'Power Rangers Ninja Steel' has probably been watched more this year than 'X-Men 97'
Yes, really.
Hey all! The latest Netflix engagement report recently dropped, covering the first half of this year. Shall we dive in?
Note: I failed to write about the back half of 2023 numbers when they were released a couple months ago; was in the thick of some book stuff at the time. I’ll do a bit of that here. (Also: pre-order my book! If you love Power Rangers, I think you’ll love it — because it’s about Power Rangers!)
Another note: Without having access to pre-2023 data, it’s hard to extrapolate a ton of meaning from the available data. Also, as noted when I wrote about the first Netflix data dump, this data ultimately is impossible to make wide generalizations about without additional context/demographic info that is available only to Netflix, and maybe Hasbro. It would do you good to keep that in mind while digesting the data.
The top five in 2024 (so far)
The most watched seasons of Power Rangers so far in 2024 aren’t too different from the most watched in the first half of 2023, though the order has shifted slightly.
Cosmic Fury, the series’ newest entry, has the most views of any series or film this year at 3,000,000. Its total hours watched — 13,100,000, puts it third among all seasons available on Netflix.
A reminder: Netflix calculates a “view” by taking total viewing time and dividing it by the runtime of each season. A view doesn’t inherently translate to a viewer, but it’s widely discussed as if that’s the case. In the case of season-long data, a view can be interpreted as a per-episode average.
The most watched in terms of hours viewed is season one of Dino Fury, which also ranked first in the first half of 2023. It would have ranked first in that category during the back half of 2023, too, if not for the premiere of Cosmic Fury, which just edged it with 300,000 additional hours of watch time (23,000,000 to 22,700,000). The now three-year-old season has had great legs since debuting on Nickelodeon; it’s 2,400,000 views in the first half of 2024 are second among all available seasons and films.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always is interesting to evaluate, given Netflix’s affinity for total watch time. It ranks well outside the top five in watch time, given it’s a single “film,” but ranks third in views (2,200,000) for the time period. That’s a steep decline from the first half of 2023, during which it premiered (13,300,000 in about two months of availability).
Ninja Steel continues to be a good performer among all things Power Rangers. Season two (er, Super Ninja Steel) counted 1,700,000 views in 2024’s first half — fourth overall — and its total hours watched (14,900,000) rank second only to season one of Dino Fury.
Power Rangers (2017) technically rounds out the top five in total views, but I’m going to disregard it since it isn’t available on Netflix in America. Not to be too U.S.-centric, but it’s difficult to really consider its standing here without it being available in the country that most turned out for its theatrical release in 2017. (I am willing to speculate it’d be number one by a wide margin, in views and watch time, if it were available in the U.S.)
That leaves us with two seasons that more or less performed equally: season two of Dino Fury (1,500,000 views) and season one of Ninja Steel (1,400,000 views).
Pre-school cartoons continue to rule the day among children’s fare. Season four of Paw Patrol, the most-watched kids show of the period, by itself nearly matched the total views of all Power Rangers content on Netflix (13,800,000) and dwarfs the franchise in total watch time (139,100,000). Peppa Pig remains Hasbro’s top performer on the platform; her season-one adventures alone drew 6 million more views than all of Power Rangers and against a slightly lower total watch time of 79,300,000 hours.
I didn’t point it out the last time I wrote about Netflix viewership data, but The Thundermans — a superhero sitcom that ran for four seasons on Nickelodeon from 2013-2018 — is a steady performer and perhaps the most comparable show to Power Rangers on the entire platform, in terms of the type of content and total season run times. Its four seasons combined for 74,200,000 hours of watch time and 8,200,000 views per episode (it’d likely be neck-and-neck with Power Rangers if not for the abysmal performance of its fourth season among Netflix viewers).
Here’s an interesting comp for you: through its first three weeks, X-Men 97 averaged about 3.1 million views per episode drop, based on Disney Plus internal data shared with TV ratings guru Bill Gorman (the first drop included the season’s first two episodes). Through that same period, the show generated 6,233,333 hours of watch time — less than five seasons of Power Rangers, the oldest of which was released in 2017 (Ninja Steel season one). Gorman stopped sharing data from that source due to changes in his personal life, but based on its week-to-week declines — the fourth episode premiered to about 788,000 viewers — it’s incredibly likely that several seasons of Power Rangers were watched more in the first half of 2024 than the most-discussed show of the year in geek circles. If that 3.1 million views number held for the entire first half of 2024, it would still only match the per-episode view count for the entire run of Ninja Steel, arguably the most maligned iteration of the show. I find that humorous; farts stay winning.
