Stranger Things outdid itself with the premiere of its final season over the Thanksgiving holiday.
The series recorded a whopping 8.46B viewing minutes in Season 5’s debut week, putting it miles ahead of basically anything else on streaming from November 24 to 30, according to Nielsen’s latest weekly report.
That’s the biggest weekly viewing total ever produced by a streaming title by well over 1B minutes, besting a record that was already held by Stranger Things after the series amassed 7.2B minutes when Season 4 premiered in 2022.
Nielsen doesn’t separate viewing totals by season, but the measurement company did say that 57% of that total came from the new Season 5 episodes and 59% of the viewership were adults 18-49.
It’s difficult to compare directly to last season, because Netflix released Season 5 on a Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET while Season 4 came on a Friday at 3 a.m. ET. Still, this tally is quite impressive considering that it only includes a little over four days of availability for the new episodes, especially considering that only four episodes dropped. Three years ago, seven episodes of Stranger Things 4 debuted at the same time, and the series didn’t reach that record-breaking weekly total until their first full week of availability from May 30 to June 5. Stranger Things tallied 5.14B minutes viewed in Season 4’s first three days.
Nielsen also says that the anticipation for the final season came weeks before the episodes premiered. Stranger Things resurfaced as the No. 3 title on Nielsen’s Top 10 the week of November 3 with 921M minutes viewed, taking over the No. 1 spot the following week with 1.3B. The week before Season 5 premiered, the series maintained its status at No. 1, totaling 1.6B minutes.
This sets the stage for a massive showing on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve as Netflix rolls out the final episodes of the series. While Nielsen reports are a month delayed, Netflix will report the totals for Season 5’s remaining episodes in the coming weeks, as it did for the first four episodes.
Despite the tough competition, Paramount+ managed to make some noise with the third episode of Landman Season 2, while Netflix’s The Beast in Me also broke through. Landman took No. 2 with 1.34B minutes viewed, and The Beast in Me came in third with 1.06B minutes viewed.
Funnily enough, The Beast in Me creator Howard Gordon’s 2011 series Homeland also surged onto the charts at No. 1 among acquired titles that week, raking in 855M minutes viewed after landing on Netflix.
As is typical, this is also when the classic holiday movies started making their annual appearance on the Nielsen rankings. The live action How the Grinch Stole Christmas led the way, jingling all the way to 669M minutes viewed. Home Alone earned 499M minutes viewed, and Elf came in at 397M minutes.
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