(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)
I just got a notice from the Hollywood Media Police that I haven’t been citing Backrooms, Obsession and, of course, The Mandalorian and Grogu’s $300+ million “failure” in enough of my article introductions, so I have to do it today. (Seriously, I read three articles, just this week, citing these films. Twelve hours after writing that, I read three more. Crazy.)
I mention this because, today, I’m writing about a straight-to-streaming, popular-IP-based franchise film that came out the same weekend as The Mandalorian and Grogu, and it definitely underperformed, not even getting close to the streaming viewership equivalent of Mando’s $350 million dollars.
And yet, almost no one is talking about it.
Seriously, this film’s underperformance compared to the media silence might be the single best example of The Argylle Treatment I’ve ever seen, since the same studio/streamer also released a different IP-based film in theaters and everyone (really, everyone?) talked about how that one flopped. Also, a new Netflix comedy came out and flopped, yet the press barely covered this one either.
So that’s two juicy topics for Part II of this week’s Streaming Ratings report. All that, plus an update on the battle for kids eyeballs on streaming, some TV show finales on CBS, a vicious kids battle between Swapped, GOAT, Zootopia 2 and KPop Demon Hunters, the Indy 500’s viewership, streaming viewership (or the lack thereof) for Scream 7 and The Bride!, Cocomelon’s future in theaters (I’m not optimistic), all the other flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
Let’s dive right in!
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of May 18th to May 31st, 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
This was a terrific week for “The Argylle Treatment”:
As a reminder, this is the idea that, due to the boost of awareness for theatrical releases, primarily driven by their marketing spend, we tend to remember the hits and misses at the box office more than streaming failures. This is reinforced by weekly box office reports, covered by every trade, a ton of Substackers, and most media outlets. heck, these days, box office analysis comes out before the weekend is even over!
In contrast, we often can’t even recall the names of film flops on streaming. (And sometimes the hits!) This results in a logical fallacy called…
If something is easily recalled, we tend to attach more weight to it. So consider these films…
The Mandalorian and Grogu
Masters of the Universe
Jack Ryan’s Ghost War
Ladies First
Do you rate all four of those equally in your mind? Probably not, since you likely barely heard about and then forgot Jack Ryan: Ghost War and/or didn’t know what Ladies First was!
Anyways, both of those straight-to-streaming films underperformed. Jack Ryan: Ghost War only got to 13.5 million hours on Nielsen, and topped out at 16.7 million hours on Luminate. It’s impossible to translate streaming hours to box office dollars, but if I had to describe it using a film’s opening title card, I’d say Jack Ryan’s streaming viewership is in “a galaxy far, far away” from The Mandalorian and Grogu’s $350 million global box office.
Here’s how it stacks up to recent Prime Video films (a longer timeline looks even worse):
Once again, I’d note: why didn’t Bautista and Momoa’s The Wrecking Crew go to theaters?
On Samba TV, Jack Ryan: Ghost War debuted at second place, then fell off by its third week. (That’s not unusual for Samba TV, but it is another data point that it wasn’t a huge hit.) Netflix’s Ladies First did even worse, only making Samba TV for one week at eighth place.
Ladies First made Luminate as well, but again on the low side, peaking at 7.6 million.
It was also very low on the Nielsen charts:
Also, both critics and viewers seemed to hate Ladies First, giving it a 38 on Metacritic and 5.8 on 27K reviews on IMDb. Customers didn’t love the Jack Ryan film either, giving Ghost War a 5.7 on 27K reviews. (The Mandalorian and Groguhas a 7.0 on 67K reviews and Masters of the Universe has a 6.9 on 38K reviews.)
Listen, neither Ladies First nor Jack Ryan: Ghost War were as pricey as Masters of the Universe. But they weren’t free either, and Ghost War looks like it had solid production value, plus it stars a top tier Hollywood talent. Given that it originated from a popular TV show, this underperformance is even worse.
That’s why these films make such good reminders about the real difference between theatrical releases and streaming: one just matters a lot more because it actually moves the buzz needle. The vast majority of streaming films aren’t really bombs or misses or flops; they’re something worse:
They’re anonymous.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source entertainment.substack.com ’
