When Next TV asked Netflix recently about a year-over-year audience decline we’d observed in the first half of 2023, company press reps told us we had it wrong.
The platform’s audience is just fine, the reps told us. And besides, fresh hits were on the way, they added, specifically mentioning last week’s season-three premiere of The Witcher.
Well, not so much.
The first five of eight season 3 episodes for the Henry Cavill action-fantasy series drew only 73 million viewing hours in their first four days on Netflix. That was around half of what season 2 debuted to back in December 2021. (Netflix dropped all eight season 2 episodes of The Witcher on December 17, 2021, which accounts for some of the difference, but certainly not all of it.)
And unlike in previous campaigns, catchup viewing for The Witcher was minimal -- season 1 was watched for 17.2 million hours during the week of June 26 - July 2.
For the week of December 13-19, 2021, season 1 drew nearly 50 million viewing hours.
Despite the tepid season 3 debut, The Witcher was Netflix’s No. 1 show last week. Chris Hemsworth super-spy shoot-’em-up action drama Extraction 2 was the top film, but its audience whittled to just 36.2 million viewing hours and 17.5 million views in week 3.
Meanwhile, Colombian melodrama The Surrogacy lost around 40% of its breakout week 2 audience, finishing with just 47.5 million viewing hours last week.
Few folks are talking about it right now, but we're in the middle of summer, and Netflix is suddenly ice cold.
