The Legend of Korra has followed in the footsteps of its predecessor
Avatar: The Last Airbender by instantly becoming the most popular title on Netflix in the U.S., according to the streaming service’s
public ranking system!
Netflix
added all four seasons of The Legend of Korra to its programming library in the early hours of Friday, August 14, and follows the streamer adding
Avatar: The Last Airbender in mid-May, where it also became the Number 1 title on the service within day, and going on to
smashed the record for being on Netflix’s daily Top 10 lists the most amount of times in a row.
Created and executive produced by Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the epic story of
The Legend of Korra, set in the world of
Avatar: The Last Airbender 70 years later, follows the journey of Avatar Korra, a 17-year-old girl striving to live up to the legacy of her predecessor Avatar Aang, while using her mastery of all four elements to confront political and spiritual unrest in a modernizing world.
Launched in April 2012, Nickelodeon’s
The Legend of Korra ran for 52 episodes over four seasons ("Books"). Its first season premiered as basic cable’s number one kid’s show and drew 3.8 million viewers per episode, the highest for an animated series that year.
The series is translated in more than 25 languages for Nickelodeon branded channels internationally. The property has translated into a successful ongoing graphic novel series written by TV series co-creator DiMartino. The first graphic novel storyline,
Legend of Korra: Turf Wars, has captured various Top 10 sales spots across children’s fiction, YA science fiction, and graphic novel categories since its debut in 2017.
The news comes as fans were dealt a massive blow last week when
Avatar co-creators DiMartino and Konietzko
revealed that they had departed Netflix's live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Although they didn't explicitly cite "creative differences" in their announcements, it seems like that was the reason that they left the production, which is still going ahead.
‘Lucifer’, Which Found Second Life On Netflix, Tops Nielsen Streaming Rankings
Lucifer, which was canceled by Fox two years ago and then given a second life by Netflix, has come out on top of Nielsen’s latest streaming rankings.
The show outdid Nickelodeon animated series The Legend of Korra, which streams on Netflix, logging just shy of 1.6 billion minutes of viewing in the U.S. from August 17-23.
As has been the case since Nielsen debuted the streaming rankings last month, all 10 top titles are on Netflix. Disney+ and Hulu have been added to the consideration set as of this week. Amazon programming is also tracked by Nielsen, which measures only the U.S. and therefore can’t definitively gauge performance across global platforms.
Directionally, though, the data is noteworthy. The August 17-23 data also shows more of a mix between library fare and newer originals.
One popular original is The Umbrella Academy, whose second season debuted in July, finished No. 3 for the week with about 1.09 billion minutes of viewing. Project Power, a Netflix original movie starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, finished No. 7 with 761 million. Teenage Bounty Hunters, an original comedy drama that debuted August 14, took the No. 10 spot.
Here are the full rankings, with episodes available on Netflix and total streaming minutes:
1. Lucifer (75) 1.591B
2. The Legend of Korra (52) 1.248B
3. The Umbrella Academy (20) 1.088B
4. The Office (192) 928M
5. Shameless (121) 802M
6. Grey’s Anatomy (361) 764M
7. Project Power (1) 761M
8. Criminal Minds (277) 713M
9. NCIS (353) 533M
10. Teenage Bounty Hunters (10) 422M
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Nielsen: Netflix Dominates Weekly SVOD Top 10 Chart
Driven by a mix of original and third-party licensed content, Netflix swept all 10 spots on Nielsen’s weekly SVOD programming chart from Aug. 17-23. The TV rating guru earlier this month began publishing a weekly Top 10 chart of most-streamed SVOD programming from just Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. It now also includes Disney+ and Hulu.
Netflix is led by “Lucifer,” the former Fox television series that found a second home on the SVOD pioneer. It bumped “The Umbrella Academy” into the No. 3 spot with nearly 1.6 billion minutes consumed over 75 episodes. The “Academy” has tracked about 1 billion minutes streamed over 20 episodes.
In the No. 2 spot was “The Legend of Korra,” (1.28 billion minutes over 52 episodes) an animated television series originally created for Nickelodeon in 2012. The next three spots were held by reruns of “The Office,” “Shameless” and “Greys Anatomy,” which tracked 928 minutes, 802 minutes and 764 minutes, respectively, across a combined 2,494 episodes.
In the seventh spot was Project Power (761 minutes), an original action/sci-fi/fantasy film starring Jamie Foxx as an ex-soldier, who mingles with a cop (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and teen (Dominique Fishback), in New Orleans to hunt for the source behind a dangerous new pill that grants users temporary superpowers.
