Original Coverage & Source Attribution: entertainment.substack.com
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.)
Way back in 2022, I did a deep dive into each streamer’s horror offerings, looking at the top horror film and TV shows, and which streamers had the best library titles and best Halloween landing pages.
If you’d like to check out those articles…
After taking last year off, I’m back at it again this year. My theory—then and now—is that Halloween landing pages provide a subtle but surprisingly valuable insight into how the streamers position themselves, and what they do well and what they don’t. They show who relies on libraries, whose libraries across TV and film have the most value, who understands how customers want to access those libraries, and, being blunt, which product teams actually put the time in to make a quality holiday user experience.
Plus, three “horror” TV shows had big debuts this month!
So today, I’ll answer the questions…
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What are the all-time biggest horror shows and films on streaming?
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What streamer has the best library?
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What streamer has the best landing page? And what does this say about the streaming wars today?
But first, let’s look at three big new horror shows on streaming…
In a fun twist this month, three different streamers released three different horror TV shows. Many scary stories come out every October, but the twist is that all three did well:
Two of the shows got over 20 million hours, which is just good. You can see that Below is helping Netflix start October/Q4 off well:
And that Carrie is a top seven show for Amazon through two weeks:
But here’s the crazier note: even though it doesn’t look huge, Crystal Lake is Peacock’s biggest debut yet:
Let’s discuss the streaming elephant in the room: two of these shows are based off classic horror IP: Jason and Carrie. So once again, IP works, in theaters and on streaming. It just does. Oddly enough, horror IP doesn’t draw a tenth of the ire that other IP does, even though, arguably, horror films are the original franchise films, starting in the 1930s and continuing on through the slasher film 80s.
So horror TV shows are off to a great start. While I’ve written before that horror films do NOT over-perform on streaming, TV shows are a different story.
To start, here are the top first seasons for all streaming TV shows since 2020 (the start of the Streaming Ratings Era):
First take: yep, that’s some power laws at work right there. The biggest TV show hits aren’t just bigger than other hit shows, they’re orders of magnitude bigger. Wednesday dwarfs The Last of Us (a big hit!) and is ten times bigger than the next six most popular horror shows. Wow!
So yes, horror or horror-adjacent shows can do as well as the top shows on streaming. Wednesday is proof of this. (Though, even Wednesday is more horror-adjacent than proper horror.) Also, note that Below, Carrie and Crystal Lakecould/should keep moving up the charts.
That said, there is some weakness in these numbers. Only eighteen horror first seasons made the charts, which is low. For context, 541 season ones have made the Nielsen originals charts since 2020. Eighteen out of 541 isn’t great! Plus, again, the IP issue. Wednesday and The Last of Us came from popular IP, and It: Welcome to Derry and Goosebumps are spinoffs.
Next up, every horror show from season two on:
The bad news here? Besides one iconic example, horror shows don’t last long i.e. generate very many seasons. While many straight-to-streaming horror shows were limited series, many weren’t and only four horror shows got to a second season or beyond. That’s a bad hit rate. And yeah, only one horror show made it to a fifth season! This genre is just not elite (on streaming).
Okay, on to the top horror films all time (er, since 2020):
We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out…
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…What streamers have the most horror films…
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…And how FASTs have embraced horror films…
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…How many elite horror films are on linear TV or aren’t on TV at all…
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…How streamers make it very, very hard to find horror films…
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…And a lot more…
…please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
