Netflix's most recent engagement report rounds up the most-watched shows and movies on the streaming service. We lay out the top 10. Photo / Getty Images
Netflix's most recent engagement report rounds up the most-watched shows and movies on the streaming service. We lay out the top 10. Photo / Getty Images
Netflix has just released its most recent viewing figures covering the second half of 2023. The engagement report reveals the streaming service’s top movies and shows from July to December that topped off the year.
Netflix has been extremely busy lately. 2023 saw a bunch of new href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/film/" target="_blank">films and TV series delivered to subscribers, and the latest viewership figures released in What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report reveal just how much content was consumed.
Netflix’s content was streamed for 90 billion hours from July to December. To put that into perspective, it would take one person over 10 million years to watch the same amount in one sitting.
But as well as highlighting the streaming service’s viewership numbers, the engagement insights also reveal what shows and movies were 2023′s most successful.
The most streamed show on Netflix during this period was One Piece, a live-adaptation series of a popular Japanese manga show.
If you haven’t heard of this show, then you might be surprised. One Piece was released in August 2023 after a long wait from fans and broke the streaming service’s viewing records that were previously held by Wednesday and Stranger Things.
The series, which stars Iñaki Godoy as Monkey D. Luffy, racked up over 71 million views and was streamed for 546 million hours.
The show clocked over $17 million per episode, which made it more expensive than it cost to produce an episode of Game of Thrones.
Fantasy adventure series One Piece was the most-streamed show on Netflix in the second half of 2023. Photo / Netflix
The second-most popular show on Netflix during the second half of 2023 was Dear Child; a psychological thriller based on the German book Liebes Kind by Romy Hausmann.
The six-part limited series was released in September 2023 and was watched 52.5 million times.
Other shows that became the most successful hits during this period were:
Who is Erin Carter? (50 million views)
Lupin: Part 3 (49 million views)
The Witcher season three (47 million views)
Sex Education season four (46 million views)
Beckham (43 million views)
CocoMelon season eight (37 million views)
Virgin River season five (35 million views)
The Lincoln Lawyer season two (35 million views)
Painkiller (34 million views)
When it came to film, Netflix did not disappoint either.
Leave The World Behind – which includes a star-studded cast with the likes of Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke – is an adaptation of the 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam. The film was produced by Higher Ground Productions, a production house founded by Barack and Michelle Obama in 2018.
It received over 121 million views and was streamed for 286 million hours.
Following the dystopian tropes of the collapse of technology and civilisation as we know it, Leave The World Behind was described by Herald reviewer Jen Shieff as “spectacular and really well-acted, with just enough White Lotus-type humour to make audiences take it less seriously than they otherwise might”.
Leave the World Behind became Netflix's most-watched movie in July to December 2023.
The spy film Heart of Stone came in at second place, racking up 109 million views.
The rest of the top 10 films on Netflix during this period were:
You Are So Not Invited to my Bat Mitzvah (60 million views)
Netflix’s global reach was also highlighted in the latest engagement report, which revealed that non-English content now accounted for about a third of its viewing figures.
But when it came to the old favourites, Netflix subscribers were still coming to watch them in droves.
Classics such as Grey’s Anatomy (51 million views), Gossip Girl (49 million views) and Gilmore Girls (45 million views) remained valuable pieces in Netflix’s content library, continuing to pull in millions of views for the streaming service.
