Netflix Co-CEO Credits Stranger Things for Helping Save Company’s Subscriber Base

Netflix’s second quarter 2022 earnings were released on Tuesday revealing that the streamer lost just shy of one million subscribers during the three-month period between April 1st and June 30th. It’s a staggering number, but better than the two million the streamer had projected to lose during that time. And when it comes to what helped stem the loss, Netflix credits Stranger Things with helping out. CEO Reed Hastings acknowledged that there were several titles that did well for the platform, but Stranger Things may be the single thing that tempered the loss.

“You know looking at the quarter, you know were executing really well on the content side obviously,” Hastings said. “Ozark, Stranger Things, lots of titles, lots of viewing. We’re improving everything we do around marketing, improving the service, the merchandising and you know all of that slowly pays off.”

He added, “If there was a single thing we might say Stranger Things but again we’re talking about you know losing 1 million instead of losing 2 million so you know our excitement is tempered by the less less bad results.”

Stranger Things Season 4 was a huge success for Netflix. Between both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, the series pulled in 1.27 billion hours viewed and given how popular the season was with viewers, it certainly does make sense that many subscribers may have stayed with Netflix just to see how the season wrapped up as well as how it sets up for the final season.

Interestingly, while Hastings credited Stranger Things with shoring up the subscriber numbers, Co-CEO and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos also said that the series had a significant financial impact thanks to the pandemic.

“That show, in particular, was affected as much as any [by COVID] because of the young cast, and the size and scope of the production, and multiple locations we shot it in. It was a very expensive burden to deliver it,” Sarandos explained. “One of the catalysts for splitting the season in half was how long it took to produce that show and a lot of that was stalled because of early shutdowns of the production, and restarting production, and being extremely careful with the cast of the show early on in COVID.”

Sarandos added, “So it was more financially impacted than a lot of our other projects were. If you did that again, you might even get a few extra episodes out of it.”

All nine episodes of Stranger Things Season 4 are now streaming on Netflix.