While it’s typical for Netflix’s original movies to come out of the gate with a lot of social buzz and high viewership numbers, acquisitions from third-party studios actually have the longest shelf life on the streamer, according to Ampere Analysis.

Publishing later today, a new study called Unpacking Netflix’s Evolving Movie Strategy has found a slower “decay” rate (e.g. views over time) in licensed movie titles compared to originals, when looking at the SVOD’s top-performing film debuts from the first half of 2023 through to the first half of 2024. While original film debuts averaged 30 million views, their performance a year later had slipped to roughly nine million. Conversely, acquired films averaged 21 million views initially, but were still pulling around 12 million a year down the road.

Movies licensed from other studios also seem to yield the best ROI. On average, Netflix’s spend-per-view for a film acquisition is US$0.12, which is lower than original features (US$0.13), licensed series (US$0.55) and original shows (US$0.68), as per the report.

Since the pandemic, the streamer has been shifting away from commissioning and towards licensing, with greenlights for movies and TV series dropping by 45% and 23% respectively between 2021 and 2024.

In the first half of last year, Ampere estimates that Netflix spent US$1.07 billion on acquiring movies—and this part of its library collectively generated around 9.23 billion total views in the same period. Meanwhile, original film spending was about 50% less at US$510 million, leading to roughly 3.98 billion views. 

Despite lower long-term appeal, original films do tend to rack up the highest overall viewing totals. In fact, they made up Ampere’s entire top 15 most-viewed movies list for the platform in the first half of 2024—they included live-action fantasy film Damsel in the top spot (144 million views) and the 2023 animated feature Leo (96 million views). Coming in at number 18, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the best-performing film acquisition with 80 million views, followed by Universal’s Minions at 73 million.

When releasing its biannual engagement reports, Netflix has consistently boasted the draw of its animated film catalogue, which is usually dominated by kids titles. And the sentiment is backed up by Ampere’s data, which shows that family-friendly films have the lowest rate of viewing decay and better longevity (average number of views per movie) than other content genres including horror, crime, drama and sci-fi/fantasy.

“Kids movies continue to maintain their appeal over time, garnering double the amount of views of other genres after a year,” the study notes. Among this content category’s most-viewed titles for H1 2023 to H1 2024 were The Boss Baby, Trolls and Shrek—all stemming from the library of NBCUniversal, which renewed its licensing agreement with Netflix last fall.