We told you the Nielsen ratings were coming… and there they are.
In near-record time for Nielsen, we’re finding out that when it comes to “minutes watched” for the first weekend of a Stranger Things debut, Season 4 came out swinging big time. The show tallied more than 5.1 billion minutes watched, placing it as the third most-watched show of all time in its opening weekend. This lines up very well with Netflix’s announcement last week that Stranger Things Season 4 had the biggest English language twenty-four hour release in history with 286.7 million hours watched. It should be noted that Nielsen only tracks smart TVs, so the actual number of hours watched over the full weekend could be even higher.
Stranger Things Hours on Forbes
Meanwhile, when it comes to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the series fell far short of Stranger Things and it is clear some publications are trying to cover this up a bit. From Dade Hayes Deadline:
Obi-Wan, with shorter and fewer episodes, had a more subdued launch with about 1 billion minutes. Even so, its debut was the biggest ever for Disney+ and it also made history as the first non-film title to hit 1 billion minutes of viewing in its first week. (Marvel series Loki reached that threshold but only after a handful of episodes were in circulation.)
So there are a couple of issues here. First, there’s no reason that people shouldn’t have loved the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi and rewatched the episodes enough to bolster these stats. We clearly saw that with The Mandalorian Season 2 finale… and yes, that finale bested the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi combined with ease:
The latest numbers report from The Hollywood Reporter has indicated that Peyton Reed’s crowd-pleasing season finale, featuring an unexpected and entirely welcome appearance from Luke Skywalker in his prime, helped push The Mandalorian to become the most-watched streaming television series in the week that it premiered. Not only that, but it was the most-watched show period at 1.34 billion minutes streamed from the 16 episodes that have currently been released. — StarWars.net
Things get far worse for Obi-Wan Kenobi when we start really digging into the situation. For starters, Obi-Wan Kenobi launched with two episodes. If we compare its two-episode viewership to other Disney+ original content two-episode viewership, we find that there’s a significant decline. For example, Loki came in with 1.6 billion hours watched for its first two episodes. Obi-Wan Kenobi only picked up 1.1 billion hours. Given that Disney+ has far more subscribers today than when Loki premiered, that’s a steep drop.
Finally, the trades are protecting Obi-Wan Kenobi a bit more when they tow the company line that this is the biggest thing on Disney+ ever. That’s completely untrue. The biggest thing ever was Encanto, and not by a little. What the trades are failing to clarify is that they’re talking about “original content shows over a debut week when Disney+ has never released an original content show with two episodes.” That’s a heck of a caveat. So what was the biggest debut for Disney+ when Encanto debuted?
According to Nielsen, Encanto picked up a bonkers 2.2 billion minutes of streaming time on Disney+ towards the end of December.
— That Park Place
And guess what? Encanto has a shorter run time than the two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi combined.
In review, here are the objective truths you should know:
- Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 1 is the third biggest streaming show of all time.
- Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 1 earned over 5 billion watched hours in seven days.
- Obi-Wan Kenobi had about a fifth of those hours watched in seven days.
- Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 1 had roughly 1.5 million more viewers on smart televisions.
- The claims being made about Obi-Wan Kenobi breaking Disney+ records are misleading at best.
- Stranger Things clearly has more content to watch but there’s no reason Obi-Wan should be limited to single-time watch-thrus.
Finally, the news doesn’t get any better for Disney. The second part of Stranger Things’ season is coming and it’s a four-hour extravaganza. At that point, Stranger Things may be topping 8, 9, even 10 billion hours watched. Seriously. I don’t think it will top 10 billion, but it’s hard to understand how this isn’t going to be the biggest show of all time by the point of its finale.
Does that mean you must hate Obi-Wan Kenobi or that this website is intrinsically against the show? No. Absolutely, 100% no. But we’re not going to pretend that Obi-Wan Kenobi is on the same level as Stranger Things or Top Gun Maveric, and we’re not going to pretend that Disney is telling the truth about this. Obi-Wan Kenobi is, so far, less popular than Loki but probably watched more than The Book of Boba Fett. And while we know that Stranger Things is about to blow up huge and real records for streaming, the future is not so clear for Obi-Wan Kenobi. That’s not because we hate it or we’re out to get it… it’s because the audience score is far different than Stranger Things.
This may be hard for some to understand. The idea that Star Wars is this far diminished is difficult for some to accept. Our job at this site is now to accurately portray how this is likely to impact Star Wars and Lucasfilm. All I can tell you is that coming in with far less than half of your main competitor is probably not how Lucasfilm is going to succeed. Maybe they should have released half the season, right? Maybe it should have been better? Maybe it shouldn’t have been divisive? I don’t know what the answer might be in your opinion, but I can tell you that there’s no way around coming in lower than Stranger Things, lower than Loki, lower than Encanto… it’s not a winning hand. Because when it’s time to go to the advertisers to pitch your price points, they don’t care about anything except the hours watched. And that not-a-winning-hand is about to be repeated come July. Maybe it will be worse.
For all the latest news that should be fun, keep reading That Park Place! As always, drop a comment down below.
Update 8:43 PM EST, 6/6/22
According to an industry expert I spoke with, the numbers from Nielsen may be quite confusing the way they’re presented in the trades. Even though the numbers are provided for a seven-day tally, Nielsen only measures on a less-than-seven system. I will be consulting with the expert later tonight for clarification and will update in the morning as needed.
Update 10:00 AM EST 6/7/22
Resolved an error for runtime of Stranger Things. Huge thanks to Kevin for pointing out the error!
