Kevin Smith’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation proved to be hugely polarizing when it hit Netflix in July, as evidenced by how the animated reboot of the beloved property has fared on Rotten Tomatoes.
Critics have awarded it an impressive 94% rating, but the audience score is way down at 39%, with disgruntled fans blasting the show at every opportunity. Smith has even taken to trolling his detractors online, which only served to enrage them even more, so it’d be fair to assume the review-bombing will begin all over again when the next batch of episodes arrive on November 23.
Netflix hasn’t publicly released any official viewership data detailing how Revelation fared with subscribers, but during his FatMan Beyond podcast, the actor and filmmaker teased that the latest reinvention of He-Man has been a major success for the platform.
“I can’t tell you anything for many reasons, I want to keep my jobs, but part of the process when you make a thing for Netflix where they have a call with you at like the, maybe it’s the 15 day mark or the 20 day mark, and the one month mark where they go through the metrics and the algorithm essentially, and tell you exactly how many people watched, how long they watched, which episodes they f*cking watched, give you a percentage of how many people are likely to come back. It was f*cking mind-bending, mind-bending, and again I can’t share it because it’s so proprietary and what not.
But I had a very simple question about like, in the movie world they make a movie for like $10 million and if it makes $10 million or more at the box office you’re like ‘All right, we got out money back’. I was like, ‘Do you have that at Netflix?’. They were like ‘Yes, a version of that,’ and based on that, they’re very happy. Again, I don’t wanna say sh*t because I’ll get in trouble, but it was f*cking fascinating, all the information they could give you about the show. Nothing that I’ve ever done before could I have that much data that soon in the process, it was flabbergasting to say the least. So yeah, based on that I can’t wait for the second half to drop man.”
The streaming service claims it’ll be more transparent with viewing data moving forward, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be getting a full breakdown for every single original project. That means we’ll have to take Smith’s word for now, but you can bet more than a few folks will raise a skeptical eyebrow given the divisive reception to Masters of the Universe: Revelation so far.