The final two mega-episodes of Season 4 of Netflix’s Stranger Things earlier this month ended up giving the series the second-highest weekly viewing total ever in the relatively short history of Nielsen’s streaming ratings, the company said Thursday in releasing numbers for the week of June 27-July 3.
The two Season 4, Volume 2 episodes helped the series grow more than 150% week over week to 5.9 billion viewing minutes, Nielsen said. That helped it overtake Netflix sibling The Umbrella Academy which was No. 1 the week before. The 5.9 billion minutes is the No. 2 highest-viewed week ever, per Nielsen, since Stranger Things‘ Season 4 premiered the week of May 30 with 7.2 billion minutes viewed.
Netflix has the top five all-time weeks – No. 3 is Tiger King, No. 4 is Ozark (both from March 2020) and another interval of Stranger Things‘ Season 4 is at No 5. (Nielsen measures streaming only via a TV screen, meaning mobile is not counted, for Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max and Apple TV+.)
Stranger Things Season 4, meanwhile, currently counts 1.33 billion hours viewed (a different metric than Nielsen) on Netflix in its first 28 days. That’s the most ever for an English-language show on the streamer, with the Korean epic Squid Game No. 1 overall with 1.65B hours in its first 28 days.
Netflix has seven of the top 10 overall streaming titles for the week of June 27-July 3, the most recent numbers available. Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy (2.22B views) was still strong at No. 2, and Sing 2 was No. 3 with its second 1.3B-minutes week in a row.
Amazon had two titles in the top overall including the debut week for its Chris Pratt-starring series The Terminal List, No. 4 with 1.1B views. The other was The Boys, at No. 6 overall with 951 million minutes viewed. They were No. 3 and No. 4, respectively, in the Originals rankings, which included by Hulu’s double of Only Murders in the Building (526M) at No. 5 and new FX series The Bear (349M) at No. 9.
Netflix’s The Man From Toronto (952M minutes and Disney+’s second week of Doctor Strange 2 (620M minutes) joined Sing 2 to rep movies in the top 10 overall rankings.