There is absolutely no stopping Stranger Things. The widely beloved sci-fi series returned to Netflix with the first part of its fourth season on May 27th and immediately took over the world of streaming. Everyone already knew Stranger Things was popular heading into Season 4, but the series is now breaking even more records with its latest batch of episodes. The opening weekend for Stranger Things 4 was even enough to top Obi-Wan Kenobi, the biggest original series in Disney+ history.
According to Nielsen, Stranger Things was viewed for a whopping 5.1 billion minutes in the first three days after Season 4 arrived on Netflix. That’s enough for the biggest streaming debut in more than two years. Obi-Wan Kenobi was also impressive, giving Disney+ its strongest-ever debut weekend, but fell way short of Stranger Things with one billion minutes.
Videos by ComicBook.com
It’s worth noting, however, that Obi-Wan Kenobi had significantly fewer episodes than Stranger Things. The new installment of Stranger Things alone came with seven episodes, not to mention the three previous seasons. Obi-Wan Kenobi debuted with just two episodes, both of which are shorter than most of the new Stranger Things entries. With the same number of episodes, that gap might have been a bit closer.
This season of Stranger Things wasn’t just the longest installment of the show to-date, it also featured a brand new villain that likely goes down as its most terrifying. Series producer and director Shawn Levy opened up to IGN about the creature known as Vecna, the frightening villain of Stranger Things 4.
“Season 4 required a villain unlike any before,” Levy said. “And it needed to be more than a creature, more than an evil cloud of particulate. It needed to be a humanoid villain with more depth, more dimension, and far more evil. That’s what Vecna is.”
At the Stranger Things 4 premiere, series star David Harbour offered some thoughts on what Vecna brings to the table in this new season. Like Levy, Harbour confirmed that the villain is much different than anything we’ve seen so far.
“Vecna is a psychological horror that I don’t think we’ve really seen,” Harbour told Variety. “The Upside Down has been this wild west world where there are creatures running around, there’s violence, but we’ve never seen something as calculatedly psychologically evil as this. That’s exciting because he is a true big bad that we’ve needed in the series.”
What did you think of the new season of Stranger Things? Let us know in the comments!
