U.S. Streaming : The most-watched new films and series of 2024 according to Nielsen and Luminate.
Welcome to the most complete and comprehensive look that you'll find online at what was watched and what wasn't on streaming in 2024 in the US.
📈 Methodology used in this analysis.
Measurement used: For this analysis, as with all my other articles, I used the metric of Complete Viewing Equivalents (or CVEs), calculated by dividing the weekly viewing hours reported by Nielsen and Luminate by the runtime of the films and series in question. I also chose to study these titles based on their first 14 full days of availability, unless otherwise stated. These two methodological precautions allow for fair comparisons between programs of varying lengths and release days. For some titles that appeared in Nielsen’s Top 10 only once or twice, I estimated their 14-day performance as accurately as possible using available comparisons.
Countries and services covered: The United States, on connected TVs. The measured services include Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, Max, Peacock, and Paramount+.
🎞️ New Movies
It was a year decided in the final weeks to crown the most-watched film in streaming during its first 14 days, and Carry-On on Netflix narrowly took the lead ahead of Amazon's Red One.
As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, Red One overtook Carry-On beyond the first 14 days, so this ranking is truly just a snapshot at a specific moment in time. That said, the trajectory of Red One was rather unusual, as it received a boost during its third week of release thanks to the Christmas week.
If we zoom out to previous years for this Top 20, here’s what we get.
The threshold to make it into the Top 20 has hovered around 15 million CVEs in 14 days over the past three years. This year, however, there are other noteworthy trends, such as the fact that more original streaming films managed to make it into the Top 20 compared to last year. This brings the count back to 2022 levels, with 13 original films versus 7 that were previously released in theaters.
To be as thorough as possible, here is the Top 100 most-watched films released in 2024 on streaming in the U.S. during their first 14 days. I’ve also included Luminate figures for the same period when available, noting that Luminate only began tracking in March 2024. Since Luminate focuses exclusively on films released directly on streaming, it’s normal that no data is available for films that were first released in theaters.
In this Top 100, we observe 42 films that were first released in theaters (some of them are mentioned twice because they had two different pay-TV windows) versus 58 released directly on streaming. To tie this back to my earlier article comparing the performance of films released directly on streaming with those of theatrical films that later hit streaming, the 2024 data reaffirms my conclusion that the biggest streaming films tend to achieve higher viewership than the top theatrical films on streaming. However, the gap has narrowed this year, with the variation ranging between +17% and +26% in 2024.
Let’s take a closer look at the streaming performance of the 50 highest-grossing films at the U.S. box office last year.
Among the 50 highest-grossing films at the U.S. box office last year, 14 have not yet been made available on streaming platforms and may potentially populate the 2025 Top 10, including Moana 2 and Wicked. Of the remaining 36 films, 12 did not make it into Nielsen's Top 10, either due to insufficient viewership or because Nielsen does not track their platform, such as Starz. For films that could have qualified but didn’t generate enough streaming viewership, many are found on Paramount+, highlighting a trend. A few major flops are worth noting, such as Joker: Folie à Deux and Challengers that never managed to get in a weekly Top 10 from Nielsen.
Films distributed by Sony directly on Netflix seem to perform significantly better on streaming. For example, Madame Web became the most-watched superhero film during its first 14 days in the U.S. in 2024, surpassing Deadpool & Wolverine, despite being available only to ad-free Netflix subscribers. Also, Universal animated films did better in their second window on Netflix than in their first on Peacock.
Once again, there appears to be little correlation between box office success and streaming viewership. For instance, Inside Out 2 nearly doubled the streaming numbers of Deadpool & Wolverine, even though both grossed a similar amount at the U.S. box office. A standout example is Red One, which ranked as the 24th highest-grossing film at the U.S. box office in 2024 but managed to become the most-watched theatrical release on streaming during its first 14 days—not just in 2024 but in the entire streaming era. To achieve this, the film sacrificed a portion of its theatrical window, shortening it to just 2–3 weeks, much to the dismay of exhibitors. However, this strategy paid off for its streaming performance. Had the film followed a standard 30- or 90-day theatrical window, it likely wouldn’t have achieved the same viewership levels on streaming.
