EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is taking another run at Trainwreck, the documentary franchise that delivered films including Poop Cruise.
The streamer has renewed the project, which comes from Don’t F**k with Cats producer Raw Television, which is part of All3Media, for a second season.
It comes after ratings success for Poop Cruise, which sailed off after its first week in June with 21.1M views and was top ten in 86 countries, with the other seven films in the strand also performing well.
The Cult of American Apparel sewed up 7.8M views in its first week, The Real Project X housed 7.4M views, Balloon Boy took off with 7M views, Storm Area 51 convinced 7M views, Mayor of Mayhem smoked 6.4M views, The Astroworld Tragedy scored 6.2M and P.I. Moms uncovered 4.8M views.
The streamer found itself in the middle of the cultural conversation, particularly with Poop Cruise, which told the story of how a four-day luxury cruise trip from Galveston, Texas, to Cozumel, Mexico proved catastrophic for its 4,000 passengers after an engine room fire destroyed electrical cables supplying the entire cruise liner, leading to raw sewage leaking all over the ship.
Adam Del Deo, VP of Doc Series and Films told Deadline that it “captivated audiences around the world”. “There was a variety of topics and subjects, so it was bringing in diverse audiences into the documentary space. It sparked conversations on social media and in the press and the general word of mouth that it had [showed] it was a series that was loved by our members,” he added.
Netflix and Raw Television have not decided on the topics that would make up the second run of Trainwreck, but they will similarly feature a range of topics from music, politics and pop culture that feature “chaotic moments”.
Trainwreck was first spawned with Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, which told the story of the disastrous attempt to relaunch the flower power music festival, in 2022. That three-part series did well for Netflix, with 20.3 million hours viewed – the metric Netflix previously used – and entering its Top 10 charts at No. 8.
The streamer was in the process of making The Astroworld Tragedy, which was produced by Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story producer Passion Pictures, while also talking with Raw, which produced the rest, many in association with advertising agency BBH, about “taking a bet on a larger franchise”.
Netflix’s Del Deo wouldn’t be drawn on the cost of the films, but the relatively quick turnaround episodes are clearly less expensive than many feature documentaries. “I would say it’s in line with what we spend on our docs,” he added. “There was nothing like overly expensive or cheap.”
The release strategy has also been interesting with many of these films dropping a few weeks apart from each other. Del Deo said that other than Trainwreck, the only other time it has launched a franchise with different films launching at different times, rather than as one big binge drop, is with the sports franchise Untold.
“We commissioned it initially as a series, but we thought there would be different audiences, so at that point, we said, ‘Should we think about our traditional all-at-once release strategy just a bit differently in the way we did with Untold, which covered sports, but there was a lot of variety around the different types of sports stories that we were telling, so that’s how we landed on this idea,” he added.
