Fair Play, up-and-coming filmmaker Chloe Domont’s well-reviewed erotic drama, acquired by Netflix at the Sundance Film Festival in January for a reported $20 million, premiered to a flaccid 24.2 million viewing hours and 12.6 million views on the platform last week.
For a prestige adult drama targeted to awards consideration, that audience performance isn’t damning. But it ain’t great, either.
Netflix's best awards performer last year, the dual-Oscar-winning multi-national co-production of All Quiet on The Western Front, debuted to just 31.5 million streaming hours for the week of October 24-30, 2022. And in the same beginning-of-October frame last year, another Netflix festival pickup, Ana De Armas’ Blonde, garnered over 37 million viewing hours in its first week.
Last week's rankings: ‘C’ Grade for 'Sex Education' Season 4 — Netflix Weekly Rankings for Sept. 25 - Oct. 1
Certainly, Netflix was hoping for more from Demont's film about young lovers (played by Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich), whose incendiary romance is tragically quenched when she gets promoted over him at a cutthroat Manhattan hedge fund.
However, all was not bleak for Netflix's prestige adult drama aspirations. Crime thriller Reptile starring Benicio Del Toro as a grizzled gumshoe, retained the top English-language film spot last week, building on its premiere-week audience for a total of 45.1 million hours viewed.
The murder mystery — showcased by Netflix at Toronto International Film Festival — also stars Alicia Silverstone and Justin Timberlake. It garnered 40.2 million streaming hours in its premiere week on Netflix.
Netflix's most popular domestic TV show last week was limited series Beckham, which took the top spot on Netflix’s ranking of English language series, landing 58.8 million viewing hours from October 2-8.
For context, Netflix last sports documentary series, Untold: Swamp Kings, which was focused on coach Urban Meyer's University of Florida football program in the aughts, delivered just 15.5 million streaming hours when it dropped back in August. And Netflix's last docuseries about soccer star, Neymar: The Perfect Chaos (which also featured David Beckham), premiered to just 26.3 million viewing hours.
Season 4 of Sex Education fell to second place in the domestic series rankings with 53.8 million viewing hours, less than half of what it managed the week prior.
On the international side, Anna Castillo’s Spanish survival thriller Nowhere was the No. 1 non-English-language film, generating 50.4 million viewing hours in its second week on Netflix. The series also has 29.9 million views, making it the most watched content across the board based on the metric Netflix added to its ranker back in June.
Perhaps more impressive is the 63.9 million viewing hours scored by Lupin: Part 3, the most recent addition to Omar Sy’s French crime-mystery series.
A retelling of the classic French story about Arsène Lupin, a world-famous gentleman thief and master of disguise, all three parts of the series made Netflix's top 10 non-English series ranker last week
In fact, catch-up viewing for the first part of the series landed it in second place, with 13.9 million hours viewed. The second part of the series came in fourth, earning 10.2 million hours.
