Two weeks ago, when Stranger Things 5 had just dropped, I thought it would be good to write about the performance of previous seasons so that we might be able to predict viewing figures. 

And then Netflix apparently acquired WBD and all hell broke loose. 

The article thus morphed into, “How might WBD content perform if it was inside Netflix vs. native Netflix content?”

And then Paramount made a (hostile) bid for WBD and all hell broke loose for a second time. 

Gah. 

So finally, in this piece, I’ve ignored Paramount and pulled everything else together into one analysis: how Netflix content actually performs, how efficient it is on a cost-per-million-viewing-hours basis, and what happens when you apply the same methodology to WBD’s most expensive films.

TLDR

• Squid Game S1 is the most efficient title Netflix has ever made costing just $9,700 per million viewing hours 

• Stranger Things 4 is far more expensive at $147,000 per million hours viewed but is still wildly more efficient than blockbuster films

• Netflix movies are structurally inefficient compared to its series. Red Notice and The Gray Man, for example, land in the $440k–$668k per million hours range

• WBD tentpoles operate are more expensive still. Most of the 15 I studied sit between $700k and $1.1m per million hours with only Joker looking remotely competitive.

• In terms of any acquisition, the data suggests to me that if Netflix stays SVOD/AVOD-only, WBD’s cost structure (for movies at least) is fundamentally misaligned with Netflix’s viewing-hour economics.

It’s true, there could be some confirmation bias here – I was instinctively sceptical about any potential deal – but here’s my rationale below. 

The Raw Netflix Data

Netflix’s raw viewing data is fascinating enough on its own. Split into the three classes I’ve been looking at – Movies, English Language Shows and non-English Language Shows – here are the all-time Top 10s of each type.

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Netflix Global All-Time Viewing Top 10s

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5 Initial Observations

#1) Squid Game is Netflix’s true MVP. Season 1 alone (runtime: 8 hrs 19) accounted for 2.2bn hours viewed – 30% more than Stranger Things 4. It’s the single most efficient audience magnet Netflix has ever produced.

Seasons 2 and 3 take up the top 3 slots in the all-time global list for non-English. Wednesday S1 is the most efficient English-language show (6.82 hrs runtime = 1.7bn hrs watched).

#2) Movies can’t compete with series on total hours. Netflix’s biggest ever movie (KPop Demon Hunters) lands 541 million hours. But shows routinely do 3-4x that.

Even mid-table English series like The Night Agent or Bridgerton S3 (~800–900m hours) dwarf every movie in Netflix’s catalogue.

#3) Four of Netflix’s most watched English shows have an 8hr+ runtime. And a fifth, Bridgerton season 3, was 7hrs 59.

The average runtime of the Top 10 is 7hrs 47.

That inflates total hours massively.

Stranger Things 4 is the obvious case: 13 hours runtime led to 1.84bn hours watched. If ST4 had been a 7-hour season like Wednesday, the viewed hours would be almost halved.

#4) One-off limited series are Netflix’s stealth weapons. By hours viewed, three make the all-time English-language Top 10:

• Queen’s Gambit: 7 episodes = 746M hours viewed
• Adolescence: short runtime of just 3hrs 50 mins = 546M hours
• Fool Me Once = 630M hours

Limited series give Netflix high completion, high social impact and strong global pickup.

#5) The movies list skews action, apocalyptic, star-driven.

Most Netflix movies are high-concept spectacle with big names like The Rock, Gal Gadot, Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Gosling and Sandra Bullock. None have yet created franchises. Most sit at 150–220m views per hour, way below the big series. The wider point: movies require nearly the same cost as a full season of TV but deliver a fraction of audience hours.

Adding Costs

It’s when you add in cost that the analysis can get really interesting. Netflix doesn’t habitually publish production budgets but I was able to find some numbers.

Squid Game 1, for example, cost $21.4m for the full season. Stranger Things 4, by contrast, reportedly cost $30m per episode – $270m total. (ST5, btw, is reported to have had a budget of $50m per episode.)

Of the movies I could find costs for, Bird Box had a budget of $20m, Don’t Look Up $75m and both Red Notice and The Gray Man $200m.

Using those figures, we can calculate that:

• For each 1m hours viewed, Squid Game 1 cost Netflix only $9,700
• 1m hours viewed of Stranger Things 4 cost a whopping $147,000
• The movies are even more inefficient than ST4. Against the same performance – 1m hours watched: Bird Box cost $61,000, Don’t Look Up $184,000, Red Notice $440,000 and The Gray Man $668,000. Oh dear.

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Netflix - Cost per Million Viewing Hours

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Reverse-Engineering WBD Movie Performance

To get some sense of how Warner Bros Discovery’s biggest films might compare on a like-for-like basis with Netflix content, I’ve taken a deliberately simple, conservative approach. We obviously don’t have streaming viewing hours for these titles (WBD doesn’t report them) but we do have global box office receipts.

By assuming an average ticket price of $10, we can convert box office into tickets sold. Multiply that by each film’s runtime and you get a rough proxy for theatrical viewing hours delivered. From there, the same calculation used for Netflix applies:

Budget ÷ million Viewing Hours = cost per million viewing hours.

This method has obvious limitations:

• It only captures theatrical consumption. Home entertainment, broadcast, and streaming windows would all add tens of millions more hours
• It assumes uniform ticket pricing, which is clearly not true across geographies
• It excludes marketing spend, which in many cases was substantial

Even with those caveats, the comparison is still useful, I think. It gives us a directional indicator of how efficiently WBD’s biggest films converted production spend into audience attention during their first (and cleanest) window. And it highlights just how different film economics are from Netflix’s high-performing series, which often deliver billions of viewing hours at far lower cost-per-hour.

Here are the 15 most expensive WBD films of all time, measured using that theatrical-only metric. The data suggests that:

• Joker is WBD’s most efficient movie in the list garnering 219m viewed hours for $251,000 per million
• Only three of WBD’s movies – Joker, Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone and Aquaman – have better efficiency than one of Netflix’s most expensive titles, The Gray Man
• WBD’s least efficient title (by this scale) is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice which cost $1.14m per million hours viewed

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WBD Films - Cost per Viewing Hour (Theatrical)

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Deal Scepticism

This isn’t a definitive efficiency ranking – that would require full lifecycle viewing data – but as a first-pass benchmark it may have some merit.

It may also help explain why I was instinctively sceptical about any Netflix / WBD marriage.

WBD’s crown jewels are built for a completely different model:

• Theatrical ROI – where revenue scales with opening weekend hype, not viewing hours
• Tentpole budgeting – where $150m–$300m is the cost of entry
• Franchise logic – where merchandising, downstream licensing and cinema cycles absorb the spend

Netflix’s world, with its retention-driven economics, cost-per-viewing-hour efficiency and global completion rates and churn modelling is the opposite.

When you line up the two catalogues using the same efficiency metric, the mismatch is obvious.

If Netflix is buying WBD for its catalogue, brand IP, scale, defensive moat and, crucially, to embrace the theatrical model, fine. But if the strategic intent is “we remain a pure-play SVOD/AVOD streamer”, then, for me, it doesn’t pass the smell test.