Given that The Mandalorian Season 3 was not off to a great start after the first episode, and took a nosedive after the third, this is not looking good for what was Disney’s flagship streaming show.
At the beginning of Disney+ there was one show that drove meteoric viewership and rocketed Disney’s subscribers to numbers they never thought possible. The Mandalorian not only gave Star Wars fans hope that there was an alternative to the sequel trilogy but it also managed to scrape its way to the very top of all streaming content on any platform by the end of its first season. When Luke Skywalker showed up, fans cried, Lucasfilm executives mocked them, and The Mandalorian took its place as the number one show on any streaming platform, ousting Netflix and defeating The Office for the very first time.
But scandals and determinations to go back to a sad-sack Luke have saddled The Mandalorian. Bad shows in-between and baffling narrative decisions have not helped.
And so it is that The Mandalorian, in its debut Season Three episode, was not even able to beat “The Last of Us” in the Nielsen ratings. Despite TLoU having longer episodes, The Mandalorian should have easily cruised past given that his was the opening from a Mandalorian on a multi-year hiatus. Normally, that results in a binge watching bounce like what we saw with Stranger Things’ latest season debut. For The Mandalorian, no such bounce exists. And with that, it’s time to say that the last Star Wars content with cultural impact is no longer in that same category.
Here are the numbers:
Position, Platform, Title, Episodes, Minutes Watched (in millions)
| 1 | Netflix | Outer Banks | 30 | 2,214 |
| 2 | Netflix | Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal | 3 | 1,084 |
| 3 | HBO Max | The Last Of Us | 8 | 1,011 |
| 4 | Netflix / Paramount+ | NCIS | 339 | 826 |
| 5 | Disney+ | The Mandalorian | 17 | 823 |
| 6 | Netflix | We Have A Ghost (2023) | 1 | 807 |
| 7 | Netflix | Cocomelon | 21 | 765 |
| 8 | Netflix | Perfect Match | 12 | 744 |
| 9 | Disney+ | Bluey | 114 | 736 |
| 10 | HBO Max | South Park | 309 | 687 |
Courtesy: Nielsen
To give context to just how bad this is, Outer banks nearly tripled The Mandalorian’s return to television. “We Have a Ghost”… a movie most people have probably never even heard of… nearly beat it. The Mandalorian lost in ratings to NCIS.
Diving into the statistics even more (and we recommend you do), we came to find that Black Panther: Wakanda Forever continues to drop precipitously on Disney+. Encanto and all other recent Disney animated movies are completely gone with only Moana remaining. HBO Max and other streaming services have largely overtaken Disney+ in terms of viewership for highest-watched content. Ultimately, things are unraveling for Disney in a way that the mainstream media seems not yet ready to report.
So it’s bad at the box office, it’s potentially worse now on streaming for the House of Mouse. That leaves Disney World and Disneyland, plus the cruises, as being the only really healthy parts of the company pulling it along while it literally falls apart in so many ways. It is, therefore, not surprising that job cuts have come, budgets are being frozen, and the company is probably going to have much harder times ahead beyond what we’re seeing. How long until they make a content course correction remains to be seen.
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