Significant viewership numbers for select titles on Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ show that while Netflix benefits from a larger pool of potential subscribers, platforms with smaller user bases can still mobilize strong audiences for specific titles. What’s particularly interesting is when these platforms fail to do so for other titles, as this becomes a key area for analysis.
📺New binge-released series
For series, I remind you that Nielsen’s methodology aggregates the viewership of all seasons of a given series over a specific week, which makes their figures almost useless for series with multiple seasons. I will therefore focus exclusively on the new series of 2024, starting with those released as a binge. Here’s what the Top 20 for the year 2024 looks like:
Netflix dominates this Top 20 quite logically with 16 series, compared to 3 for Amazon and 1 for Hulu. The real surprise of the year is the performance of the British series Fool Me Once, which lands in second place behind The Perfect Couple starring Nicole Kidman. For Amazon, Fallout was the big success of the year, ahead of Cross and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The only Hulu binge-released series in the Top is Echo, a MCU title, but its relatively disappointing numbers did not motivate the company to greenlight a new season.
Notably, there is a foreign series in the list, the Norwegian show La Palma, released in December, which almost made it into the Top 10. Nearly half of the series in the Top 20 are mini-series, while all the others have been renewed for additional seasons (the only unknown being No Good Deed, which might be renewed based on its solid U.S. numbers).
If I expand the analysis to the 50 new binge series released for which I could estimate 14-day figures using the weekly Top 10s and leaks on Twitter from earlier this year, here’s the ranking:
It’s clear that the binge release format was favored by Netflix, Amazon, and also Peacock. However, the fate of the series becomes more uncertain as we move down the ranking. Netflix's three cancellations of the year (KAOS, Brothers Sun, and Dead Boy Detectives) all had roughly the same viewership numbers, establishing a clear threshold of risk for English-language series on Netflix.
📺New weekly-released series.
For the series released on a weekly basis, I need to adjust my methodology and rank the shows based on their average EVCs per week of release. In this regard, it’s very clear that there was a standout winner this year: Landman on Paramount+, which nearly doubled the audience of the second series in the ranking, Agatha All Along. Here are the 20 new series released weekly for which I managed to gather performance data on their streaming numbers and I want to give a special thank to TVGrimReaper on Twitter who leaked confidential Top 10 for each service during several months, allowing me and us to lift the veil on the real performance of series beyond the Nielsen Top 10. As a matter of fact, only the first 5 series of the following ranking did manage to get into a weekly Nielsen Top 10, showing how poorly new weekly-released series did last year.
The discrepancy of data between Nielsen and Luminate is quite crazy if you look at the first two series, one being estimated twice higher and the second one half less. No one knows anything in streaming ratings, let’s remember that. The fact that the 4th highest-performing weekly series in terms of audience was canceled shows that we are at much lower levels this year compared to previous years, even at the top of the ranking. Only Landman has truly achieved viewership numbers that can rival the biggest successes of past years. Agatha All Along would only rank 18th in a ranking of the most-watched weekly series since 2021. Even Shogun appears relatively low in the rankings, as does The Penguin, although Nielsen only tracks streaming viewership for the latter, not linear viewing. However, this didn’t stop shows like House of the Dragon or The Last of Us from performing significantly better in previous years.
2025 should be more exciting, especially with the return of Daredevil, which is expected to do well and so many new films and series. If you’d like to follow all of this with me, don’t hesitate to subscribe to receive all my future updates directly in your inbox! I send two weekly newsletters about streaming ratings, one for Netflix global numbers and the other one for US streaming numbers based on data from Nielsen, Luminate and SambaTV. It’s free and it will stay free!
That’s a wrap on this overview of the streaming landscape in the U.S. for 2024! I’ll be back in a few days for a deep dive into the latest Netflix figures.