Netflix today issued viewership data for 99% of its entire streaming catalog, or about 18,200 titles available worldwide. It published the numbers in a report, What We Watched, capturing viewership from January to June of 2023.
Night Agent Season 1 topped the list with a staggering 812 million hours of viewing. Other Top 10 offerings included Wednesday: Season 1 and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story – each at more than 500 million hours.
Sadly, the Orson Welles-directed The Other Side of the Wind, which debuted in November 2018, was omitted from the report. However, the companion documentary from Morgan Neville, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, was included. It finished near the bottom in the No. 17,806 spot with total viewership reported at 100,000 hours, the lowest measurement awarded to some 3,800 titles.
By comparison, Martin Scorsese’s 2019 crime epic The Irishman came in at No. 675 for the first half of the year with 28.8 million hours of total viewing.
In a statement accompanying the report, Netflix said that a film or program’s success should not be measured by viewership alone.
“Success on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes, and is not determined by hours viewed alone. We have enormously successful movies and TV shows with both lower and higher hours viewed. It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience — and the size of that audience relative to the economics of the title.”
The Other Side of the Wind received awards from the National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It appeared on more than three dozen Best Films of 2018 lists.
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