A New, Simple System That Helps Us Track Movie And Show Performance On Netflix

For most of 2019, I spent my workdays poring over box office numbers—and there was never a shortage of news. Movie ticket sales eclipsed $42 billion for the first time ever; Disney
DIS
churned out seven different billion-dollar movies; Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing movie ever. It was a wild year of records broken and milestones achieved.

Then the coronavirus ripped it all to shreds.

The past four months have been a strange time for someone who was so invested in the box office. While I was able to look back and dig up a few interesting stories, I was ultimately left incapacitated by such an alteration of daily life. Instead of heading out to the movie theater each night, people were forced to nestle up on their couches and experience any and all entertainment from the comforts of their homes.

Which got me thinking: is there a way to track streaming numbers like we track the box office?

I’ve only just now realized that Netflix
NFLX
must have been thinking about this exact same thing months back. Because right when the coronavirus pandemic effectively shut down the economy back in late February, the world’s most popular streaming service released what is currently our only true tangible peak behind the digital curtain: the Top 10.

What might have seemed like nothing more than a marketing move is actually the only true barometer of success we have right now for newly released movies. Based on where a movie or TV show moves on Netflix’s Top 10, we can now physically see which movies are trending upwards and downwards each and every day. And while we don’t have streaming data for all of the major platforms (like Hulu, Amazon Prime
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and HBO), we do have data for the biggest one—which is valuable insight in an age where the box office barely exists.

But it’s not enough to see the Top 10 change each day. To truly mimic the box office, we’d need a way to attach a number to the movement those movies and shows experience on the Daily Top 10. Because when there’s a figure associated with performance, we can then start to track records and milestones like we’ve historically done for box office.

So I decided to create that system. It’s a very simple, straightforward formula that anybody could track in their own spreadsheet (which I’ve done).

Basically, a movie is awarded points based on where it lands on Netflix’s Daily Top 10. If a movie holds the No. 1 spot, it gets ten points. And then you go down the line: nine points for the No. 2 movie, eight points for the No. 3 movie, and so on.

I went back through every single Daily Top 10 list since Netflix premiered the feature on Feb. 27, 2020, and doled out the points. Because of that, I can now not only see which movies are dominating on a daily basis, but I can also put together figures for the weekend, for the week, for the month, for the entire year—and, of course, for the entire history of the Top 10. With all of those numbers housed in a single spreadsheet, I can now conclusively say which movies and shows have dominated the world’s biggest streaming platform during the coronavirus pandemic—an honor that was almost exclusively reserved for the biggest box office juggernauts in 2019.

I actually used that formula to put together a ranking of the All-Time Top 10 movies last weekend. And this weekend I did the exact same thing for TV shows. And I found the results fascinating.

Maybe I’ve only done all of this (and it did take a while, by the way) because I’m itching for movie theaters to reopen. But until then, we have Version 2.0 of the box office. This data has become valuable insight as the streaming era has completely redefined how and where we watch movies.

If the coronavirus pandemic forever changes our approach to movie theaters, then I’d expect other streaming platforms to follow suit with Netflix—which would naturally birth an entirely new system for monitoring and tracking movie performance.