2023 in review
Overall, more than 270,000,000 hours of Power Rangers was watched on Netflix in 2023, breaking down into more than 50,000,000 view(er)s.
Again, there’s a lot we don’t about those view(er)s that matters a great deal. Are they unique across each show? What age are they? Are they only watching Power Rangers or is the series part of a sprawling entertainment diet? To the parties involved (especially Netflix), the answers to these questions matter as much, if not more, than raw statistics. Context is always important.
Still, Power Rangers more than holds its own against like competition in the kids space. While the teen/adult-skewing Transformers film series remains powerful in Netflix territories where it’s available — its first five movies alone generated more than 180,000,000 hours of watch time and 73,000,000 views for the streamer in 2023 — the 11 Transformers cartoons available on the platform in 2023 combined for “just” 52,200,00 hours of watch time and 11,000,000 views. (One could point to this as evidence that the franchise’s latest big-screen release, the family-oriented Transformers One, was predestined to disappoint at the box office.) Only three seasons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons were available on Netflix in 2023: the first two seasons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) and the first season of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (all three were available in the United States during the time period, and remain so as of this publication). They generated 77,600,000 hours of watch time and about 7,700,000 views, or just slightly more than season one of Dino Fury generated for the platform.
While it’s worth acknowledging that both of those franchises’ newest entries live on Paramount Plus in the U.S., it’s unlikely those shows are performing at a level anywhere close to the newest Power Rangers shows. A big reason is Netflix’s subscriber count (277 million worldwide) is more than four times greater than that of Paramount Plus (68.4 million, only available in the states); the odds aren’t in their favor. Also, Power Rangers shows have drastically outperformed shows from those franchises on Netflix that were contemporaries. Example: season one of Rise of TMNT premiered on Nickelodeon the same year as season two of Power Rangers Ninja Steel; the former had half the hours watched (17,500,000) and 60% fewer viewers (1,800,000) than the latter in 2023. It’s not hard a leap to make.
Year-over-year performance
A look at the first half of 2023 versus the second half of 2023, only for the seasons that were available on Netflix for the entirety of both periods.
Overall, the available seasons saw a 32% drop in hours watched and a 46% decline in total views for in the comparable time periods. Individually, the second season of Ninja Steel experienced the lowest YOY decline in hours watched (just 17%), while season three of Mighty Morphin had the lowest drop in views (21%, albeit starting from a very small view total to begin with).
Mighty Morphin season three and season two, as well as Dino Fury season two, all saw declines of greater than 50% in watch time. Season one of Mighty Morphin had one of lowest drops in watch time (32%) but experienced the worst drop in total views (60%).
It isn’t in the year-over-year chart, but Once & Always saw a 32% decline in hours watched and a 31% decline in views from July-Dec. 2023 compared to Jan.-June 2024, which is comparable to most of the shows. (Its declines from its debut window to the second half of 2023 were 75%.)
Cosmic Fury premiered in Sept. 2023, making it ineligible for YOY comparisons, but its 43% decline in hours watched and views from the back half of 2023 to the first half of 2024 is comparable to most seasons’ YOY numbers.
Honestly, I’m not sure what MMPR’s paltry overall performance (outside of Once & Always) should be attributed to. I’d guess it’s most likely because the show is easily accessible without a subscription via several FAST channels (Pluto, Roku, etc.) and YouTube, but who knows?
Conclusion
If you made it here, congrats — you’re as big a stat nerd as me!
Seriously though, thanks for reading this. I realize it’s a lot of numbers to absorb, and that it’s hard to extrapolate much from them, but I’ve always found this stuff fascinating — especially as it relates to my favorite show of all time. Folks like Burgundy Ranger have done an incredible job over the years tracking data related to Power Rangers, and while I’ll never be as dedicated as them, I’m happy to contribute where I can.
In short, it’s still hard to know how much, or why, any of this data may or may not matter. But, my takeaway remains the same: people watch Power Rangers. A lot of them.