Today, we’re diving into the depths of my Excel spreadsheet for a fairly comprehensive overview of the theatrical films that performed best on streaming during their launch period in the United States between 2021 and mid-2025 across the main SVOD services. But before we get into it, please take the time to read the methodology used in this report, because as always, it’s important.
📈 Methodology
Here are the main points of the methodology to keep in mind while reading this report.
The data in this Streaming Report covers only the U.S. territory on TV and is expressed in millions of CVEs (Complete Viewings Equivalent). This means I divide the viewing minutes published by Nielsen by the runtime of each film to compare them on equal footing. It’s a simple reverse engineering of Nielsen’s own process, since the institute calculates the average number of viewers at every minute of a film and multiplies it by its duration to produce the figures in its weekly Top 10.
The data used includes films released between January 1, 2021, and June 30, 2025, i.e., since the establishment of Nielsen’s triple weekly ranking system.
To build the largest and most comparable sample across services, I chose to focus on the first 14 and 28 days of availability, when most viewing takes place and which is enough to determine whether a film is a hit or not. The selected films appeared for at least 2 to 3 weeks in Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 (depending on their release day in the week), which allows me to estimate their 14- or 28-day numbers with relative certainty. For certain films that only appeared for one week, I used comparisons with other titles to estimate a 14-day figure. All such estimated numbers are marked with an asterisk.
The films I kept are those released in their first or second pay window on streaming, not catalog titles that rotate in and out of services depending on licensing deals.
Sony films on Netflix in the U.S. are not included in the ad-supported tier, which naturally reduces their potential audience.
Between January 2021 and August 2025, Nielsen expanded the range of SVOD services it measures by adding HBO Max, Peacock, etc., over 2022 and 2023. As a result, some films released before these services were included may have slipped through the cracks of their rankings.
The 100 most-watched theatrical films in the U.S. on TV during their first 14 days of release between January 2021 and June 2025.
The best starting point is probably to first establish the list of the 100 most-watched theatrical films according to Nielsen’s figures and the methodology detailed above and the top two films in this ranking might surprise you.
