Borat 2 Reportedly Drew More Viewers Than Disney's Mulan On Its Opening Weekend

The Borat sequel, officially title Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, was watch by an estimated 1.6 million U.S. households in its opening weekend. Such a number puts Sacha Baron Cohen's film ahead of Disney's Mulan in terms of total viewers, according to Samba TV. Mulan was watched by 1.12 million households via the Disney+ streaming service over its opening weekend according to the same metrics. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm had the advantage of being free for Amazon Prime Video subscribers while Mulan was only available at an additional cost for Disney+ subscribers.

Mulan, at launch and still today, cost $30 to watch on top of a Disney+ subscription. Borat 2 was quietly developed and quickly released, including a surprise drop on Thursday night during the final Presidential debate. The Thursday night release did not seem to boost the views for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm as most of the audience was built during the weekend. Buzz for the film took social media by storm ahead of its release as a sequence involving Rudy Giuliani stirred up a massive controversy.

The figures for both Mulan and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm might not be exactly on the mark. Samba TV pulls together ratings estimates by polling 3.4 million U.S. households and using this data to create a representative of the total households. It also only tracks viewer data on internet-connected televisions. It does not track views on mobile devices or web browsers. For a viewer to count, they have to have watched at least a cumulative 5 minutes of the title. Samba TV collects its viewership data through a proprietary automatic content recognition (ACR) technology which some smart TV users have opted to allow. It tracks viewing by "listening" for which content is being watched on the smart TVs.

Nearly half of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm's viewers watched the movie on Friday night alone, with 48% of the total coming on the October 23 scheduled release date.

(First reported by Variety)