Netflix Reveals Strong Viewership Numbers For Mindy Kaling’s ‘Never Have I Ever’ & Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods’ In Earnings Report

Dominic Patten
·5 min read

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Coming off a coronavirus pandemic dominated second quarter, Netflix today revealed not just strong subscriber and revenue growth, but also a lot of eyeballs for some key series and films.

“In Q2, we notched successes in many of our key content verticals,” the the now Ted Sarandos co-CEO’d streamer circumspectly noted in the letter to shareholders that was released Thursday just after the market closed.

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While nowhere near breaking any records for Netflix, the Mindy Kaling co-created Never Have I Ever snagged 40 million households globally in its four weeks of after its April 27 release. Nowhere nearly as praised as the recently renewed Lang Fisher co-created and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan starring coming of age dramedy, the reunion of The Office alums Steve Carell and Greg Daniels in Space Force saw that series also hit 40 million households in the month or so since the military comedy launched on May 29.

In a period that saw COVID-19 stay-at-home orders loosen in many big cities, states and in other countries that have the health crisis much more in hand than America, the results for this quarters big new shows are fare behind the 64 million households worldwide that tuned in for Tiger King over its first month of release. Today’s numbers also up at the heights of the 65 million households that watched Season 4 of the international sensation of La Casa de Papel AKA Money Heist in the three weeks after its April 3 premiere, as the Q1 report stated back on April 21.

Long the metric for Netflix, households here are defined by the streamer in cases like these as a series, film or special being viewed for a minimum of two minutes — very different from the more traditional ratings numbers of broadcast TV.

Pulling focus to features, Spike Lee’s powerful Da 5 Bloods drew an audience of 27 million households since the Vietnam War drama starring Delroy Lindo and Chadwick Boseman, among many more, debuted on June 12 on Netflix.

To offer some apples to prestige perspective on the performance of the Oscar nomination tipped Da 5 Bloods did in this era of close cinemas, earlier today, the now more than 193 million subscribers strong streamer dropped a list of its top 1 most watched original movies. The Chris Hemsworth fronted Extraction was number one by far with 99 million households around planet Earth taking a gander at the action flick since its April 24 release.

Debuting on May 13, the Lauren Lapkus and David Spade-led comedy The Wrong Missy was number eight on the list with 59 million, two notches down from the 64 million who saw Martin Scorsese’s epic The Irishman. The Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci starrer dropped on Netflix on November 27, 2019 after a limited theatrical run that started on November 1 last year.

They didn’t offer up any numbers, but the streamer today did give an unsurprisingly shout out to the Charlize Theron starring and Gina Prince-Bythewood directed The Old Guard. The immortals-based kick off to an obvious franchise has been the top flick on Netflix since it’s July 10 debut – and an almost certain candidate for the next Top 10 list, whenever the streamer decided to give up peek at those numbers.

Toggling back to TV, Netflix’s new-ish unscripted fare of Too Hot to Handle and Floor is Lava brought in 51 million and “a projected” 37 million households respectively in their first four weeks of release – cause nothing wipes away the stress of a global pandemic for an hour or two than watching people refrain from having sex with each other or scurry over a set of boiling lava.

Bragging about numbers in all their forms today and noting their return to production in “Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Italy, and the UK,” comparative old warhorse Netflix also took a sideswipe at its digital competitors, both new and old, in Thursday’s earnings report.

“All of the major entertainment companies like WarnerMedia, Disney and NBCUniversal are pushing their own streaming services and two of the most valuable companies in the world, Apple and Amazon, are growing their investment in premium content,” the Reed Hastings-run company said with the prose equivalent of gritted teeth. “In addition, TikTok’s growth is astounding, showing the
fluidity of internet entertainment,” they added one day after NBCU’s Peacock had its national launch, with no Olympics and few originals.

“Instead of worrying about all these competitors, we continue to stick to our strategy of trying to improve our service and content every quarter faster than our peers,” Netflix noted sticking the shiv in. “Our continued strong growth is a testament to this approach and the size of the entertainment market.”

Indeed, or read another way: “Hello World!”

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