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‘Queen’s Gambit’ Is Netflix’s Biggest Hit
Posted
November 30, 2020
Views
1,162
Likes
24
Comments
1
Engagement
2.15%
November 30, 2020
1,162
24
1
2.15%
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6:17Now PlayingNetflix says “The Queen’s Gambit” is the most-watched limited series in its history. Some 62 million households saw the show about a chess prodigy in its first four weeks of release.
"The Queen's Gambit" is the quintessential Netflix hit, a scripted drama created by an award-winning filmmaker about a flawed protagonist that explores a very specific corner of the world. It’s the type of hit Netflix excelled at in its earliest days, and had struggled to find at times in the past year or two.
The data point comes with a couple big caveats, but “The Queen’s Gambit” is a big hit by any measure. It ranks among the most-watched Netflix series ever, and has singlehandedly revitalized interest in chess. Sales of chess sets have increased 87% since the show’s debut, and sales of chess books have climbed 603%.
Yet "The Queen's Gambit" will also have slipped out of the cultural zeitgeist before the year is over. Netflix has created an ecosystem where there are new manias every couple weeks. “The Queen’s Gambit” supplanted “Emily in Paris” atop the Netflix charts, and will inevitably be overtaken by “The Crown,” or “Selena” or “Cobra Kai.”
These short bursts of interest represent a new era in media created by the abundance of the internet, according to media executive Tal Shachar:
“We only see more and bigger fads at faster paces. That we have more diversity than ever, and yet somehow less at any one point in time.”
Disney, Netflix’s biggest competitor, employs a different strategy, one that Shachar captures in the second part of this paragraph.
“It also means that increasingly the real value or trick won’t be in blowing up … but rather in holding on to the 15 seconds of fame once we have it.”
While Netflix holds onto attention with an unending barrage of new material, Disney creates a handful of big moments and franchises, some of which have remained in the culture for almost a century. Its streaming service has thrived with just one show, "The Mandalorian," which is itself based on a movie from 1977.
"The Mandalorian" is a lot more in-demand online than "The Queen's Gambit," per Parrot Analytics.
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