The movie was followed by reruns of “Criminal Minds” (713 minutes/277 episodes) and “NCIS” (533 minutes/353 episodes) and “Teenage Bounty Hunters” (422 minutes/10 episodes), is a teen comedy-drama series created by Kathleen Jordan that premiered on Netflix on Aug. 14.
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The Future of the Mega-Popular ‘Avatar’ Franchise Is a Corporate Minefield
Fans were understandably upset last month when original creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko departed Netflix’s planned live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender over creative differences. In an open letter penned by DiMartino, however, he did write that they will continue to be involved in the Avatar universe, leaving the door open for rampant speculation and excitement among the growing fanbase.
Since the series and its sequel, The Legend of Korra, premiered on ViacomCBS’ Nickelodeon in 2005 and 2012, respectively, the animated franchise has become one of the most beloved TV creations in recent memory. But with Netflix knocked back to square one two years after first announcing the live-action series, the future of the franchise remains unclear. Unfortunately for fans clamoring for ViacomCBS to reclaim the rights and give it back to DiMartino and Konietzko, that doesn’t appear to be a realistic option.
“There is no obvious recourse,” Matthew V. Wilson, partner and co-chair of the Sports and Entertainment team at Arnall Golden Gregory LLP, where he specializes in entertainment law, told Observer. “My assumption is that Netflix acquired the exclusive right to create the adaptation coupled with a long-term right to monetize it. The precise scope of those rights is unclear, but I can’t imagine that Netflix would invest in the property without securing long-term exclusivity in distribution.”
The contemporary Netflix business model focuses on content creation and ownership, Wilson explained. While the original creators and owners likely retained a contractual right to participate, collaborate and/or consult with Netflix on its development, it’s safe to assume that Netflix possessed the final word on all creative decisions. That’s crucial, as the animated Avatar franchise has grown into one of Hollywood’s hottest pieces of intellectual property.
Reelgood—a streaming aggregator that tracks every TV show and movie available online for its 2 million-plus U.S. users—found that both The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra rank among the top 100 most-watched TV shows weekly, starting a month before they respectively were added to Netflix. Both titles earned a massive surge in popularity and streams once they were added to Netflix’s catalog.
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This is backed up by data from Parrot Analytics, a data firm that tracks TV popularity through social media, fan ratings and piracy to figure out who’s watching what. According to their data, The Last Airbender is the 63rd most in-demand digital series in the world over the last 60 days and Netflix’s fourth most in-demand title in the U.S. during that span. Over the last 30 days, The Legend of Korra is the 95th most in-demand digital title worldwide and Netflix’s seventh most in-demand title in the U.S. No matter which way you slice it, the two series are among the most popular both domestically and globally. This is particularly valuable for the future of Korra, which may have more corporate leeway than its sibling series.
“It seems that Korra is currently available on Netflix (and Amazon, Nick and ViacomCBS), which means the owners of the property granted non-exclusive licenses to multiple channels,” Wilson said. “I would imagine that also means that no such adaptation (derivative creation) right was granted to any third parties. So, presumably, Viacom retains the right to make a live-action adaptation.”
ViacomCBS plans to relaunch CBS All Access as super service Paramount+ in 2021 to directly compete with Netflix. In doing so, it would make sense for the company to retain as much of its popular IP as possible. A live-action adaptation or animated sequel to Korra is an obvious move to create attractive exclusive programming for the rebranded streamer. But each of those Avatar fans that Netflix and its 180 million-plus subscribers creates is a potential new ViacomCBS customer down the road. That’s the short-term play at least as ViacomCBS continues to bank lucrative licensing agreements with third parties. But long-term considerations in this age of fragmented SVOD competition will likely result in media silos keeping its coveted titles in-house, similar to how Marvel and Netflix dissolved their collaborative relationship in recent years.
“I would expect ViacomCBS will (1) not renew those third-party agreements after the existing terms expire, and (2) certainly not enter into new deals similar to the existing Netflix deal, which involve exclusivity and/or the right to make sequels, adaptations or other derivative properties,” Wilson said. “At least with respect to ViacomCBS (or any other property owner with its own distribution channel), Netflix will no longer have the leverage to demand the ‘enlarged scope’ deals of a few years ago.”
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Originally published: Monday, August 17, 2020.
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