The Hunting Wives was the most-streamed series in the U.S. last week, racking up more than 2B minutes viewed on Netflix, per a new report from Luminate.
This is a pretty big win for Lionsgate Television, which produced the series that up until around two months ago was set for release on Starz. As of now, The Hunting Wives is only licensed to Netflix for U.S. distribution — not that that seems to have impacted its performance very much. In fact, the title is doing particularly well for a U.S.-only streaming series, more than doubling its viewership from the week prior, when it managed 811M minutes viewed in its debut week on Netflix, according to Luminate.
Each week, Luminate distributes a report on the Top 50 shows and movies on streaming in the U.S. July 25 to 31 was an interesting interval for TV, not only because of The Hunting Wives.
The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 fell one spot to No. 6 this week with about 317M minutes watched (down from 425M the week before, when Season 3 premiered). Since Luminate reports on total watch time, this kind of viewership drop off is to be expected, given that two episodes were released at premiere and only one additional episode dropped last week. Also worth remembering this is just U.S. viewership, and Prime Video has said the series is also showing outsize performance in the UK, Germany, and Brazil.
Speaking of Prime Video, the streamer can also hang its hat on its Bosch spinoff Ballard, it seems. Though viewership was down week-over-week, the series moved up to No. 3 among TV series, per Luminate, with 434M minutes viewed.
The beleaguered And Just Like That… was also in the Top 25 again — where it has been for at least the last month — pulling in 146M minutes viewed. While slightly lower than the week prior, that is pretty on par with the Season 3 performance overall. There’s no doubt that viewership has waned over time, and Season 3 has been generating some less-than-exemplary reviews, which likely explains the decision to end it with a two-episode finale tacked onto the end of this installment rather than let it continue.
It is certainly not the best performance HBO Max has ever seen from one of its titles, but it seems worth noting that And Just Like That… Season 3 was the only HBO Max title to reach the Top 25 streaming series over the past two weeks — and one of only two in the Top 50, along with The Pitt.
Netflix’s 2020 documentary series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich is also continuing to benefit from the current backlash toward the Trump administration for the decision not to release anymore files related to Epstein’s criminal case and the President’s ire at publications like The Wall Street Journal for reporting on his links to the convicted sex trafficker. We previously reported that the doc saw a 430% increase in viewership during the week of July 18 to 24, and it just keeps climbing.
Last week, the doc generated over 135M minutes viewed, making it the 30th most-streamed TV title in the U.S. It just barely missed the Top 50 the week prior with 73.1M minutes watched.
On that note, Netflix’s follow up doc Ghislaine Maxwell: Filthy Rich also tripled its U.S. viewership last week with nearly 47M minutes viewed, which just further illustrates how the current U.S. political landscape is dictating viewership preferences right now.
