Prime Video has another crime thriller to delve into this week. Butterfly drops on Wednesday, Aug. 13, and usually, I’d be more than excited about another thriller airing.
The problem is that all six episodes of the series are dropping at once. Now, I know there are a lot of people out there who love binge-watches, but I’m not one of them. I find them stressful to get through all the episodes at once to avoid spoilers, and I just don’t like feeling like I need to watch all episodes at once.
Let’s face it; we feel that need. We know the streamers want us to binge-watch to prove that we like the series, and if we don’t, there’s always a risk a show will be canceled. I think Butterfly dropping all six episodes at once is even worse for it than just my normal gripes about binge-watches.
Prime Video has a bad experience with binge-watch shows
I fear that Butterfly will go the way of a lot of other shows on Prime Video that dropped as binge-watches. In recent years, we’ve had the likes of The Wilds, The Horror of Dolores Roach, and With Love all dropping their episodes at once. They were all abruptly canceled.
While there’s no guarantee that a weekly-released show will be renewed (just look at I Know What You Did Last Summer), the binge-watch shows have a lot more riding on them. At least with a show that drops episodes each week, there is a chance that people will find it a week or two later and then quickly catch up. With then just a few episodes to binge and the promise of more episodes, they’re likely to tune in.
If you find out three or four weeks later that a show dropped as a binge, will it really become a priority? Probably not, especially when people know that only the first week or so after release counts for streaming networks.
It doesn’t help that there hasn’t been that much in the way of promotion for Butterfly. I forgot all about it until recently, because Prime Video has a history of poorly promoting its own content. It’s not alone in that, as Netflix also has a major issue with promoting anything other than Stranger Things and other big releases.
Butterfly is going up against a lot of other Prime Video content
There’s already a lot going on with Prime Video right now. There are weekly drops of Countdown and The Summer I Turned Pretty. Adding another show in as a binge-watch could be a bit much for some. If it was just an episode a week, it would work better.
I know the Butterfly viewers aren’t likely to also watch The Summer I Turned Pretty, but they are likely to watch Countdown. Those two shows are in the same genre.
On top of that, it’s the middle of the week. A lot of people are going to wait until the weekend to binge-watch, and then that could lead to people forgetting all about it as summer plans pick up again.
I will always be on the side of weekly releases, but I do think Prime Video is thinking short-term with Butterfly. The decision to release it as a binge-watch is a bad idea for its future.
Butterfly drops in full on Wednesday, Aug. 13 on Prime Video.
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