A cold one with 'The Boys'
From 'Reacher' to 'Fallout' to 'The Boys,' Amazon bets on Dude TV for Prime Video.
The Gist
From “Reacher” to “Fallout” to “The Boys,” Amazon’s content goals seem to revolve around one main thing: Dude TV.
The company’s biggest programs on Prime Video have attracted a predominantly male audience, something that might run counter to streaming in general.
For years, Prime Video suffered an identity crisis and its content spending has come under scrutiny. But Amazon seems to be carving out a space it’s eager to keep filling.
The boys are back in town.
Amazon dropped the first three episodes of the fourth season of its bloody, gory anti-superhero show “The Boys” last week, a couple months after its video-game adaptation “Fallout” debuted to roaring success. Amazon has said the latter is Prime Video’s second-biggest series ever, behind “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” Amazon also said “The Boys” season four viewership was up 21% compared to season three’s debut.
Both shows follow a string of recent success stories for Amazon’s Prime Video that have at least one thing in common: they exude a certain hyper masculinity, or at least, on paper, seem like the kinds of content that would stereotypically cater to a male demographic (no, I’m not going to get into the toxicity of some of those viewers, especially as it relates to “The Boys”; every season, it seems like we run into the same discussion of how conservatives think Homelander is the good guy, and every season people act as if it’s a new topic worthy of our time).
For years, Amazon’s content ambitions seemed to be suffering an identity crisis. Comedies like “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Fleabag” found critical success and racked up Emmy wins, but were never blockbusters. The company sought Oscar gold with the likes of “Sound of Metal,” “Beautiful Boy,” and “One Night in Miami…”, but was rarely successful. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Amazon’s new CEO Andy Jassy was taking a close look at how much the company was spending on content, after expensive misfires like “Citadel” and “The Peripheral.”
But if Amazon hasn’t solved its movie and TV identity crisis quite yet, it’s at least carved out a space for itself that it seems eager to keep filling.
Earlier this year, Amazon’s remake of “Road House,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a former UFC fighter, gained 50 million global viewers in its first two weekends, the company said. I take Amazon’s own stats with a grain of salt since it doesn’t specify what it counts as a view, but third-party data backs up that it was a hit. According to Nielsen, it was watched for 1.32 billion minutes in its first weekend in the US, which, assuming each household finished the movie, equates to 11 million views.
“The Terminal List,” starring Chris Pratt as a Navy SEAL investigating why his platoon was ambushed during a covert mission, gained 1.6 billion viewing minutes in its first full week of release in 2022. Then there’s “Jack Ryan” and “Reacher,” two shows about tough dudes named Jack. In January, “Reacher” concluded its second season on Prime Video, racking up 1.23 billion minutes the week its final episode dropped.
Don’t forget “Invincible,” the adult-friendly animated series based on the comic of the same name; fantasy shows like “Rings of Power” and “Wheel of Time”; and of course, Prime Video has its eye on live sports, with Thursday Night Football and an expected NBA deal.
None of this content explicitly screams “female oriented,” and that’s backed up by data. During the first week of “Fallout’s” release, its audience in the US was over 60% male, according to Nielsen, which says the show has a similar audience makeup as “The Boys.” Nielsen said that “Rings of Power” had a majority male audience, at least in the US. And 58% of that “Reacher” audience was male (TWO-THIRDS was over the age of 50. Pundits started labeling Prime Video as the destination for “dad TV.”)
Nielsen has suggested in the past that this runs counter to the vast majority of streaming content, implying that women typically make up more of the audience demographic. It’s not as if Amazon hasn’t tried to fill that void, though. Recently, its straight-to-Prime movie “The Idea of You,” a romantic comedy starring Anne Hathaway, premiered on Nielsen’s streaming charts with 528 million viewing minutes in its first weekend of release, which I estimate equates to around 4 million US viewers. Not bad for a streaming-first rom-com. And while the teen romance series “The Summer I Turned Pretty” hasn’t been a roaring hit, it at least caters to an audience Amazon’s other shows don’t, and inspired some virality on TikTok last year.
But Prime Video has yet to find something like Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” a blockbuster series whose audience is female-dominated. Programming like “Idea of You” and “Summer I Turned Pretty” seem more supplemental to what Amazon is really interested in: dude TV (not just dad TV, although there’s a Substack publication dedicated to that you can check out). There’s more on the way: for starters, a “God of War” series, based on the hit PlayStation game franchise, has been in the works since 2022.
Prime Video is the streaming service I’d most equate with cracking open a cold one with the boys (or “The Boys”). Is that simply a byproduct of Amazon’s emphasis on IP, as the company mines comic books and video games for content? It’s not like Netflix hasn’t been doing that, but Netflix, in its quest to be all TV for everyone, has been more broad. If Amazon is going to be more practical in what it spends money on, then it will look at what has worked. And right now, what’s working is the TV equivalent of the Schwarzenegger/Weathers “Predator” handshake meme.
Beyond the Traverse
👑 The Verge wrote about how the media bent the knee to “Game of Thrones” for nearly a decade (I was there for — and took part in — some of it)
I recently wrote about the legacy of the show five years after its divisive finale
🐉 Speaking of Thrones, “House of the Dragon” season two premiered with nearly 8 million viewers
🧛 The Hollywood Reporter dove into the bevy of problems facing Marvel’s “Blade” reboot, which just lost another director
💸 Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” finally found a North American distributor
Entertainment strategy guy covered this on 25 April, I would link it if I could . Bit more complicated but basically prime’s female targeted stuff has been a ratings wipeout.