I had been hearing that The Book of Boba Fett was not doing as well in streaming numbers as The Walt Disney Company would like. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to get data out of Disney about Disney+ viewership numbers, and I didn’t want to do an article on low interest unless I had something to pin it on. After all, what if my sources were wrong on this one? Did I really want to jump out ahead of everyone only to be proven wrong in a couple of months? And what if The Book of Boba Fett has a phenomenal second episode that reverses everything? Nobody wants to write something that is outdated in a few days — these things live on forever through search engines.
The Book Of Boba Fett
Stranger In A Strange Land pic.twitter.com/em3bxmf2z1— 💠(@BobaThinker) January 1, 2022
Then an industry acquaintance of mine made a suggestion that I could no longer ignore. She said for me to do a Google Trends comparison of Spider-Man No Way Home and The Book of Boba Fett over the last seven days. I protested though… Spider-Man will have plenty of searches just from people trying to find tickets, while The Book of Boba Fett doesn’t have the same internet dynamic. “Add Matrix Resurrections,” she said.
Hmmm…
There’s a point, and it’s a good one. Matrix Resurrections is a massive flop; relatively nobody is trying to find tickets to see that movie in theaters. You would also think that it’s box office success correlates with HBO Max success. Disney, meanwhile, probably thought it had the hottest streaming content on the planet with The Book of Boba Fett. It had the hottest property with The Mandalorian, so why not with this spin-off, right? So good enough, I decided to see what the internet interest was with the three supposedly biggest media content out there.
And…
“Holy cow,” I couldn’t believe it. Even factoring in that The Matrix has some people somewhere searching for tickets, this was crazy. The middle-of-the-night drop-offs when nobody is searching anything still had The Matrix Resurrections outperforming The Book of Boba Fett by more than double. Can it be that The Book of Boba Fett is even less successful than my contacts were suggesting? Have people truly turned off the television when it comes to Disney+ and Star Wars content?
I still can’t believe what I’m seeing with Google Trends, and I still can’t endorse it. Surely there must be some mistake. So I tried one more way to see if I was missing something. I decided to put in Encanto. I know that it has been doing much better on Disney+ than at the box office, but nobody is buying tickets for it… so there aren’t any searches for that reason inflating the Google Trends statistics. And it’s also already out for more than a month, so people aren’t trying to look up its reviews. The buzz should have died down, and ultimately it’s a movie that lost money at the box office. Surely, The Book of Boba Fett will be trouncing Encanto.
Encanto v The Book of Boba Fett Results
It turned out that Encanto is beating The Book of Boba Fett in internet buzz by about 7.5x. That’s beyond anything that I would put out there unless it was staring me right in the face. It’s too ridiculous. And yet there it is. Now I’m left to wonder… is it real?
If these statistics and insider sources are right, The Book of Boba Fett is heading out of the gate as an abject failure of monumental proportions. It’s beyond The Matrix Resurrections for crying out loud. Can the series turn around? Absolutely. But if these first signs are correct (and I still can’t get myself to believe them), then this is horrific for the future of Star Wars as Disney currently has it conceived. I’m being honest, I’m flabbergasted. I thought it would come in lower than The Mandalorian, even half as popular, but this is just beyond anything I would have guessed.
So let me know what you think. Is this real? Are the views tanking this hard? What the heck is going on? And remember, I’m just as shocked as the next person on this one.
Update 2:39 PM EST, January 4th, 2022:
Samba TV has now confirmed that The Matrix Resurrections did beat The Book of Boba Fett. In their five-day premieres, The Matrix Resurrections gained 2.8 million views. The Book of Boba Fett only had 1.7 million.
