I love that classic old Looney Tunes bit where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck argue back and forth about whether it’s rabbit-hunting season or duck-hunting season. Their mutual goal is to avoid the wrath of Elmer Fudd’s shotgun. Any argument can and will be made to keep them alive. Strangely, that 1951 scene is eerily reflective of today’s Hollywood. Every stakeholder in the entertainment industry—studios, movie theaters, streamers—is working toward different goals. That means they all have different definitions of success. Coupled with Hollywood’s unparalleled PR spin, a consensus is hard to reach as a result.
Hits still exist, but every success story comes with asterisks, caveats and qualifiers. Box office hovers around 15 percent below pre-pandemic levels globally and roughly 20 percent domestically. From 2014 to 2019, 28 Hollywood films crossed the $1 billion mark at the box office. In the last five years, as of this writing? Only 11. Streaming success can be measured and argued via endless Beautiful Mind-esque permutations. Total hours viewed, total views, unique households, completion rates, subscriber acquisition and retention, engagement among high-risk users…I need an Ambien just thinking about it.
No one can agree on which metric matters most.
As Comscore head of marketplace trends Paul Dergarabedian told Observer: “It depends who you’re talking to—audience, studio, theaters, financiers. What is their north star in terms of what they deem successful?”
Success then vs. now
Despite the best efforts of infamous Hollywood accounting, success has been fairly straightforward throughout cinema’s history. A movie was released, ticket sales were counted, and the marketplace delivered a verdict. Bob’s your uncle.
The 2010s, when annual domestic box office topped $11 billion in five consecutive years, were especially easy to read. Opening weekend and total gross relative to budget were widely accepted evaluation tools.
Similarly, the early streaming gold rush revolved around relatively binary equations. Through mid-2022, Wall Street rewarded Netflix for consistent subscriber growth. The streamer’s quarterly gains were enthusiastically covered by the media like a draft list for the rapture (I was guilty as well). It was an easy and exciting narrative to peddle.
Yet neither framework applies as cleanly as it once did. As Wolk notes, “The industry has never had the patience to let a show or movie find an audience. They demand instant metrics.”
Studio success = lifecycle monetization
Home entertainment, such as VHS and DVD, long served as a financial safety net. This market’s collapse, coupled with Hollywood’s increasing fragmentation, has elevated the importance of multi-window success.
Digital and streaming claw back value in new ways. Sony’s Madame Webb flopped at the box office, but was the studio’s most-watched film on Netflix in 2024. F1: The Movie was a box office hit, but never made Nielsen’s Top 10 weekly streaming charts. Greenland 2: Migration struggled in theaters, yet ranks in the Top 10 for digital rental/purchase across Amazon, Apple TV, Google and Rakuten TV as of this writing, per FlixPatrol. Theatrical whiffs can become streaming hits. Streaming flops can be licensed externally. Around and around it goes as studios must evaluate a longer performance lifecycle to understand a given title’s contributions.
Avengers-level hits move the needle more than anything. But at the studio level, success often comes from maximizing potential across as many windows as possible rather than dominating just one.
Streaming success = retention
Streaming growth has slowed considerably in recent years. Plenty of streaming performance data exists. But context doesn’t.
Samba TV recently announced that the first episode of Apple’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles was watched by 1.2 million U.S. households, yet no timeframe was given, as Entertainment Strategy Guy pointed out. Netflix boasted in its latest Engagement Report that non-English programming accounts for more than a third of all global viewing. Yet viewership of top non-English shows pales in comparison to that of their English counterparts.
Data-driven arguments decrying failure and declaring success are easy to conjure. For example, the studio behind Show A announced that it drew 7.5 million viewers in its first five days, while Show B has never made a Nielsen streaming list in two seasons. Which would you rather have? Trick question, they’re both Daredevil: Born Again. The industry has yet to standardize a clean evaluation rubric.
Data from Digital i shows that around one-third of 2025 streaming viewership was driven by customers at a greater risk of canceling their subscriptions due to low usage. At the same time, only a minority of elite shows manage to grow their audience season over season. Title-level ratings are still massively important. Shows don’t get renewed if their viewership doesn’t justify the budget. But overall platform success has less to do with a single show’s performance and more with what viewers do after watching.
TVRev founder and media analyst Alan Wolk hits on what executives really want to see: “The most important metric is one that is notoriously hard to measure—attention. In the fragmented world of feudal media, it is not how many people see your series or movie, but how passionate they are about it.”
A small, intentional audience, even at a high risk of cancellation, can be more valuable under the right circumstances than a large audience of passive consumers. Macro success now orbits retention, churn reduction, and sustained engagement rather than raw reach and growth at all costs.
Exhibitor success = stability
Movie theater owners loved Barbenheimer. But you know what they love even more than one outsized weekend flanked by uncertainty? Consistency.
Exhibitors protect against the downside by programming for predictability. The opening weekend is still crucial. But according to Dergarabedian, it is not necessarily the most important metric.
“The most accurate measure of success is how long it stays in the top five or top ten, how it holds up week-over-week,” he said. “It’s a direct reflection of how the audience feels about the film.”
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania...We’ve seen huge openings followed by cataclysmic drops that cut box office legs and ruined narratives. Exhibitors will trade the volatility of massive potential for the guarantee of steady health. Once again, their definition of success differs from their partners.
The cost
Why does this lack of a uniform understanding even matter? It’s not just the cloudiness of post-performance analysis on our end. Without mutually agreed upon benchmarks of success, decision-making that powers the creative across development, budgeting, distribution and beyond can be misaligned.
Studios need titles with hit potential across every window. Exhibitors eye films that deliver guaranteed results. Streamers want to keep you in their digital ecosystems for as long as possible. Marketing departments try to whip viewers into an opening-weekend frenzy. Sony laments a box-office bomb, while Netflix may rejoice. Different departments are working toward different goals all at the same time. If no one can agree on what constitutes a success, all you may have is a recipe for failure.
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