The Sandman Begins on Netflix Top 10s – Picture: Warner Bros. Television / Netflix
Welcome to a new (and possibly recurring) feature where we run through the big stories from the top 10 hours of Netflix weekly data that drops every Tuesday. This week, we’ll be looking at the three big stories for the week ending August 7.
Netflix updates its top 10 stats page weekly with 40 new figures every hour of the top movies and shows from the past 7 days. If you want to easily browse the top 10 hour data, visit our tool.
Note: In this report of Netflix hours watched from August 1st to August 7th, we will use “Complex Viewing Equivalent” or CVE.
That means we divide the hours Netflix watched by the runtime of a movie or series. It allows for better comparisons between movies and series but is not an audience metric either.
1. Purple Hearts is huge.
After a great first weekend, Purple Hearts had a monster second week with 102 million hours watched. Read also : Netflix feature exec Jason Spingarn-Koff is leaving.
How big is it? This is the third best second week of any Netflix movie released since July 2021, behind Red Notice and Don’t Look Up. It’s so big.
It’s so big that Purple Hearts may be entering the Top 10 for English language films, knocking 6 Underground off the rankings.
A number of reasons could explain why the film was so successful. Two of the biggest theories in the fandom revolve around the influence of Sofia Carson or Tiktok. We’ll see how long it lasts.
2. The Gray Man is abnormally normal
When it came out, the numbers for The Gray Man’s first weekend were unimpressive. See the article : Netflix’s bad year got even worse when Disney+ passed it on to streaming subscribers. Solid but unimpressive compared to the other blockbusters coming from Netflix, Red Notice, Don’t Look Up, and The Adam Project to name a few.
Since then, The Gray Man’s trajectory has been beyond his “normal” first three weeks. Normal in the run-of-the-mill-Netflix-movie sense: small bump in week 2, sharp drop in week 3.
Netflix blockbusters usually don’t do that (except for Don’t Look Up, but it became obscure very quickly in the US). They come out in great numbers and then lose steam week after week. So far, The Gray Man has had a better hold over its first three weeks than Red Notice and The Adam Project and it could continue like that.
There might be some explanation for this: the movie has a slightly better average from people on IMDb, so word of mouth might be better. But it also makes you wonder if the marketing around the movie was worth it in the end for Netflix as it acts like your typical Netflix movie without a big number for a Netflix blockbuster. Anyway, the movie is 6th in the all-time ranking and is likely to reach 4th at the end of its first 28 days. Great, but is it enough?
3. The Sandman is pretty slow to emerge in the Top 10s after debut weekend.
The release of Sandman was successful in at least one way: it pleased both fans and critics and with an average of 8. This may interest you : Netflix: Exciting Series Set to Debut in 2023.0/10 on IMDb out of 32,000 ratings, making it one of the best Netflix series which were reviewed for the year.
But how did it do during its opening weekend? He did … well. Not great or great, but just good.
Sandman debuts on Netflix Top 10s vs other shows
In fact, out of all the new English series released on Friday, it did the 4th best weekend with 8.7 CVE.
That’s better than First Kill or The Lincoln Lawyer but way behind Vikings: Valhalla and Man vs Bee.
Given that it was hyped and promoted and based on a popular comic book, it could be seen as a bit of a disappointment even if its universe isn’t exactly mainstream. The second week will be crucial if a renewal decision is yet to be made.
