Streaming services are notoriously vague when it comes to releasing any sort of official viewership data, and the only numbers we get coincidentally come attached to a platform touting one of its original movies or TV shows as a massive success.
Amazon proclaimed that Coming 2 America scored the biggest digital premiere of the COVID-19 era but didn’t offer any concrete information to back it up, while HBO Max hasn’t released any figures at all, with third-party aggregator Samba TV doing all of the legwork. Netflix, meanwhile, are in a somewhat similar position, but they do tend to be a little more transparent than the competition.
Melissa McCarthy’s superhero comedy Thunder Force was widely panned, but it did manage to spend three consecutive weeks in the Top 10 most-watched list before dropping out, setting a 2021 record. However, it’s now been surpassed by The Mitchells vs. the Machines, with the acclaimed animation having recently claimed its 23rd day in a row as one of the streamer’s most popular titles.
In terms of actual viewers, though, Anthony Mackie’s Outside the Wire remains in pole position for now after drawing an estimated 66 million sets of eyeballs in the first four weeks it was available to stream, compared to the 52 million that Netflix were predicting for Thunder Force. Of course, today marks the four-week mark for The Mitchells vs. the Machines and it looks likely to surpass Mackie’s sci-fi actioner, while both should realistically find themselves lagging behind Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead when the dust settles and the numbers are crunched.
The real winner in all of this is Netflix, though, who continue to assert dominance in the streaming wars thanks to a slew of buzzy titles covering multiple genres, a trend that’s set to continue for the rest of the year.