‘The Cloverfield Paradox’ pulls 5 million reported views, ‘Altered Carbon’ falls flat with only 2.5 million

With a risky strategy, airing the first trailer for ‘The Cloverfield Paradox’ during the Super Bowl, and then releasing the movie that night on Netflix, apparently the streaming service won big, with a claimed five million viewers of the movie so far. Imagining this instead to be a movie released in the theater, five million viewers would be a pretty successful opening weekend (keeping in mind nobody had to directly *pay* for a ticket via Netflix, so it’s not apples and oranges here).

Another big bet of the service, ‘Altered Carbon,’ pulled in relatively disappointing viewership numbers, with a reported 2.5 million viewers of the show within the first week following release. This number was pulled by third party tracking service Nielsen, who Netflix has claimed, among other tracking services, to be an inaccurate representation of streaming.

Netflix took two huge bets here, one with the release of ‘Cloverfield Paradox’ on such a short marketing timeline, and paying big bucks for ‘Altered Carbon’ production. Netflix has relied heavily on the success of their original and exclusive content over the past two years especially, as their third party distribution library has continued to shrink almost every month.

Netflix CEO Reid Hastings has come out and said that he is far more interested in taking big bets and being wrong than playing it too safe. Big bets are how content libraries land shows like ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘House of Cards.’ Ask Jeff Bezos about how he feels his Amazon original content library is doing, and he’ll be the first to tell you he’s still waiting on that big hit.