Extraordinary Attorney Woo is indeed extraordinary as it breaks into Netflix’s all-time top 10. Purple Hearts may tie with The Gray Man for the most-watched Netflix film of the summer. Here’s your top 10 report for the week of August 8th to August 14th, 2022.
Netflix updates its top 10 stats page weekly with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past 7 days. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data easily, visit our tool.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from August 8th to 14th, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent” or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours viewed announced by Netflix by the runtime of films or series. It allows for better comparisons between films and series but it’s not an audience metric either. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season.
1. Extraordinary Attorney Woo breaks into overall top 10 but highlights the difficulty of analyzing Netflix’s hours viewed.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo is one of the biggest international series of the summer but its rollout highlights the difficulty of analyzing Netflix’s hours viewed.
As of the time of publishing, Extraordinary Attorney Woo season 1 is now the eighth biggest premiere of a non-English series, with 288.62 million hours viewed globally.
Top 10 International Series on Netflix of All Time
Before Stranger Things 4’s release, Netflix changed its methodology for counting hours viewed to better reflect how series can now be split into or even released weekly.
For Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Netflix will count for its first 28 days total like this:
Total 28 days = Hours viewed during the first 28 days following the premiere of Episode 1 on Netflix + Hours viewed during the first 28 days following the premiere of Episode 2 on Netflix and so on until the first 28 days of Episode 16 are over. So, we will only know the final tally of Extraordinary Attorney Woo in mid-September.
That would be easy-ish to understand but it gets even more complicated.
As of now, Extraordinary Attorney Woo episodes have different release dates worldwide. For example, in France, episodes arrive two weeks after their US premiere. And we know that Netflix traditionally only counts the first 28 days window following the first release on any territory. So that would mean that the third and fourth week of viewing of any episode of this series in France would not count into the 28-day period counted by Netflix for its Top 10 all-time ranking.
Picture: Netflix
Finally, Extraordinary Attorney Woo has another factor that makes it more likely to enter and stay in the Netflix Top 10s: it is a very long series.
With 16 episodes of 70 minutes (or 1100 minutes, give or take), it is the second-longest series to make it into the all-time Top 10, after Cafe con aroma de mujer and its giant 4140-minute season, and 2-3 times longer than any other series in the Top 10.
All of these factors make it very hard to truly reflect the viewership of the series, and the only number that will be worth something will be the final 28 days’ number of hours viewed. Only then will we be able to compare it to other series on an apple-to-apple basis.
2. Purple Hearts may tie with The Gray Man as the most-watched Netflix movie of the summer.
I don’t think anybody would have bet at the beginning of the summer that Purple Hearts might become the most-watched film of the summer but it’s been besting The Gray Man over their 2nd and 3rd week, respectively.
Its hold in its third week is one of the best recorded of all Netflix live-action films released on a Friday (you can likely thank TikTok for that).
It added the equivalent of 22.1 million complete viewings in its third week, ahead of the 18.1 million CVE that The Gray Man added in its third week.
The Gray Man will finish its first 28-day window with around 255 million hours viewed, while Purple Hearts might end up with around 240 million hours.
Considering the difference in runtime, there’s a possibility (slim but still) that Purple Hearts does better than The Gray Man in CVE.
3. Day Shift launches onto Netflix with a very modest start
With 30 million CVE over its first weekend, Day Shift is doing exactly what an American action and/or comedy does on Netflix usually and it represents the 8th-best launch for a Netflix film since June 2021.
Where can it go from there? Well, the film has two predictable paths in front of him following such a start. The first one is the Sweet Girl path which ends up at around 68 million CVE after 4 weeks.
The other one is the one that Senior Year and The Man from Toronto took (in extraordinarily close proximity) and it ends up at around 82 million CVE. Anything less than 68 million would be a disappointment, and anything more than 82 million would be a great success.
Too early to call which one it will take but we’ll know more next week!
4. Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie and 13: The Musical flopped hard.
Do you know how difficult it is for an American Netflix Original Film NOT to appear in the Top 10? Very very difficult. Only four films did not manage to do that so far in 2022:
Picture: Netflix
- Apollo 10 1/2: A Space-age Childhood Odyssey from Richard Linklater,
- Lena Waithe’s Beauty
- Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie
- 13: The Musical
These last two are different from the first two because both are new adaptations or continuations of existing licenses.
They were released globally but did not manage to enter a lot of Top 10 rankings anywhere.
Both are aimed at kids/teens, but I don’t have a good explanation for why they did not manage to enter the Top 10. For all I know, it could be a sign that Netflix subscribers hate seeing colons in the title of films but I’m sure the algorithm already picked up on that.