The journey to adapt Neil Gaiman's DC comic took 33 years, but The Sandman was definitely worth the wait. On August 5, 2022, comic enthusiasts lived to see its Netflix adaptation. Later, on November 3, the exciting news about the show's continuation was announced. And lately, Neil Gaiman revealed what to expect in the upcoming season.
2022-12-05
by Julia Knutelska and Sandra Brenda
The story was dubbed “unadaptable” to the screen, mainly due to its complexity. Still, the reason behind the stalling wasn’t as trivial as the studios’ reluctance or general lack of interest. In the mid ‘90s, The Sandman's potential adaptation aroused such great emotions that the King of Pop, Michael Jackson volunteered to portray Morpheus. So what could go wrong?
In an interview with the Rolling Stone magazine, Neil Gaiman revealed that some of the scenarios seemed unacceptable to him — e.g., a disturbing mechanical spiders predilection proposed by Warner Bros producer Jon Peters. As we read, Gaiman himself leaked the script to the public eye, then led to the review published by Ain’t It Cool News, which ultimately ridiculed the idea, and stopped the project from happening.
Finally in June 2019, Netflix signed the comic adaptation deal and started filming in October 2020. Two years later, the first season of The Sandman hit the platform. The series turned out to be a global success and stayed in Netflix's Global Top 10 TV Series for seven consecutive weeks.
But was it enough for Netflix to notice its potential for renewal? Let’s take a closer look at The Sandman’s viewership numbers.The Sandman’s Netflix Viewers
In this article, we are going to focus on three markets: the United States — the center of the entertainment universe, the United Kingdom as the domestic market of the franchise, and Brazil, the first country in the world to discover Neil Gaiman’s comic.
We started by summarizing the series’ presence in the Top 10 Series rankings in the selected countries. We used two of our Showlabls metrics: Total Hours Watched (THW), and Unique Viewers (UV), to determine The Sandman’s popularity.
Here we can see that, in terms of Unique Viewers, The Sandman remained at the top for five consecutive weeks in the United States. The audiences in the United Kingdom and Brazil tuned in to watch the adaptation for an additional week. Interestingly, the trend was also visible on a daily basis. In each of the analyzed markets, The Sandman spent most of its first 60 days in the Top 30 Daily Titles. It only shows that the series kept a constant and numerous audience on the platform.
Now let’s check the day-by-day viewership numbers. By observing the daily Unique Viewers starting from August, 5, to the end of September 2022, we noticed a similar trend in each country — a great peak immediately after the release date, then the all-time-high on its third day on the platform, followed by a long tail of gradual loss of interest.
We can also pinpoint the release of the special 11th episode, Dream of a Thousand Cats/Calliope, by looking at the chart. In the US and Brazil, we notice a significant viewership increase around August 19, 2022. At the same time, the surprise premiere appeared far less impressive for viewers in the United Kingdom.
Comparing daily trends in relative audience size (Share of Viewing), we see that The Sandman reached the highest share each day in Brazil, with its peak of 9.20% SoV on August 7, 2022. The United Kingdom fell in the middle, with the SoV at the level of 6.74% on the same day. The least engaged were Americans (5.39% SoV). We can also notice that the surprise release of the bonus episode re-engaged a significant part of the audience.
Hourly viewer distribution charts, based on viewers’ local time, show how different the consumption of The Sandman is in each of the analyzed markets. For example, UK viewership distribution is characterized by a sharp peak between 7 pm – 11 pm, with a low viewer presence during the day. In Brazil, despite a similar prime time, The Sandman was also being watched in the afternoon, when the first noticeable peak happened.
Now we know that The Sandman had a strong start on Netflix, but how engaged were the series’ viewers? To answer this question, let’s take a look at the series’ Completion Rate.
The Brazilian audience was less likely to drop the series than the viewers in the United States and the United Kingdom. Including the bonus episode, more than a quarter (28%) of all viewers who watched the first episode of The Sandman completed the whole series. At the same time, it was around 24% and 21% for British and American Netflix users, respectively.
