here) but the analysis is top notch. I think many people discount how quality thinking, regardless of the argument/conclusion, will make you a better thinker. “Erased by the UFC: Frank Shamrock, The MMA GOAT of the 20th Century“ by Nate Wilcox in The MMA Draw Newsletter Growing up playing the UFC fighting game on the Dreamcast, Frank Shamrock was my favorite MMA fighter, and this history/tribute to him was great. Other Fun Reads “The Hardest Part Of History To Tell Is How It Felt“ by Craig Fehrman at Defector “Unmasking the Sea Star Killer“ by Craig Welch at bioGraphic “What Could Save the Industry? Fin-Syn“ by Richard Rushfield in The Ankler Alex Rollins Berg in Underexposed on movie bumpers, pillow shots, Disney trash cinema, cult films, and Casablanca. David H. Montgomery in YouGov’s The Surveyor on punctuation marks, condiments, dinosaurs, and comic strips and kids media. “How Medium finally pivoted its way to profitability“ and “Why the best journalists on YouTube are all former Vox employees“ by Simon Owens in Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter “It’s Not Just You, Netflix Shows Have Gotten Slightly Shorter: Here’s What the Data Says“ by Kasey Moore at What’s on Netflix “Numlock Awards: How Diane Warren became the biggest loser in Oscar history“ by Nathaniel Rakich and “Numlock Awards: The Oscar Bait era is over. The Oscar Chum era is here.” by Walt Hickey & Michael Domanico at Numlock Awards
Netflix and Superheroes Are Having a Rough Stretch on Streaming....
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) I have a quick prediction before we start today’s article: You might see this data in future news articles. Not my specific charts or analysis, but the core trend I’ve been monitoring—Netflix is having a lackluster Q2—will become inescapable. Often, folks want to know “What does the data say?” Well, that’s what it says. I haven’t seen this analysis hit the trades really yet, but I have a feeling some other outlets are going to start making this case soon. Remember, you read it here first. You probably have read about the problems facing superhero films at the box office this weekend. Well, this week, I explore whether superheroes are dying on TV as well! And the data says: definitely maybe! We have a lot to cover in today’s Streaming Ratings Report, which covers the two weeks of 18-May and 25-May. Today, I’m just looking at TV, like Netflix’s disappointing Q2, superhero shows underwhelming, a few TV shows dropping off the charts, The Pitt finally ending its epic run on the viewership charts (and whether “view counts” change its status as one of the biggest shows of all time), all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. Tomorrow, I’ve got a great rundown of the film side of things. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of May 18th to May 31st, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Television - Netflix’s Q2 Slump Continues Having analyzed streaming ratings for going on half a decade, I have learned to trust my gut, but I’m always relieved when I can find actual data to back it up. For example, after a string of very popular shows like Stranger Things, Bridgerton, The Lincoln Lawyer and The Night Agent came out, week after week, in January and February, my gut wondered if Netflix had enough new and returning TV shows to sustain them throughout the year. Since then, Netflix’s post-March slate of shows has not impressed me. This week seemed to feature a potential new hit, but then, like a classic Duffer Bros. TV show, there was a twist. I speak of The Boroughs, Netflix’s latest (and last) Duffer Bros. produced show. The pitch is “Stranger Things with older actors”. And it topped the Nielsen charts: With just two weeks of viewership, The Boroughs would have been a top 25 debut show last year: But here’s the twist: Netflix has already cancelled The Boroughs! What happened? Likely a few things. First, the show didn’t do as well globally as it did in the US. As What’s on Netflix showed, it lagged behind several other shows that got cancelled. Second, its completion rate was likely low; after an initial burst of interest, it quickly dropped off on the Samba TV and Luminate charts. Third, the Duffer Bros. left Netflix for Paramount, and that may have factored into Netflix’s decision here. (Though I tend to believe that if a show is doing well, Netflix would have kept greenlighting seasons.) Still, just because I can explain why Netflix may have cancelled this show doesn’t mean I’m justifying it. In particular, as I’ve noted before, Netflix is losing a lot of their bigger shows as they reach their natural ends, and they need to replace those shows. This show had the hallmarks of a big new genre show, and it’s their biggest hit of the last few months (in the US at least), but now it’s done. Netflix’s other show this week—The Four Seasons, the second season of the “hit” show from last year—definitely disappointed. Its sophomore season had about half the viewership of the first, only 12.7 million hours. It also only had a two week run on Samba TV, and its numbers were all down on Luminate too. In other words, even with two successes, the Q2 slump for Netflix looks real: I could add to the list of disappointments: Both Lord of the Files and Man on Fire had short runs on the Nielsen charts. Running Point’s sophomore season also opened to about half its viewership, similar to The Four Seasons. