Coming-of-age drama My Life With the Walter Boys expanded its audience engagement by 40% in its second week on Netflix, ranking as the platform's top English-language TV series for the week of Dec. 11-17 with 97.5 million viewing hours.
Shortly after touting the Sony Pictures Television-produced series audience performance, Netflix announced that it renewed the show for a second season.
Uber-downer, star-studded novel adaptation Leave the World Behind, meanwhile, also grew its second-week viewership, capturing 106.2 million hours of streaming, not only leading Netflix's film categories, but all Netflix programming for the week.
The movie, starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke, had Netflix's best weekly film performance since Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery captured 127.3 million viewing hours in the final week of last year.
Leave the World Behind also recorded nearly 45 million "views" -- now Netflix's preferred metric for its Global Top 10 rankings. That was the most recorded in single week since Netflix's introduced the metric back in June.
Also perking up last week for Netflix was the sixth and final season of The Crown, with the final five episodes dropping Dec. 14 and generating nearly 51 million hours of engagement in their first four days on the platform. That was a 42% uptick over the debut of the first four season-6 episodes back in mid-November.
Based on the 40 titles ranked across four categories in Netflix's weekly Global Top 10, overall platform engagement was still down 13.2% vs. the same week in 2022. Netflix's engagement in 2023 has consistently come in at well below its 2022 levels, according to numerous audits conducted by Next TV this year.
Last week's report: Pitch Black 'Leave the World Behind' Lights Up an Audience -- Netflix Weekly Rankings for December 4-10
Netflix also scored with yet another Korean romcom, True Beauty, which drew 63.5 million viewing hours in its third week on Netflix's global platform.
As the MoffettNathanson graphic released this week shows, Korean titles account for around 6% of the movies and TV shows on Netflix.
Meanwhile, Korean shows generate 8% of Netflix viewing, more than any other non-English programming source.
Here are the rankings for the week of Dec. 11-17.
