Marking yet another disappointing performance from an established Netflix series, Sweet Magnolias: Season 3 delivered only 39.5 million total viewing hours in its first three days on the platform.
That compares unfavorably to the 40 million streaming hours garnered by season 2's premiere in February 2022.
Sweet Magnolias somewhat narrow miss comes amid the absolute season 2 cratering of The Lincoln Lawyer, which declined to just 19.4 million viewing hours on Netflix's global viewing platform in its third week. In its third week on Netflix in May 2022, David E. Kelly's adaptation of the Michael Connelly novel series delivered nearly 65 million streaming hours.
Next TV has reported a sustained decrease in Netflix viewing since the beginning of this year.
Total viewing for Netflix’s top 10 English-language TV series category last week was down more than 250 million hours from the same week of July last year. And with writers and actors striking for the foreseeable future, the streamer will likely struggle to bring new content in to address the issue.
However, while Netflix struggles domestically, it may find its footing internationally.
Korean romantic-comedy King the Land: Season 1, which was released in early June, saw the most significant jump in viewership, reaching 65.1 million viewing hours across Netflix's global measuring platform and leading all comers for the week of June 19-25.
Bird Box: Barcelona, a European-produced spin-off of the wildly popular English-language horror-sci breakout film Bird Box, has yet to prove itself as popular as its inspiration. But with 35.5 million viewing hours and 19 million views , it ranked comfortably last week as the most watched original Netflix movie of any kind, English-language or otherwise.
Data from Netflix’s last seven weeks of Global top 10 rankings reveals that since June 1, viewing of international content makes up 43% of its total viewership, an increase of 23% from the same period of time last year.
That means Netflix is more reliant on its international content for views than it has been in a long time-- maybe ever.
With WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes practically guaranteeing that the production of domestic content will be stalled, if not completely halted, it’s nearly impossible to say when this cold-spell will end for Netflix, or if they’ll abandon ship for sunnier shores abroad.
