Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, where it seems like everyone is checking out for the holidays a little early (yes, I’m looking at you).

🚨🚨P.S.A.: I’ll be writing a slightly lighter What I’m Hearing and doing pods throughout the holidays (except Christmas Eve, which is a Sunday), with our contributors helping out, too. Look out for the Hero and Villain of the year, my 2024 predictions, and maybe a mailbag. Send me questions.

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Let’s begin…

• Ike’s pity party adds one: Longtime Disney watchers will be excused if they LOL’d when Jay Rasulo was revealed as the second wannabe board member put forward today by Nelson Peltz, alongside Peltz himself. Rasulo, Disney’s former C.F.O., was famously passed over by Bob Iger for the C.O.O. job despite being the favored choice of none other than… Ike Perlmutter, who was running Marvel and loved his frugality. That was actually the beginning of the end of Ike’s relationship with Iger. Now Ike is shadow-puppeting his West Palm bro Peltz in this proxy fight and, lo and behold, Rasulo appears to declare, “The Disney I know and love has lost its way.” Scorned former employees do tend to think that way.

• Bold and the un-beautiful: A few people asked me for the full complaint filed against A3 Artists Agency owner and alleged “sex pest” Adam Bold that I mentioned Sunday, so here it is. Someone else asked if the lawsuit will hold up the Gersh Agency’s purchase of parts of the A3 business. That deal is basically done, according to insiders, though I’m guessing Gersh would like Bold to indemnify them against any claims by A3 leaders Brian Cho and Robert Attermann. What a mess.

• Box office over/under: It’s Wonka weekend! I know I’ve crapped on this movie since its bad footage appeared at CinemaCon 2022. But I’m actually gonna take the over on the $40 million tracking. Women, young kids, and sugar fiends are all powerful demos.

Let’s drink it all in: The report contains “hours watched” for more than 18,000 titles, 99 percent of everything on the streamer between January and June 2023. Originals, licensed titles, foreign-language shows, sports docs, K-dramas, telenovelas, Sandler movies, Sandler movies with David Spade, good stuff, bad stuff, really bad stuff, and He’s All That—everything’s there on one Excel spreadsheet.

The numbers aren’t perfect, of course. Content with longer runtimes is favored, obviously, and it’s only a six-month snapshot, so the rankings heavily benefit what debuted during that period. Also, perennial favorites like the Universal animated films aren’t valued as highly since they aren’t new to the platform. But these are real, honest-to-god ratings of what people are watching on Netflix. No streamer has ever been this transparent, and it’s about 10 years overdue.

In its announcement, Netflix warned everyone not to compare titles against each other, which of course everyone around town has been doing anyway. Because people are terrible, I got a few suggestions to check out how poorly so-and-so’s show performed. One agent told me a client has already lobbed an Anything we can do here? call to his lawyer when he saw how high a show he wrote appeared on this list. It’s probably too early for any of that. But once we see a few of these data reports, the apples-to-apples comparisons of when a show dropped and its ratings in a six-month window will be very interesting. This is a potential game-changer.

My Puck colleague Julia Alexander has been poring over the data, itself, and she’s got some smart initial thoughts here. Tonight, I’m more interested in why this is happening, and the implications. To explain the about-face, Sarandos came on The Town right after the announcement, and he framed the shift as a way to alleviate bad vibes from talent. “It was starting to feel like grounds for mistrust,” he told me of the data imbalance between creators and the executives working with the talent. And, basically, the “competitive” issues are less of a problem these days. After all, Netflix has pulled away in the streaming wars, so the company didn’t need to be so secretive anymore.

I asked Jessica Reif Ehrlich, the BofA Securities analyst, what she thought was really behind the data dump. “I think, first, it’s related to advertising,” she told me. “Their engagement is just head-and-shoulders above the rest.” That’s true. Netflix needs the ad tier to drive its next stage of growth, as do all streamers. For instance, engagement on Disney+ is atrocious, part of the reason that C.E.O. Bob Iger can’t combine D+ fast enough with Hulu, which has much higher engagement and a great ad business. And while Netflix has partnered with Nielsen to provide advertisers with audited third-party data (the new Netflix numbers are not audited), releasing this level of consumption data publicly allows it to circulate in the community and get reported by the media. That will help Netflix as it grows its ad tier, which still only accounts for 15 million of its 247 million members worldwide.

“Second,” Ehrlich continued, “this is likely designed to help force other streamers to release more data.” And, I’d add, to shame them if they don’t. In the current talent ecosystem, where Amazon and Apple are still writing massive checks, and where HBO/Max maintains its halo of quality, Netflix wants to be the service that can pay market rates and make good shows and deliver viewership unlike any of those other platforms. In fact, I wonder if Netflix is doing this because it believes it should pay less for projects because it is the one platform that can reliably catapult a show—and, therefore, a star or director or writer—to a massive global audience. Remember, Suits had been available not just on Peacock but on Prime Video, where it was watched by a tiny fraction of the Netflix viewership. We’re about to see what Netflix can do for Girls5eva, the Tina Fey-produced comedy that is moving from Peacock to Netflix for its third season in March. Presumably, all three seasons will take off, even though the first two are available now on Peacock.

Put The Night Agent or Ginny & Georgia on any of the other services and they’d probably do okay. On Netflix, they delivered nearly 2 billion hours viewed from January to June. Why, in the putative Netflix mental calculus, should a platform with its enormous reach be stuck in ridiculous bidding wars with, say, Apple—which has only 40 million users worldwide and terrible engagement—where shows won’t find nearly the same sort of audience or fanfare?

It’s important to remember that streaming is not like television: If you sold a show to a little-watched cable network like AMC in the mid-2000s, you could still enjoy a breakout like Mad Men or The Walking Dead or Breaking Bad because at least everyone with a basic cable subscription had access to the network. These Netflix numbers reinforce that, in streaming, there’s Netflix, and then there’s everyone else. And if you’ve got a show on a platform that people don’t pay for, there’s sooo little discovery. As Ehrlich put it to me, “Netflix is like the entire cable bundle in one place.” So, Ted is basically saying: Let’s stop pretending these other platforms are even playing the same game. And if creators and the media have this information thrown at them, and with regularity, Netflix might end up in a better bargaining position.

Ted called that point “cynical” when I mentioned it to him on The Town. He called streaming “an incredibly competitive environment.” Maybe he’s right, and it’s not like Hulu or Prime Video have zero audience; they create hits on their own terms, and regularly score big market share on Nielsen’s monthly guide. But Netflix is also publicly airing the flops, or more interestingly, the middling titles, things that might be prestigious but don’t attract eyeballs. As Joe Adalian of Vulture noted today, those numbers can “adjust expectations” for talent. “Plus,” he wrote, “it could come in handy when trying to explain why shows people loved got the ax after a season or two.” It’s all just a gigantic flex from a company that has spent most of this year posing like Hans and Frans. Put simply, the competitive benefits of radical transparency now outweigh the benefits of hoarding all that data.

Also, talent might be more aggressive in demanding this stuff now, though so many factors go into why a show sells to one outlet over another. Maybe this data reinforces Netflix as the place for a show to have a chance to be truly big, and creators can use Netflix’s transparency to get more out of, say, Amazon or Apple. But a) I don’t think the top executives at those companies care at all what Hollywood people think of them, and b) their answer to such transparency queries might be a version of the old Don Draper line to Peggy: That’s what the money’s for.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or someone to put on the naughty list? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.