King Charles defiant amid new Harry & Meghan Netflix blow
King Charles III kept a stiff upper lip as Netflix announced a stunning win for Harry & Meghan in an unexpected new blow to the Royal family.
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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle scored a massive win in their battle against the Royal Family, with their Netflix series fuelling massive growth for the US streaming giant.
Despite mixed reviews driving down the personal popularity of the Duke and Duchess, Netflix announced Harry & Meghan is their second most successful series in the “documentary” category ever, helping lure 230 million new subscribers to the service in 2022.
The rating success and the inevitable appetite from Netflix for more Sussex content is a major headache for King Charles III, who has been hoping for a ceasefire in the family drama before his coronation in May.
The Monarch stepped out in Manchester, northwest England, to visit the Kellogg’s factory, laughing with cereal workers over a box of royal Cornflakes.
Before the debut of Harry & Meghan, behind-the-scenes turmoil led to Netflix warning the couple their massive contract could be dropped if serries flopped among viewers, according to a Netflix insider.
But instead of losing their reported USD 100 million ($A145m) at any time and receiving a greatly reduced “kill fee”, Netflix is now more likely to green light future projects from the couple thanks to its runaway success.
Netflix revealed it gained 7.7 million new subscribers during its fourth-quarter earnings, buoyed by the first chapter of Harry & Meghan launching on December 8 and the second chapter launching three weeks later.
Beating subscriber expectations by more than two million, and announcing revenue of $US7.85 billion ($A11.3bn) in the quarter, sent Netflix shares up by more than six per cent.
While Netflix does not announce viewership statistics, they said the first three episodes took the record for its biggest debut in the documentary category with 81.6 million hours watched in the first four days. Or about 28 million households in the first week.
The October-December quarter boon stood in stark contrast to the rest of Netflix’s year, with the company saying in a statement “2022 was a tough year, with a bumpy start but a brighter finish”.
“We believe we have a clear path to re-accelerate our revenue growth: continuing to improve all aspects of Netflix, launching paid sharing and building our ads offering. As always, our north stars remain pleasing our members and building even greater profitability over time.”
The clear path is now more likely to run through Montecito in California, especially with Prince Harry’s memoir Spare also shattering sales records with a whopping 1.43 million copies of the English-language edition sold on its first day in the UK, the US and Canada.
Publisher Penguin Random House said the autobiography smashed its sales records, outstripping the previous nonfiction first-day record holder, Barack Obama. The former US president’s “A Promised Land” sold 887,000 copies on its first day in 2020. Michelle Obama’s book, Becoming, sold 715,000 copies in 2018.
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