‘Stranger Things’ Sets U.S. Streaming Record, Nielsen Says; ‘Obi-Wan’, ‘The Boys’ & ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Are Far Behind But Crack Weekly Top 10
01.07.2022 - 22:11
/ deadline.com
The first batch of Season 4 episodes from Netflix juggernaut Stranger Things propelled the series to an all-time record for U.S. streaming in a single week, Nielsen said.
All 32 episodes of the show available to that point racked up 7.2 billion minutes of streaming from May 30 to June 5. That’s the most of any title since Nielsen began tracking streaming in 2020.
The Season 4 episodes premiered on May 27, as did Star Wars spinoff Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Obi-Wan had already been identified as a breakthrough original along with Stranger Things in a stand-alone Nielsen report last month. By the week of May 30 to June 5, the show had three episodes available due to Disney’s gradual, non-binge release model. The show’s audience was two-thirds male, Nielsen said, making it the most male-skewing title of the week. Age-wise, it was fairly evenly split across the 18-34, 35-49 and 50-64-year-old groups.
The Boys on Prime Video finished within a whisker of Obi-Wan with 949 million minutes of viewing. Following it in the No. 5 slot, was Harry Potter film franchise entry Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore on HBO Max with 758M minutes. Apart from a one-off report on Wonder Woman 1984 in December 2020, this week marked the kickoff to Warner Bros Discovery’s HBO Max being officially tracked by Nielsen.
Along with HBO Max, Nielsen measures viewing only via a TV screen for Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video, Apple TV+, Hulu and Disney+. (Mobile viewing is not counted.) The company typically releases weekly numbers on Thursdays, but the latest numbers were held up for eight extra days, with Nielsen attributing the delay to what it called “product enhancements.”
The weekly chart for May 23 to 29 also had Stranger Things dominating, with 5.141 billion