Yahoo Finance Netflix's (NFLX) Glass Onion Hits the Right Chord With Viewers
Netflix NFLX recently revealed that Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery has grabbed the top spot in the list of films (English) for the week Dec 19-25 with 82.1 million hours viewed.
Glass Onion is the sequel to the 2019 movie Knives Out that introduced Daniel Craig as the detective Benoit Blanc. The latest movie finds Blanc in Greece with the billionaire tech industrialist Miles Bron played by Edward Norton.
Netflix secured the rights to two sequels to the Knives Out franchise for $450 million in 2021. The streaming giant has reportedly spent roughly $40 million to produce Glass Onion.
The mystery movie had a limited theatrical run in late November at 693 theaters in the United States. Per Box Office mojo data, Glass Onion collected $13.3 million from theaters, thanks to the extended Thanksgiving weekend.
Glass Onion has been watched by roughly 35 million households (82.1M view hours divided by 2.3 hours of runtime) from more than 93 countries within three days of its release on Netflix. Glass Onion’s initial strong viewership trend bodes well for Netflix’s prospects in the holiday season.
Netflix, Inc. Price and Consensus
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Strong Content Benefits Netflix in Holiday Season
Netflix’s latest Top-10 list reflects the benefit of a strong content portfolio that is driving viewership in the all-important holiday season.
The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari was the second most-watched English film with 25.1 million hours viewed. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio took the third position with 19.7 million hours viewed.
In the non-English film category, The Big 4 continued to maintain its dominance with 19.7 million hours viewed. A Not So Merry Christmas and Private Lesson were #2 and #3 for the Dec 19-25 week with 17.8 million and 9.9 million hours viewed, respectively.
In the television (English) category, season one of Wednesday maintained its #1 position for the fifth consecutive week. Season 3 of Emily in Paris was the second most-watched show with 117.6M hours viewed. Season 1 of The Recruit was placed at the #3 spot with 95.6 million hours viewed.
In the television (non-English) category, season 2 of Alice in Borderland grabbed the #1 spot with 61.2 million hours viewed. Season 1 of Alice in Borderland and Reborn Rich were the #2 and #3 shows with 18.7 million and 17 million hours viewed, respectively.
Netflix’s Popularity Suffers From Stiff Competition
Netflix has been suffering from strong competition from the likes of Disney DIS, Comcast CMCSA and Apple AAPL in the saturated streaming space.
Netflix shares have declined 53.5% in the past year compared with the Zacks Consumer Discretionary sector’s fall of 52%. NFLX shares have also underperformed Apple, Comcast, and Disney shares, which have declined 27.6%, 30.9% and 44.3%, respectively.
Moreover, Netflix’s ad-supported plans have failed to ignite user interest per the latest data from subscription analytics firm Antenna, cited by The Wall Street Journal.
The ad-supported plan accounted for only 9% of new Netflix sign-ups in the United States during November. Netflix launched its ad-supported service on Nov 3 with the basic plan costing $6.99 a month in the country.
Per Antenna, 57% of subscribers either re-joined Netflix or signed up for the first time while 43% downgraded from higher-priced plans. Moreover, by the end of November, 0.2% of subscribers in the United States were on Netflix’s ad-supported plan.
Disney followed in the footsteps of Netflix to offer its ad-supported tier starting Dec 8, 2022. The company’s streaming service Disney+, as of Oct 1, 2022, had 164.2 million paid subscribers compared with 118.1 million as of Oct 2, 2021.
Apple’s streaming service, Apple TV+, continues to gain recognition with its critically acclaimed and popular shows like Ted Lasso.
Comcast’s Peacock also offers a free-to-watch tier with ad support that has about 40,000 hours of content. Peacock is well poised to grow, owing to its vast library of IPs and new productions.
Nevertheless, Netflix’s strong content portfolio is expected to help it win new subscribers during the holiday season. At the end of the third quarter, Netflix had 223.09 million paid subscribers globally.
This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company currently expects to gain 4.5 million paid subscribers in fourth-quarter 2022. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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