Did Ghostbusters Do the Gangbusters Reviews?

(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the best guide to what’s hot in streaming TV and what’s not. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategies in the entertainment industry. If you received this email, subscribe (to get these insights every week.)

Let’s start today with a fun fact that will impress your friends:

In July, Paramount+ released just three new original TV shows, and none of them achieved ratings success.

That’s not to say they didn’t have shows that were good for them. Paramount+ shared Your Honor, Dexter And Malignant with Netflix, and that larger platform helped all three land in the Nielsen top ten. But as for Paramount+ itself, it looks like they’ve taken the summer off. (Those three new shows? Mafia Spies, Camp Coral: Spongebob’s Underworld, And Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken) Perhaps they wanted to wait for football to drive retention, or they wanted to avoid the Summer Olympics, or a general content downturn in the industry, or they relied on their weekly series (Mayor of Kingstown And Malignant), but they still withdrew.

It’s also interesting that despite the limited release schedule, Paramount Global owned or co-owned seven titles on the Nielsen Top 30 charts this week: Criminal Minds, Dexter, NCIS, Evil, Spongebob Squarepants, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I And ALS:

(For the free subscribers, I publish this top 30 chart every week at the end of each newsletter.)

The caveat is that several of those seven titles were shared with other streamers, such as Netflix or Prime Video. But still! Paramount’s success is often overlooked in coverage of the streaming wars of the entertainment industry.

Still, that little Paramount detail is why I like my approach so much. I watch EVERYTHING the streamers put out and look at as many ratings/interest graphs as I can each week. I think I find little details that other media outlets, in their quest for virality by focusing on trending shows, often miss.

Let’s take a look at the ratings for the week of July 22nd. On the TV front, things were a bit lackluster, with no TV show surpassing 20 million hours of viewing on the Nielsen charts. We still had some interesting stories, including a new Netflix true crime series that made it onto the charts, Presumed innocent Finally Making Its Way On The Nielsen Charts, A Look At Slow-Moving Hits, More Library Titles Boosted By Major Theatrical Releases, A Look At Your Honor And Rightfun stats about podcasts, the ratings for the Olympic Opening Ceremony (which were high, but possibly overhyped), all the flops, fails and misfires of the week (there were a lot of those on TV), and much more.

But we’ll start with a big number for a movie on Netflix….

(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the US market and aggregates data from the weekly Nielsen top ten ratingsTop Ten Data from Luminate, Showlabs, TV time trend data, Samba TV ratings per household, company date factsand Netflix hours watched 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 22 through July 28.)

If you only look at the total number of viewers, Sony’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire had a great opening week when it hit Netflix. Seriously, here are the best opening weeks for streaming (both in theaters and direct-to-streaming) so far in 2024:

On the Nielsen charts, an opening of over 23.4 million hours is great! The caveat is that it opened on a Monday, giving it a full seven days of viewing. So if you’re counting “per day viewing,” this isn’t nearly as impressive.

These are the highest daily viewing figures this year: