Prince Harry’s ‘Heart of Invictus’ Struggles to Attract Viewers

Prince Harry’s Heart of Invictus docuseries wasn’t exactly a smashing success for Netflix. New viewership data reveals that relatively few people bothered to watch the show, which spotlights the stories of wounded veterans training for the 2022 Invictus Games.

Heart of Invictus dropped on Netflix on August 30, 2023. The show from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Archewell Productions received a favorable response from critics, with an 86% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the average Netflix subscriber wasn’t enthralled, and the series failed to crack the streamer’s Top 10 list of most-watched shows in the days after its release.

Now, Netflix has revealed more details about how many people watched Heart of Invictus, and it’s not pretty. The show racked up just 300,000 views in months following its late-August release, according to What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report, which captures viewership data from July to December 2023.

Those numbers put Heart of Invictus on par with the first season of Tidying Up With Marie Kondo (released in January 2019) and season 1 of Iron Chef: Brazil (released in August 2022). It was one of Netflix’s least that-watched new shows in the second half of 2023. The most-watched shows during that time period included One Piece Season 1 (71.6 million views), Dear Child (52.5 million views), and Who Is Erin Carter? (50.1 million views), and Lupin: Part 3 (49.7 million views).

The lackluster response to Heart of Invictus won’t be surprising to some royal experts, who predicted it would not perform well. “This is likely to be a constructive and interesting documentary. It is, however, difficult to see it attracting a large audience,” Richard Fitzwilliams, a royal commentator and expert, told Newsweek.

“After their failure at Spotify and the inability of their previous Netflix project Live to Lead to appeal to audiences, they need good ratings, but this will also have a special cachet as it is so personal to Harry,” he added.

Netflix subscribers weren’t totally disinterested in content connected to Prince Harry. Harry & Meghan, a docuseries exploring his life with his wife Meghan Markle, had about 1.9 million views in the second half of 2023. That limited series was a massive hit when it was released in December 2022. The first three episodes had 28 million views in their first four days of release, Netflix shared.

The Crown Season 6 was also popular with Netflix viewers. The final installment of the dramatized take on the British royal family was released in November 2023 and had 25.2 million views. Luther Ford played a teenage version of Prince Harry in the show.

Harry and Meghan have two more shows in the works at Netflix. One will celebrate “the joys of cooking, gardening, entertaining, and friendship” and will be curated by Meghan. The second will offer “unprecedented access to the world of professional polo, shot primarily at the US Open Polo Championship in Wellington, Florida.” No release dates have been announced.