Stranger Things Season 5 has officially broken streaming records with its first installment, which has reportedly racked up billions of viewing minutes during its release on November 26th (Thanksgiving). According to Netflix’s reporting, Stranger Things Season 5 generated 8.46 billion viewing minutes (or 140 million viewing hours) over the extended weekend of Thanksgiving, not just setting a new record but a “new historic benchmark for streaming viewership,” according to the company press reports.
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Over the first week of its release (November 23rd – 30th), Stranger Things Season 5 racked up a total of 284.2M global viewing hours. That equates to 59.6M views of the four episodes that were released. For comparison: The new Tyler Sheridan (Yellowstone) series, Landman, on Paramount+, landed in second place for that same week, with 1,343 minutes viewed compared to Stranger Things 5’s 8,460 minutes viewed.
If nothing else, Netflix has all the reasons in the world to be confident (so far) about the massive investment in this final season of Stranger Things.
How Big of A Record Is Stranger Things 5 Setting?
Stranger Things Season 5’s viewership numbers reportedly shattered previous Nielsen records by over 1 billion minutes, meaning it now stands skyscraper-high above the other top streaming shows. That includes Stranger Things beating its own record of 7.2 billion minutes during the Memorial Day 2022 release of Season 4, which became a pop-culture phenomenon at the time.
Even more interesting: Season 5 of Stranger Things only accounted for 57% of the total viewing minutes (8.46 billion): the remaining 43% came from viewers rewatching older seasons of Stranger Things, as a lead-in to Season 5. Additionally, 59% of the viewer demographic came from the coveted adults 18-49 group, which was the largest percentage of engagement for that demo across all Top 10 movies and shows on Netflix that week.
Stranger Things 5 Will Break More Records Before It Ends
What’s wild about all this is that Stranger Things Season 5 is (literally) just getting started. Netflix has the finale of the show plotted out in three different installments: one released over Thanksgiving, a second over Christmas, and the final episode on New Year’s Eve.
After seeing the response during the Thanksgiving Day release window, it’s hard to doubt that the Christmas and finale episode releases will be exponentially bigger. There will be more people on break, and far more scrutiny on these pivotal final episodes. That espically true for many of the biggest twists and developments that are expected to be revealed in the second batch of episodes – the painful losses of major characters and a major increase in dire stakes that will make the finale episode a must-see event.
Stranger Things Season 5 streams exclusively on Netflix. Let us know what you think about it over on the ComicBook Forum!
