Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Netflix is the opposite of a black box.
We know a lot about what’s inside — The Big Short and Stranger Things and all 10 seasons of Friends and 5,500 more film and TV titles — but we’re completely in the dark about how many times Netflix subscribers have watched any of those film and TV titles, or which titles they finish watching, or what’s big in Jacksonville or Japan.
Netflix will occasionally measure out a teaspoon of tidbits from its spigot of streaming data — as the company did this summer when they announced that 53 percent of Orange Is the New Black viewers had rewatched a full season. Or last week, when they revealed that roughly 1/3 of its subscribers watch a movie between finishing one TV series and starting another — but those disclosures are rare and highly selective.
Don’t take that as a criticism. Netflix spends $6 billion a year on licensed and original content, and part of its bargain with the production companies who make that content is that they’re never going to know how many people are watching. Netflix isn’t paying for a number of streams; it’s paying for the length of the viewing window. It’s exercising a competitive advantage in a market it largely built.
We know (or, at least, suspect) some viewing data. We get the occasional Netflix missives like the two I mentioned above, and we know that Netflix crashed and was down for two hours after Marvel’s Luke Cage premiered this summer. The latter incident seemed to point towards a significant level of demand, but we’ll never be 100% sure if the glitch was, in fact, due to demand or was entirely coincidental in nature.
So when the news broke Monday that Netflix had elected not to go forward with a third season of Marco Polo, the streaming service’s epic, globe-spanning, original series, neither Netflix nor The Weinstein Co., which produced the series, said why the series was ending after two seasons. They thanked each other, and that was that.
The likely —if overly broad— explanation for why Netflix elected not to go forward is almost certainly that:
- Marco Polo was really expensive to make; the New York Times estimated the cost at $180 million for two seasons).
- The reviews were not strong —the composite Metacritic score for Marco Polo is 48 out of 100— and the series didn’t score a single major-category nomination for an Emmy or Golden Globe for either of its two seasons.
- Anecdotally, media impressions and social buzz seemed to drop significantly from Season 1 to Season 2
- According to Symphony Advanced Media, a company that attempts to estimate the size of Netflix’s streaming audiences, Season 2 of MP was the weakest of Netflix’s major series releases during the third quarter of this year; representatives for Symphony told Decider that they estimate that 1.1 million U.S. viewers watched the show during its first 35 days of release. (For what it’s worth, Symphony’s Stranger Things total was 14.3 million viewers. Also, Netflix Content Chief Ted Sarandos has been very public in his dismissal of Symphony and their “really remarkably inaccurate data.”)
“Marco Polo is one of those shows for us that’s hugely popular all throughout Asia and Europe,” Sarandos said at a Hollywood Reporter roundtable in August about a month after Season 2 premiered. “And there’s a lot of focus on whether your neighbor’s watching it right now,” Sarandos said in reference to not disclosing viewership data, “but it’s really irrelevant. It’s doing exactly what it was supposed to do.”
That sounds dubious in light of Netflix cancelling Marco Polo four months later, but I’ll give Sarandos the benefit of the doubt and say maybe Season 2 did deliver the viewership in Asia and Europe that Netflix wanted it to. Given the subject matter — a Venetian merchant who spent time in China and exposed Europe to its culture — the series may well have been a bigger hit this summer in Netflix’s markets in Asia and Europe than it was domestically here in the States.
The long window between Sarandos’s praising comments at the Hollywood Reporter roundtable in August and Netflix cancelling the series earlier this week would tend to suggest that Netflix and The Weinstein Co. had tried and failed to come to an agreement on budget and casting for a third season.
Or maybe Netflix saw the gigantic numbers that Marvel’s Luke Cage did in October — 9 million viewers according to Symphony Advanced Media, which is eight times its estimate for Marco Polo — and revised its thinking on what the return should be on the money it was preparing to spend on another season of Marco Polo.
Or maybe Netflix thought when it green-lit Marco Polo a few years ago that it would be up and running in China by now and really needed the largest Asian market as the nucleus for a big-budget series based in China. The Crown is an even more expensive global series — an estimated $130 million for the first season — but has broader appeal in the United States than Marco Polo and scored three major-category Golden Globes nominations this week to Marco Polo‘s none.
Or maybe Netflix’s viewing metrics showed an unusually high number of Marco Polo viewers were skipping out after a few episodes. Or maybe it’s a brushback pitch to Hollywood studios who started thinking Netflix was the golden goose.
Or maybe… Or maybe… Or maybe…
The reality is that Netflix is serving a diverse base of 87 million subscribers in 190 countries — basically everywhere in the world except Syria and China — with a diverse roster of shows. It’s making complicated, algorithmic decisions about how to how to allocate their $6 billion content budget. Marco Polo just didn’t have the right combination of audience, attention and a bearable budget to merit a third season.
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
