The Walt Disney Company has a huge problem on their hands. Bluey is now, hands-down, more popular than Star Wars and Marvel combined… and Disney doesn’t own Bluey. They license the cartoon dogs from the BBC!
For years, the conventional wisdom around Disney+ has been simple: Marvel and Star Wars are the prestige engines that sell the service. Nielsen’s historical streaming data increasingly point to a different answer. In the United States, Bluey has become a juggernaut on Disney+, culminating in 55.62 billion viewing minutes in 2024, which made it not just Disney+’s biggest title, but Nielsen’s top overall streaming title of the year across all services and categories.
What makes that especially striking is the growth curve. Nielsen-reported year-end data show Bluey at 21.1 billion viewing minutes in 2022, then 43.9 billion in 2023, then 55.62 billion in 2024. That is not a one-off spike. It is a multi-year pattern of accelerating dominance, and it reflects the kind of repeat-viewing behavior that turns a show from a hit into platform infrastructure.
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To be precise, the strongest version of the “Bluey is bigger than Marvel and Star Wars combined” argument is not true across the entire Disney+ era if we look at the early years. Publicly reported Nielsen figures discussed in 2022 showed The Mandalorian at 14.5 billion viewing minutes in 2021, Loki at 5.23 billion, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier at 4.15 billion, Hawkeye at 3.46 billion, and The Book of Boba Fett at 4.4 billion.
Just those five titles alone total roughly 31.74 billion minutes, and that excludes other Marvel and Star Wars entries. So the combined franchises were still operating at enormous scale then.
But the trajectory since then is where the story changes. Nielsen highlighted Obi-Wan Kenobi hitting about 1 billion viewing minutes in its premiere frame in 2022, which was a major launch for Disney+. In 2023, Ahsoka premiered with 829 million viewing minutes, while Loki season 2 accumulated about 3.39 billion minutes over its six-week run. Those are respectable franchise-event numbers. They are also nowhere near the annual totals Bluey was posting as a catalog title, first at 21.1 billion in 2022 and then at 43.9 billion in 2023.
Ironheart in the trailer for Ironheart – YouTube, Marvel Entertainment
By 2024, the gap looks even more dramatic. Nielsen’s ARTEY awards put Bluey at 55.62 billion minutes, while the top streaming original series overall for the year, Netflix’s Bridgerton, posted 21.42 billion. In other words, Bluey was operating at more than double the annual watch time of the biggest original series in streaming. Since no Marvel or Star Wars Disney+ title appeared anywhere near that level in Nielsen’s public year-end awards summary, the burden of proof has flipped. The franchises may still dominate headlines, but Bluey is dominating actual time spent watching.
There is another important clue in the movie data. Nielsen’s Disney+ movie champions in recent years have been family rewatch machines like Encanto and Moana, not Marvel or Star Wars films. Encanto led 2022’s movie viewing with 27.4 billion minutes, Moana reached 11.6 billion in 2023, and then 13.03 billion in 2024. That suggests Disney+ is at its strongest when it serves as a repeat-use family platform rather than only as a home for big franchise appointment viewing. Bluey fits that pattern perfectly.
Vernestra Rwoh (Rebecca Henderson) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, season one, exclusively on Disney+. ©.
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So the careful conclusion is this: if the claim is that Bluey has always been more popular than Marvel and Star Wars combined on Disney+, Nielsen’s historical record does not support that. But if the claim is that Bluey has become more popular than Marvel and Star Wars combined in Disney+’s more recent phase, especially by 2024, that argument is very plausible and may well be true. The data show Marvel and Star Wars generating spikes. Bluey generates gravity. And on a streaming platform, gravity is often worth more.
Bluey and Chucky watch Dad, Pat and Lucky celebrate their rugby team scoring! – Disney Plus
And if we’re measuring by last year and the data we have from 2026, look out. It turns out that Bluey likely reigns supreme. Unfortunately for Disney, no matter how it performs, they don’t own Bluey and they don’t control it either. But actually… maybe that’s why it’s performing the way it is after all?
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