Decoding the Viewership Trends for Netflix India’s Series and Films in 2024

Transparency isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of streaming platforms. Streamers are infamous for being cagey about viewership data and how well a series or movie has performed. Instead, flashy announcements of randomly large numbers with little context are made, and one doesn’t quite know what to make of them. The common joke is that with a streaming title, the (unverifiable) “success party” often follows the trailer launch.

For instance, earlier this year, ZEE5 issued a press release stating that the Telugu film Hanu-Man "smashed records, crossing 102 million streaming minutes". Naturally, this leads to a few questions: does this mean a million people watched the film for 102 minutes? Or perhaps 10.2 million people watched 10 minutes each? Or even 102 million people watched exactly a minute each?

Enter Netflix — the world’s largest streamer — - which has increasingly been making promising strides towards transparency in recent years. In 2023, the streaming giant began publishing its bi-annual What We Watched report, giving a snapshot of viewership data of Netflix titles over a six-month period. On September 19, Netflix issued its 2024 report, offering viewership numbers of what was watched from January to June this year.

The report is a spreadsheet with close to 16,000 titles, which journalists and cinema enthusiasts can refer to, to get a sense of how certain titles are performing; the hits, the misses, the surprises and the duds.

Here’s a look at the key takeaways from the Indian titles in the first half of the year from Netflix’s latest data dump; why this may well be Netflix India’s most promising year yet, and why the feature film story is far more exciting than the series story.

How the Series Performed

Beginning with the shows and series, of the close to 7,000 series titles in the report, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar takes the top spot among the Indian shows, coming in at the 67th spot with 14.8 million views, making it the only Indian title in the top 100. “Views” are the report’s chief metric of success, calculated by dividing total hours viewed by runtime. To put Heeramandi’s performance in perspective, in the second half of 2023 report, The Railway Men was the most-watched Indian series with 10.6 million views, taking it to the top 150 series titles.

The next achievement on this year’s list is the crowd-pleasing legal comedy Maamla Legal Hai, which clocked 7.1 million views, putting it in the top 250 series globally. Also in the top 250 is the uncomfortably irresponsible true-crime docuseries The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth, coming in at 7 million views. While one can’t know for certain since only the viewership data for 2023 and 2024 is available, it’s fair to estimate that The Indrani Mukherjea Story could well be the streamer’s most-watched Indian docuseries yet.

Next up is The Great Indian Kapil Show with 4.6 million views, placing it in the top 500. With 3.3 million views is Abhishek Chaubey's enjoyable and under-discussed dark comedy series Killer Soup, led by Manoj Bajpayee and Konkona Sensharma. This puts both Kapil Sharma and Killer Soup in the top 10 per cent of all series watched on Netflix in the first half of 2024. Further down the list is TVF’s Kota Factory: Season 3 with 2.5 million views. But, given that the new season was only released on June 20, this number marks the viewership of only the first ten days after release, and the second half of 2024 report will likely provide a more holistic picture.

It almost must be said that conclusions about the “success” and “failure” that one draws from these numbers involve a great deal of guesswork, and come with an extensive list of caveats. This is a spreadsheet of thousands of titles with very large viewership numbers next to them, but with little context. Aside from the standout performers like Heeramandi and Maamla Legal Hai, one doesn’t quite know what “success" looks like by Netflix's internal standards. Are 5 million views good? Two million? Is it only average? With only two years of viewership data on hand, it’s hard to tell.

How the Movies Performed

Elsewhere, the Netflix India feature film story appears to be far more exciting than the series saga. While four Indian series made it to the top 500 in the first half of 2024, there were 10 Indian films in the top 300, out of over 9,000 film titles.

Leading the charge is Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s polarising hit Animal at the 72nd spot, with 21.6 million views. However, offsetting it is Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, which finished at number 81 with 19.9 million views. Given the subject, scale, sensibility, budget and cast of Rao's film, its performance proves to be a triumph on every front.

Also in the top 100 are Siddharth Anand’s Fighter with 19.6 million views, and Rajesh A Krishnan’s Crew starring Tabu, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Kriti Sanon, with 19.3 million views. In contrast, in the second half of 2023, the top two performers were Atlee’s Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Jawan with 16.2 million views, and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Khufiya with 12.1 million. However, neither made it to the top 100.

The other movies to make it to the top 300 are the Ajay Devgn and R Madhavan-starrer Shaitaan with 17.9 million views, SRK’s Dunki with 15.6 million views, the Bhumi Pednekar-starrer Bhakshak with 13.7 million views, Article 370 with 10.5 million views, Bade Miyan Chote Miyan with 10.3 million views, and Murder Mubarak with 9.9 million views. In terms of 2024’s other buzzy Netflix original films, Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila has made it to the top 400 with 8.3 million views, and Siddharth P. Malhotra’s Junaid Khan-starrer Maharaj is at 511 with 6.2 million views.

As previously stated, while it isn’t easy to gauge the entire context and impact of the viewership of these titles, in terms of the bigger picture, it’s safe to say that Indian titles and audiences finally seem to be making a meaningful mark in the global Netflix story.