The Next “Squid Game,” Iger's Hoop Dreams, and a $200M SPAC  

Good afternoon, thanks for reading The Daily Courant, highlighting the latest and most important journalism being produced at Puck.
 

Today, Puck contributor Julia Alexander decodes months’ worth of previously undisclosed Netflix data, helping to illuminate how the $300 billion streaming platform makes its decisions, from which shows to renew to the complicated formulas that determine which stars get cast. 

Then, below the fold, Matt Belloni highlights a tantalizing new SPAC deal in Hollywoodland, where UTA has filed for a $200 million blank-check company targeting the metaverse. Plus, don't miss the latest episode of our podcast, The Powers That Be, featuring Peter Hamby, Belloni, Julia Ioffe, and Dylan Byers in conversation about the future of HBO, what D.C. insiders are saying about Kamala Harris, why Vladimir Putin is massing troops on the Russia-Ukraine border, and what Bob Chapek really wants from ESPN and Hulu.

I Dug Into the New Netflix “Ratings” Data So You Don’t Have To

The next “Squid Game,” warning signs for Disney, the Ryan Reynolds calculus, and why “binge mode” might be overrated.

Bad news for cinephiles: Red Notice, the critically panned art-heist caper in which Ryan Reynolds appears with Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and a bunch of C.G.I. cityscapes, is poised to overtake Sandra Bullock’s Bird Box as the most watched original film in the history of Netflix.

That’s interesting, and speaks to the persistent gap between elite consensus and popular appeal in the streaming age. But the more surprising data point, and something we wouldn’t have known had Netflix not recently begun releasing weekly Top 10 lists based on an “hours consumed” metric, is how Red Notice helped 6 Underground, another Ryan Reynolds Netflix original from 2019, net another 3.6 million household streams in the week following Red Notice’s release—or 7.77 million hours of “engagement.” 

As a streaming video analyst, I spent the Thanksgiving week luxuriating in months’ worth of new Netflix data. (While the service only started publishing its new lists last week, data beginning at the end of June was included.) There’s still a lot that Netflix isn’t revealing—we don’t know how many people watched 6 Underground in Egypt, for instance, although we do know it appeared in the country’s Top 10 list not long after Red Notice—but there is enough to better explain the decisions Netflix makes, from renewals to casting choices and more. For that reason, it’s valuable. 

Below are the four most enlightening trends I found: 

1. South Korea Has Become a Global Content Engine

Squid Game gets all the attention, and rightly so, but what about Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha? The rom-com show, the top broadcast series in South Korea when it debuted this summer, is a massive hit for Netflix. Cha-Cha-Cha has remained a Top 10 non-English TV series globally for 12 weeks—longer than Squid Game—and has amassed 258.5 million hours viewed during that time.

Yes, Squid Game probably helped Cha-Cha-Cha, as the algorithm likely recommended other popular Korean series, but Cha-Cha-Cha was already a hit in markets like Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, India, Vietnam, and Qatar. By the week of Nov. 1, it was charting all over Latin America. A week later, it was trending in Morocco. 

This isn’t a one-off event, either...

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