“Stranger Things” is closing out its five-season run with one ratings bang after another. The second batch of episodes of the final season just added strong viewership to the show’s already impressive audience.
As “Stranger Things” debuted Season 5, Volume 2 on Christmas Day, the installment logged 34.5 million views during the week of Dec. 22. The overall figure to date includes viewership of the initial Volume 1 drop in late November, which included the first four episodes of the season, as well as the Volume 2 release on Christmas Day, which saw the debut of the next three episodes. The Volume 2 drop helped drive Netflix’s most-watched Christmas Day ever, working in conjunction with the streamer’s two NFL Christmas Day Games.
As expected, “Stranger Things” Season 5 was the most-watched English-language TV show of the week, though, like previous weeks since the initial Season 5 debut, all previous seasons of “Stranger Things” appeared in the week’s top 10 TV list. Season 1 scored the No. 5 spot with 4.8 million views, Season 2 took the No. 9 spot with 3.6 million views, Season 3 scored the eighth spot with 3.6 million views and Season 4 landed at No. 6 with 4.1 million views.
The grand finale of “Stranger Things” will hit both Netflix as well as theaters on New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31 at 5 p.m. PT.
The first drop of “Stranger Things” Season 5, which released on Nov. 26, the day before Thanksgiving, debuted to whopping 59.6 million views in its first five days on Netflix, marking the biggest premiere week for an English-language show in the streamer’s history. Viewership naturally fell in the following weeks, but Season 5, as well as all previous “Stranger Things” seasons remained in the streamer’s top 10 TV list leading up to the Volume 2 drop.
Given that Netflix calculates views by dividing hours viewed over runtime, the Volume 1 debut was always going to have a higher view count than Volume 2, whose hours viewed is divided by the total seven installments out so far rather than the first four episodes for Volume 1. The season’s viewership will start tallying toward the streamer’s most popular TV shows list after the release of the series finale on Wednesday.
The Season 5 debut also propelled broadway show “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” to have a record-breaking $2.5 million week at the Broadway box office over Christmas.
Outside of “Stranger Things,” “Emily in Paris” Season 5 landed at No. 2 in the TV list for the week with 13.3 million views. Dave Chappelle’s latest standup special “The Unstopabble” got third place with 9.2 million views.
For movies, “The Great Flood” once again dominated the non-English film list with 33.1 million views, while “Wake Up Dead Man” landed in the No. 2 spot in the English list with 11.8 million views, bested only by “Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch.”