Moreover, up to the third episode, the UK and US viewerships seem to go head-to-head in terms of viewers percentage completion rate. However, from the fourth episode onwards, Americans seem to lose their interest in the series more quickly.
Each series’ first episode is a key to its fate — viewers decide whether to give it a chance and, if so, whether to stay for more. Thus the greatest audience drop between the first and the second episode is not surprising.
Almost 31% of Americans dropped The Sandman after its pilot. At the same time, a little more than 70% of viewers in the United Kingdom watched the first two episodes. Among those three markets, Brazilians were the most eager to continue watching, with a 74% completion rate for the first two episodes.
Although we can’t think of why some of the viewers left, we can track exactly when the churn happened. The charts below show the audience's presence during the first episode, Sleep of the Just, along the content progress bar.
On the left you can see the percentage of all viewers watching The Sandman’s pilot, and on the right — the presence percentage of those who have not (yet) continued their journey with the series after the first episode. The viewers' churn happened gradually and can’t be associated with any particular scene. Unsurprisingly, the biggest audience drop was right before the ending credits.
We can only assume that these viewers didn't know about Dave McKean's (the original comic book cover artist) collaboration with Netflix which resulted in a separate, animated end-credits sequence for each episode, that takes up around 8% of the episode's time. Our data shows that barely 5% of the viewers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil did not press the skip button.
Now let’s compare the Unique Viewers in each country before and after the second season’s announcement:
There is no clear correlation between the news and the series’ viewership. The title follows a typical pattern for the majority of content on Netflix: a step-by-step burnout.
Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman character, Lucifer, was an inspiration for creating FOX’s Lucifer, portrayed by Tom Ellis. Did The Sandman Netflix release have any impact on Lucifer’s viewing? Let’s find out by looking at the Unique Viewers numbers:
We can spot an increase of Lucifer’s Unique Viewers in the United States between June 10, and August 5, 2022 (The Sandman’s release date). At the same time, there were no visible peaks in the United Kingdom and a little increase in Brazil.
Let’s dig a bit deeper. The chart below shows Lucifer’s average weekly audience three months before and after The Sandman premiere. Per our data, there was a slight shift in the UV numbers in each market. In the United States and Brazil, we see an increase of more than 111K UV in the USA, and around 6.6K UV in Brazil.
In the United Kingdom, however, the only peak we can observe happened around May 29, 2022, and was most likely due to Netflix’s UK launch of Lucifer's seasons 1-3.
Next, we wanted to know how long it took the audiences in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil to finish the season.
On average, the viewers from all three countries spent around two weeks watching all 11 episodes. Since the bonus episode 11 was released exactly two weeks after the first 10 launched on the platform, we also calculated a “typical” completion time, by excluding the special episode from the timeframe.
Here we see that the American and the British audiences were the keenest on binge-watching, consuming all 10 episodes in about 6 days. Brazilians needed roughly one day more to complete the series.
But did The Sandman pull the absent audience back to Netflix? We asked: which season of all TV series reactivated the most users, previously inactive for at least 60 days? Our reports show that between August 5, 2022, and October 20, 2022, The Sandman was Brazilians' number one reason to reactivate.
In the United Kingdom, the show only lost to the thrilling story of one of America's most notorious serial killers, Dahmer, released on Netflix in late September. In the United States, The Sandman took third place, right behind Dahmer and the first season of Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things — still gaining new viewers six years after its premiere.
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Will the second season of The Sandman spark even more of the viewers’ interest? Will the continuation elevate the series to the level of perennial hits like Stranger Things? Following the original comic character, John Constantine's advice: "You can know anything. It's all there. You just have to find it" we will be combing through our Showlabs data again, searching for the answers.
— Stay tuned!
PlumResearch specializes in precise and granular data measurement from streaming platforms. It has the world’s largest online audience panel and provides its clients with data from over 75 markets worldwide.
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