Netflix’s The Witcher with Henry Cavill has proved to be a major success with the streaming giant reporting that the series is on track to become their “biggest season 1 TV series ever” with the show snagging 76 million member households in the first four weeks.
The shareholder letter (via EW) reads:
“As we’ve expanded our original content, we’ve been working on how to best share content highlights that demonstrate popularity. Given that we now have titles with widely varying lengths — from short episodes (e.g. Special at around 15 minutes) to long films (e.g. The Highwaymen at 132 minutes) — we believe that reporting households viewing a title based on 70 percent of a single episode of a series or of an entire film, which we have been doing, makes less sense. We are now reporting on households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title.”
Basically, this means Netflix’s new tracking stats are closer to internet content and less to television and film and if an account watched at least two minutes of a show or a film that is “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional.”
Netflix says this tracking brings in higher figures and their reasoning is: “Our new methodology is similar to the BBC iPlayer in their rankings based on ‘requests’ for the title, ‘most popular’ articles on The New York Times which include those who opened the articles, and YouTube view counts.”
Netflix shared additional figures including:
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The Witcher was created by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich based on the character created by Andrzej Sapkowski. Mike Ostrowski produces while Sean Daniel, Jason Brown, Tomasz Bagiński, Jarosław Sawko, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, and Alik Sakharov serve as executive producers.
It stars Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia, Anya Chalotra as Yennefer of Vengerberg, Freya Allan as Cirilla / Ciri, Joey Batey as Jaskier, MyAnna Buring as Tissaia de Vries, Royce Pierreson as Istredd, Eamon Farren as Cahir, Mimi Ndiweni as Fringilla Vigo, Wilson Radjou-Pujalte as Dara, Anna Shaffer as Triss Merigold, and Mahesh Jadu as Vilgefortz.
While the series snagged a 93% audience approval rating over on Rotten Tomatoes, the show only managed to gather a 59% rating from critics, who gave it a consensus which reads: “The world of The Witcher still only feels half-formed as it gallops onto screens, but Henry Cavill brings brawny charisma to a series teeming with subversive fantasy elements and dark humor.”
Netflix has already announced a second season back on November 13, 2019. Production on the second season is all set to begin in London in early 2020, for a planned release in 2021.