It’s already established that streaming changed the film industry. Streaming releases were an important way of keeping the film industry alive during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic when movie theaters had to stay closed for an unspecified period and releases were postponed. Even though some of the people involved with filmmaking expressed their grievances at streaming releases, this strategy has not gone away with the reopening of movie theatres.
Disney’s Turning Red, is the most in-demand streaming released movie so far in 2022, with more than 52 times the demand for the average movie. The movie was released on Disney+ and at limited theaters in the US due to the rising number of cases of the Omicron variant in January 2022. In spite of this, that movie has been very successful in the US market, being in the top 5 most in-demand of all movies in 2022 YTD.
Faced with the impossibility of giving their titles a wide theatrical release during the pandemic, some studios chose to sell the distribution rights to Amazon, which digitally release the title via Prime Video. That was the case for the three Amazon Prime Video movies in the top 10 list. All of three movies were produced by Paramount Pictures and had their distribution rights acquired by Amazon. The most in-demand of them is Coming 2 America, a sequel to the 1988 comedy Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy.
The Adam Project is the most in-demand Netflix-released movie of the year, with 13.39 times the demand of the average movie. The other two Netflix movies in that ranking are The Irishman, Scorcese’s 210-minute length crime drama, and Enola Holmes, a movie adaptation of a book about the teenage sister of Sherlock Holmes with a sequel released on November 4th this year.
It’s also worth noting that Apple TV+’s Coda (2021), the first movie distributed by a streaming service to win the Best Picture award at the Oscars is the fourth most in-demand streaming released movie of 2022, almost two years after its release.
When it comes to movie catalog, HBO Max is the top streaming platform in the US. The platform has a demand share of 18.7% of the total movie demand available across SVODs in the US (including all movies, regardless of release type) in the third quarter of 2022, even with a smaller catalog in term of number of movies available than two of its main competitors, Netflix and Amazon Prime. HBO Max has benefited from being part of the WarnerBros. Discovery ecosystem, with many WarnerBros. movies being released on the streaming platform simultaneously with the theatrical release or after a 45-day window.
Another platform where the demand share outperforms its catalog size is Disney+. Despite having only 4.3% of the number of movies available on SVOD, Disney+’s catalog share of demand is 11.5% of the total movie demand. Disney+’s movie catalog contains a large share of highly popular exclusive franchise movies like Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, Avengers: Endgame and Deadpool which raises the average demand for a movie in that catalog.
Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, on the other hand, have the two biggest movie catalogs among the SVOD platforms but rank 2nd and 4th in terms of demand respectively. The investment in a large catalog of movies these platforms have made has not translated into a large share of audience demand. Amazon Prime Video’s and Netflix’s underperforming demand share may be explained by the fact that both HBO Max and Disney+ are the main destinations for their parent companies' produced movies, including some of the biggest theatrical releases and franchise installments including the Marvel and DC Universes, alongside Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Pixar. Amazon Prime Video and Netflix rely more on movies licensed by other producers, which struggle to reach the same level of attention of these major franchises.
