When Project Hail Mary Hit #1, The Martian Wasn’t Streaming: Content Intelligence Takeaways for Streaming Marketers

Chart titled "Missed Opportunities" comparing two movies side by side. Left: Project Hail Mary poster, labeled "#1 Box Office," with screenwriter Drew Goddard and book author Andy Weir listed. Right: The Martian poster, labeled "Not Streaming." Reelgood logo and source line "Source: Reelgood catalog data, March 2026" at the bottom.

When Project Hail Mary hit theaters and climbed to the top of the box office, the obvious follow-up watch was The Martian. Same author, Andy Weir. Same kind of stranded-astronaut, science-under-pressure story. But Houston had a problem; it wasn’t streaming anywhere. That gap, and how often it repeats across the industry, was the center of…

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How Alike Are UK Streaming Platforms? Genre vs. Tag Similarity Compared

Scatter chart titled "Every UK Streaming Platform Has a Different Content Personality" plotting genre variety on the vertical axis against narrative tag variety on the horizontal axis for select streaming platforms in the UK. The vertical axis runs from Genre Specialist at the bottom to Genre Generalist at the top. The horizontal axis runs from Theme Specialist on the left to Theme Generalist on the right. Four quadrants are labelled Diverse Curators, Everything Everywhere, Focused Storytellers, and Genre Encyclopedias. In the Diverse Curators quadrant: Channel 5 and BBC iPlayer. In the Everything Everywhere quadrant: ITVX, Prime Video, and NOW. Near the centre on the theme specialist side: Disney+ and Netflix. In the Genre Encyclopedias quadrant: Paramount+ and HBO Max. In the Focused Storytellers quadrant: Channel 4 and U. Footnote reads that the chart is based on distribution of top-3 genres and top-4 tags per title, including movies and TV series, from the Reelgood content streaming dataset as of July 2026.

A crime drama about a small-town investigation and a crime drama about corporate corruption share a genre and almost nothing else. Tags are where that difference lives, and it’s why genre-only comparisons miss so much of what’s actually distinctive about a catalogue. Reelgood tracks real-time and historical streaming availability and metadata across most platforms in…

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What Streaming Buyers Are Actually Acquiring: How to Read Catalog Changes for Licensing and Sales

Reelgood bar chart of the largest year-over-year genre changes across major streaming catalogs, 2025 to 2026, showing gains and declines by service.

Over the past few months I have sat in on a string of conversations with content strategy, acquisition, and sales leaders at production companies and independent distributors. The companies could not have been more different: a Canadian studio selling scripted series into Europe, a mid-size studio building a slate for underrepresented audiences, an indie distributor…

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The Measurement Gap: What Most Streaming Services Are Still Missing

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Next in our series on the Reelgood team’s 2026 Streaming Industry Predictions. Key Takeaways Most streaming services lack real-time visibility into competitors’ and partners’ catalogs, creating dangerous blind spots in acquisition, renewal, and licensing compliance decisions. Per-title content ROI remains one of streaming’s hardest unsolved measurement problems. Assigning meaningful monetary value to content on a…

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