After almost three years worth of wait, Eleven and her band of posies are back with an all-new season of Stranger Things. And while the penultimate season has been garnering rave reviews from critics and audiences alike, it’s also been quietly breaking records at the Netflix office.
As per the streaming giant, the drama has scored an impressive viewership by setting up the biggest-ever premiere record for an English-language series. The title was previously held by Season 2 of Bridgerton.
But that’s not it. The show also climbed into Netflix’s top 10 rankings by attracting over 287 million hours of viewership from May 23-30th, before landing on the top spot. What’s more impressive is this was achieved in a span of just three days, ever since its debut on Friday.
Over the years, Netflix has also changed the way it counts views. For instance, back in October 2019, the OTT platform announced that Stranger Things 3 was the site’s most-watched season to date, with 64 million views. However, the streaming platform was still counting a ‘view of a title after seeing at least 70 percent of the episode. This was later revised to two minutes of the show or the movie. Now, Netflix calculates viewership based on the total hours watched.
This plays into Season 4’s unusually long episodes. For example, the shortest episode in the season is 63-minutes long. While episode 7 clocks in at almost 98-minutes. Part 2 of the fourth season is rumoured to be around 2.5 hours, being spread across two episodes.
The Duffer Brothers’ series has become a flagship of the OTT platform ever since its debut in 2016. It also introduced us to talent such as Millie Bobby Brown, who’s gone on to star in multiple television Hollywood projects. Additionally, we were also introduced to other star casts of Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin.
Netflix has already renewed Stranger Things for its fifth and final season, which could arrive sometime next year. For now, the second part of season 4, which will consist of two episodes, will premiere on July 1st.
( Image credits: Netflix )
