A firm called Luminate Data recently released a big report on TV in 2024, and it had some interesting findings. The biggest series on Disney+ was Percy Jackson and the Olympians, with around 3 billion minutes watched. Overall TV output was down compared to years past, with the 2023 actors and writers strikes having stopped production for a while. And the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was watched for 60% fewer minutes than the first.
The Rings of Power didn't make the list of top 10 most watched original streaming shows. Here's that, if you're curious:
- Fool Me Once (Netflix) — 12.11 billion minutes watched
- Bridgerton (Netflix) — 11.07 billion minutes
- Landman (Paramount+) — 9.9 billion
- The Perfect Couple (Netflix) — 8.83 billion
- Tulsa King (Paramount+) — 8.47 billion
- Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story (Netflix) — 8.16 billion
- The Gentlemen (Netflix) — 8.06 billion
- Fallout (Prime Video) — 7.95 billion
- Griselda (Netflix) — 7.59 billion
- Love Is Blind (Netflix) — 7.38 billion
A 60% drop is a problem for any show, but especially for one as expensive as The Rings of Power; Prime Video spent a mint on that series, and so far the results have been...okay, sometimes. The show isn't bad straight through, but it certainly isn't the wall-to-wall banger you'd think those hundreds of millions of dollars would have bought. And all the marketing in the world can't turn the show into a phenomenon if it's just sorta fine, even if it does have The Lord of the Rings branding.
But Prime Video basically needs it to be a phenomenon if they're going to justify that price tag, which may be why it's been a few months since the season 2 finale and we still haven't heard about the show getting renewed for a third season, although the showrunners say they're writing it.
Is the golden age of fantasy/sci-fi TV ending?
These numbers don't come directly from Prime Video, and there are indications that The Rings of Power has benefitted the streaming service in other ways. Still, it feels like the industry is coming to an inflection point regarding these big, expensive genre shows. After the historic success of Game of Thrones on HBO, streamers rushed to create their own epic fantasy series, and while there have been successes — most notably HBO's Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon — nothing has been a seismic super-hit. The only sci-fi/fantasy series to get on the top 10 list for 2024 was Fallout, another Prime Video series. I don't think we'll see big genre shows go away in the years to come, but I suspect we'll see fewer epic fantasies like The Witcher or The Wheel of Time and more shows like Fallout and The Last of Us, sprawling TV shows based on popular video games. And there will always be smaller, original hits like Severance to keep things interesting.
Another option could be for streamers to find a way to make these shows for less money. The expenditures have gotten ridiculous, with The Rings of Power being Exhibit #1. A show like Agatha All Along provides a model on how to change things. This Disney+ series wasn't watched as widely as past Marvel shows like Loki or WandaVision, but it was still a hit because it cost only $40 million to make, which is nothing compared to, say, the $750 million Prime Video reportedly spent on the first season of The Rings of Power. And the final kicker is that Agatha All Along is the better show.
So Hollywood has some thinking to do. In the meantime, there's still plenty of sci-fi and fantasy TV to look forward to this year:
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