Netflix’s time-hopping crime-thriller Bodies climbed its way to the top spot in its second week with 58.6 million viewing hours from October 22-29.
Bodies had a slow premiere with 42 million viewing hours, but with an 82% Rotten Tomatoes score and solid audience reviews, it increased its engagement by 38%, according to Netflix's weekly global rankings.
Created by British screenwriter Paul Tomalin, the limited series follows four London detectives in four different time periods, and the mystery that follows them when they discover that they must investigate the same murder.
Last week’s rankings — 'Old Dads' Generates Plenty of Domestic Sound and Fury, But It All Signifies Little Audience -- Netflix Weekly Rankings for October 16-22
Mixing sci-fi, period drama, murder mystery and police procedural story elements, Bodies is based on an eponymous graphic novel written by Si Spencer.
Meanwhile, the Morgan Freeman-narrated nature documentary Life on Our Planet landed at third place among Netflix’s English series with a solid 38.3 million streaming hours. Another documentary, limited series Get Gotti, finished second with 7.3 million views (now Netflix's priority metric but not ours), but only 18.4 million hours of streaming engagement.
Beyond Bodies’s week 2 surge, and a strong niche debut by Life on Our Planet, however, the ratings news continues its southward trend for Netflix. Last year for the final full week of October, limited series From Scratch captured more than 72 million streaming hours in its second week on the platform, while ripped-from-the-headlines murder biopic The Good Nurse led all Netflix films with a strong 68.3 million-streaming-hour opening.
Last week among Netflix films, comedian Bill Burr’s directorial debut, Old Dads, narrowly remained in the top spot among Netflix’s English-language movies with 28.2 million views, building slightly on its soft premiere a week prior.
While Burr’s skewering of millennial parenting and office culture seemed to appeal to some viewers, the film is simply missing the audience numbers to back up the social media-fueled controversy surrounding the film.
More broadly for Netflix, it's been close to three months since the last time the platform opened a domestic movie to any kind of of significant audience, with the Gal Gadot action film Heart of Stone premiering to around 70 million viewing hours back in early August.
Also struggling to pull in viewership was David Yates’s Pain Hustlers, which landed at No. 2 on Netflix’s English-language film ranking.
Starring Chris Evans and Emily Blunt alongside longtime actors like Andy García and Catherine O’Hara, Pain Hustlers follows a young woman working at a failing pharmaceutical startup, who suddenly enters a dangerous racketeering scheme.
With just 29.3 million hours viewed, Pain Hustlers would have taken the No. 1 spot if not for the introduction of Netflix’s new total “views” metric early last summer, which tallies the number of users who at least started to view the content.
Meanwhile, acquisition No Hard Feelings, a raunchy Sony summer theatrical title starring Jennifer Lawrence, which was in the transactional rental/sale window these last three months, landed at No. 3 among English films with 22.7 million viewing hours.
