‘That Christmas’ and ‘Black Doves’ Make Killer Starts in Netflix Top 10s!

Welcome to your weekly roundup (and this week, an extended rant) detailing all the biggest stories from the Netflix top 10s from the past seven days. 

Every Tuesday, Netflix updates its top 10 stats page with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past seven days. You can find the data on the Netflix website or use our Netflix top 10 search tool here, which has just been updated to allow you to go back through all of the top 40 data back through 2021.

Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from December 2nd, 2024 to December 7th, 2024, 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. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season.

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1. Rant About The New Netflix Top 10 Website

A little rant this week because Netflix’s Top 10 page has changed, truly for the first time since late 2021, and the new version is infinitely worse. The data is still there, thankfully, but Netflix has made some changes that strike me as incredibly stupid. Here’s a quick list:

• The order of views and hours viewed has been reversed compared to the previous version.
• The handy overview of geographical zones where titles perform well is buried behind three clicks. Previously, it was on the same page as the Top 10, just below.
• There’s no visible date for the period covered by the Top 10 on the page. It simply says “This week,” which means nothing since the figures for “this week” are actually from the previous week. This might be the most amateurish point of all.
• Useful visual indicators have disappeared, like the number of weeks a title has been in the Top 10. Previously, this was displayed with convenient little red bars, but now it’s just a number.
• Even worse, it’s now impossible to quickly see how many national Top 10s a program has appeared in. This was very handy for tracking how well a program had traveled. (Thankfully, What’s on Netflix has taken over this feature, and they’ve preserved some of the historical data.)
• The exportable Top 10 images for programs, which I used in this newsletter to introduce each title, no longer include the number of views. They’re also no longer in landscape format and are downloadable only as .webp files, one of the worst things ever invented for the web.

These changes seem to stem from Netflix’s push to promote its TUDUM site, which aggregates all sorts of articles about its programs. As a result, we’ve gone from a page primarily designed for analysts to one aimed at the general public, as evidenced by the removal of “technical” information. The problem is, no one cares about TUDUM, and the Top 10 page was the only useful part of that site. It makes you wonder if Netflix is deliberately trying to make the Top 10 less readable and harder to study, though that’s probably not true…

In short, it’s pure “enshittification” (which deserves to be the word of the year for 2024) and is becoming all too common at Netflix, especially considering the feedback on their new TV interface, as Kasey pointed out in an article about this phenomenon. It makes me question why some services seem incapable of making incremental improvements to near-perfect user experiences, preferring instead to take leaps into the unknown that invariably turn out worse. What’s the point of having countless highly-paid engineers if this is the result? Yes, I’m angry and Netflix should be too as it releases more and more inferior products.

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2. That Christmas

The animated Christmas film written by Richard Curtis (Mr. Love Actually/Notting Hill) is off to an excellent start, even if comparisons are somewhat lacking, with 18.3M CVEs in 5 days. However, it should hold up well in the coming weeks, being both an animated film and a Christmas movie.

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3. Mary

The American biblical film Mary had a lukewarm debut with only 11.4M CVEs in its first 3 days, far from the top performers of 2024. It’s going to take a Christmas miracle to save this one from purgatory.

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4. A Man on the Inside

A Man on the Inside has crossed the 14-day mark in the Top 10, but my outlook for its future is a bit less optimistic. With 15.5M CVEs over 14 days, it’s “decent” but not a slam dunk, and unfortunately, it’s leaning closer to The Brothers Sun than to another series like Beauty in Black, which was directly renewed for two seasons.

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5. The Ultimatum: Marry or Move on

It had been almost 15 months since The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On last released new seasons, but the fans are still there, as Season 3’s launch is starting off on par with Season 2, indicating a relatively low rate of decline. A Season 4 seems likely, even though it’s not a hit on the level of Love is Blind.

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6. Black Doves

The new British espionage series Black Doves, starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw, debuted with 10.8M CVEs in 4 days, making it the 4th best launch of the year for a new series (excluding limited series). The show has already been renewed for a second season, which is great news.

That’s all for this week, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.

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