BEING THE RICARDOS attracted more viewing than Netflix's DON'T LOOK NOW the week of 12/20, per Nielsen. It was the No. 1 original movie for the week as well.
BTR: 604 million minutes
DLU: 521 MM
Some context below....
BTR debuted 3 days before DLU, so it had more time to grab eyeballs. On the other hand, DLU is 20 minutes longer, which helps pad its total minutes tally.
Don't know exactly how many Prime Video subs there are in US, but Netflix is generally seen as bigger (@RichLightShed ?)
In any case, Netflix movies usually outperform Prime Video titles, so this is a bit of an upset.
Also interesting: Nielsen says the demo skew of BEING THE RICARDOS was old---36% of the audience was over 65. Lesson: Make more movies for people who don't go out to movies!
I'm also imagining a world where WEST SIDE STORY opened day and date on Hulu or D+. The narrative around the film's business success might look a lot different...
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Just wanna put this out there before the flood of numbers and spin: The best way to compare Super Bowl audience size is by household ratings, i.e., the percent of TV homes which watched, and not total viewers.
The reason: Population grows! Ratings are static
Nets of late love to put out releases that say "A Record 110 Million People Watched SB," which...yes, that could be true.
But there are 330M+ potential US viewers today. In 1980, just 220M.
110M in 2021 is 1/3 of America. 109M in 1980 is half.
More than two years in the making, it's finally #AppleTVPlus launch day. There's been a lot of focus on its new shows (understandably so!) and what it doesn't have (old stuff.) But what's Apple's bigger play with TV+ --and the TV app? I wanted to find out (thread ahoy)
Since Apple hired two former Sony execs to run TV, people in Hollywood have been trying to figure out what the heck was going on in Culver City (where Apple video is based.) Was the plan to buy a studio/network & knock off Netflix? Maybe it just wanted to sell a few more phones?
As it started assembling creative execs and spending the now-required Crazy Sums of Money, I started talking to sources close to Apple about what the strategy was. TBH, many admitted they had no clue. But one thing I heard from a few was: "Pay attention to the TV app."