Poop Cruise: How No. 2 Became #1 For Netflix
"What Can Brown Do For You?"
We can now add “If it smells it sells” alongside “If it bleeds it leads”.
As part of its current series of documentary movies called Trainwreck - about notable disastrous, events - on Tuesday June 24 Netflix released Poop Cruise that documents the infamous sailing of the Carnival Sunrise in 2013 when the power went out and all bathroom mechanisms stopped functioning .
The segment has averaged 11M viewers in its first ten days in the U.S. according to Luminate - making it #1 among single-episode documentaries on Netflix this year as illustrated in the chart below.
I have watched Poop Cruise and it is one of those stories that you don’t really want to know about but yet you can’t really resist since it didn’t happen to you. I do wish we got to hear Carnival’s POV of the incident but they either chose not to participate or were not asked to outside of one PR person.
Source: Luminate
If we probe a little deeper and look at viewing by day for the Trainwreck episodes that have been available 10 days or more this year we see a bit of a differentiation among the titles.
Poop Cruise was almost an immediate sensation, surging on day two (Wed 6/25) and sustaining higher interest than the peaks of other episodes for the remainder of that first week.
Astroworld was more of a slow build which never had a true peak but instead stayed consistent.
Mayor of Mayhem about Rob Ford - remember him? - never got off the ground.
The Titan submarine implosion and a destructive tornado in Missouri in 2011 generated middling interest with patterns similar to Poop Cruise but never as high.
Day #
Source: Luminate
The Poop Cruise is also a big do-do to-do worldwide. It has averaged 21.1M global viewers over the last two weeks, making it the #1 documentary movie on Netflix for that period and one of only three films above the 20M benchmark. Everything else is under 10M. This is detailed in the table below.
I do not think there is any major societal statements to make about the success of this film. The term “rubbernecking” was invented in the 1890s to describe the vehicles that took tourists around New York City and eventually evolved into the concept of staring at something out of morbid curiosity. It has been around for more than a century and is just part of human nature - not a comment on our times.
The success seen here is simply the result of a great title combined with a bizarre event that is the right combination of disgusting but not depressing given no one was severely injured.