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’s second season—see below—didn’t even make any of the three viewership charts I track, unlike the first season. Netflix is absolutely having a dismal second three months of 2026. If this Nielsen data is any indication, and I think it is, I think this will show up in Netflix’s engagement report, and maybe even their financial outcomes. And the rest of June doesn’t look much better. We have two hit shows coming back—Sweet Magnolias, one of their quietest big shows, and Avatar: The Last Airbender, a big hit for them in 2024—but the other big swings are limited series crime thrillers i.e. no future season potential. Like I said above, sometimes when I uncover a juicy nugget like this, other outlets end up writing very similar articles mimicking the data without credit. We’ll see if that happens this time! Share Television - The State of Superhero Shows on Streaming When I first heard the pitch for Spider-Noir—a Sony TV show on Prime Video that binge-released eight episodes first on MGM+ then on Prime Video two days later—I had my doubts. It’s a live-action Spider-Man show set in the 1930s, starring Nicholas Cage, based on a cameo of a character in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. No, seriously, that’s the pitch. That could either go terrifically well or horribly wrong. Great because, Spider-Man. He’s the biggest superhero we have. I’ve seen tracking numbers that put the new _Spider-Man: Brand New Da_y as the blockbuster of the year and initial pre-sales back that up. And yet this Spider-Noir pitch feels very esoteric. (Also, the eight-episode binge release feels very “Amazon copying Netflix” again.) So what’s the data say? And what does this say about the future of superhero shows?
Roku May Help Fox Avoid Aggregeddon
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Scrolling through links over the last week, I stumbled across this fun headline: Wow. Formula 1 (the sport, not the docu-series) is the perfect “dog not barking”. As a reminder, each week in my Streaming Ratings Report, I call out the shows that miss every viewership chart. I dub them “dogs not barking”—like the Sherlock Holmes mystery—because without any data, we forget they even exist. This is in contrast to something like, say, a film flop—cough The Mandalorian and Grogu cough—where even underperforming at the box office is widely discussed here, there and everywhere. In the US, Formula 1 is now in “no public viewership data, so not discussed” territory. After moving to Apple TV from its former home of ESPN, basically no one talks about it. Apple did publish an initial, unsourced, unsubstantiated, (dare I say unserious) datecdote claiming more folks are watching Formula 1 on Apple than ESPN, but we haven’t gotten any updates since. This stands in contrast to when the sport streamed on ESPN, and ESPN PR provided weekly viewership figures. Formula 1 was, at best, a niche sport in America—averaging 1.3 million viewers in the Big Data Plus era—but now it’s basically anonymous. (And yeah, after moving to Apple, I very, very, very much doubt its ratings increased.) Unfortunately, that story isn’t quite big enough to warrant a section in today’s “Most Important Story of the Week” column, but I wanted to call it out, because otherwise, no one else will! Certainly, no one will write articles about the silence/ratings decline, unlike when they wrote breathless articles connecting the rise in viewership to Netflix’s Drive to Survive, including Reuters just last month. (This is a topic I’ve tried to provide a moderate/nuanced/non-hyped take since 2022.) Anyway, on to this week’s issue. I was a bit worried I didn’t have a juicy topic, then the Murdochs went out and did their Murdoch thing: buying Roku. So that’s the story of the week, and it happens to touch on quite a few themes of the streaming wars and the disruption therein. I’ll cover that, plus why more consolidation in Hollywood media looks likely, more good news on the Hollywood labor front, whether we’ll see an uptick in production in Los Angeles, some Broadway and theme park news, cellphone prices going up in the third world (and possibly everywhere), and more. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Another Big Media & Entertainment Merger The story of the week is clearly Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion. I read a lot of good strategy takes on why Fox bought this streaming TV device maker—and I’ll have mine below—but what fascinates me more is how this deal connects to quite a few themes of the streaming wars, linking to everything from the pace of M&A to “aggregeddon” to Netflix’s recent M&A actions/inactions to the shift to advertising from pure play streaming and more. The only topic I can’t really connect it to is my old theory, “never bet against Rupert Murdoch” because he isn’t the one who did this deal; his son Lachlan inked it. (Do I think he provided advice, even at his 95 years of age? Sure.) That plus I have one additional piece of strategy for all entertainment players, inspired by this deal. So let’s dive into all those topics, starting with why I like this deal. Roku is a Great M&A Buy
What Genres and Streamers Won 2025? And Who Lost? Plus Six Strategy Thoughts
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) Okay, time for the tenth and final article in my ten-part series recapping 2025. As I wrote two articles ago, my barometer for whether these articles are worth writing/publishing is whether they yield strategic insights, and once again, every subsection in this article has a strategic takeaway (or two). Honestly, these are the most important takeaways, since I step back and look holistically at the streaming wars in 2025. After I declare which streamers won and lost the year and which genres won and lost the year, I have six bonus thoughts. If you’d like to review the whole series... You can find the film flops here and here. You can find the TV shows flops here and here. You can find the top films here. You can find the top TV shows here, here and here. Then I declared my winners and losers in various categories here. You can find my 2024 recaps here. You can find the 2023 recaps here and here. And my 2022, 2021 and 2020 are all stored here. Yeah, it’s halfway through the year, and I’m just finishing this series up now. This year, I tried to space things out to not clog up my writing calendar, plus I had to wait for Fallout to (finally) drop off the charts. Well, that ended up pushing this series wayyyyy too far back on the calendar. Oh well. Next year, the goal will be to finish this series in March, but frankly, I just need more staff to make that happen. So please subscribe. Or, if you’re an advertiser (movie studio, FYC firm, or other), please reach out. Subscribe Streamer of the Year: Netflix Honorable Mention: Paramount (and CBS) So, just last week, I wrote about how Netflix has lost seven of its top twelve scripted shows in the last year. And I shared two very dour looks at Netflix’s potential slowdown this year and last. Guess what? They’re still the number one streamer in America. In 2025, they dominated new streaming shows (even if most of those new hit shows aren’t coming back for future seasons), they had the two biggest films, and they had the top returning TV show by a mile. The world is complicated, nuanced and messy. There may be warning signs of a future Netflix slowdown, but in 2025, Netflix was still the number one streamer. Note what I didn’t say? That Netflix has “won” the streaming wars, because obviously the streaming wars are still ongoing and, more importantly, YouTube is still growing—so now YouTube has “won” the streaming wars?—while Netflix’s share of TV consumption has stalled out. Avoid simplistic talking points, especially if they’re constantly repeated and could fit on a bumper sticker. I had trouble picking the second-place streamer this year, because all of the candidates for second place—Prime Video, HBO Max, and Paramount+—had some hits, but no one stood out. Then I saw this update from Nielsen on the top shows on TV in the 2025-206 season. Sure enough, Netflix had five of the top ten shows! And they had ten of the top 31 shows and fifteen of the top fifty. But CBS/Paramount+ actually had more shows in the top thirty and the top fifty. Paramount+/CBS had twelve of the top thirty shows and nineteen of the top fifty. Let me emphasize that: CBS/Paramount+ had more top shows in the 2025-2026 season than Netflix. And this look was just for TV shows, not live sports, an arena Netflix barely plays in. Meanwhile, Paramount-Skydance’s market cap is a fraction of Netflix’s. That’s weird, right? Streaming Loser of the Year, TV… We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… ...what streamer lost the year in TV... …whether Netflix could win the title for “film” streamer too… …who won the Disney vs Warner Bros. battle for theaters… ...what TV genres won and lost the year... ...what film genres won and lost the year... ...what film genre people think is thriving on streaming but isn’t… …why F-BOSSS TV shows don’t hold the same sway in the 2020s… …what it means to “flop” as a film on streaming… …UK shows underperforming on streaming… And a lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
AEW Collision Viewership & Ratings Report: 2/7/2026
Despite the excitement leading in to "Grand Slam: Australia," viewership was down for the February 7 edition of "AEW Collision."
Donald Trump Gets Lowest Kennedy Center Honors Ratings Ever: Report
Despite Trump’s boasts, the broadcast’s ratings reportedly dropped 35 percent from last year’s record low.
Donald Trump Gets Lowest Kennedy Center Honors Ratings Ever: Report
Despite Trump’s boasts, the broadcast’s ratings reportedly dropped 35 percent from last year’s record low.