The two-hour finale of Stranger Things, released in the evening of New Year’s Eve, fueled Netflix to its most views ever on a New Year’s Day. The streamer would not reveal how many those views were but announced that the fifth season of the supernatural series delivered 31.5 million views for the week of Dec. 29, which included four full days and a few extra hours of viewing for the finale in addition to seven days for Episodes 1-7.
With all episodes factored in, Netflix has now put Stranger Things 5 on its Most Popular English TV list, with the season officially entering the Top 10 at No. 9 with 105.7 million total views.
How did the streamer come up with that number? It’s complicated. Netflix has unveiled a complex methodology for calculating views on split seasons. Consumption of each batch of episodes is measured over their first 91 days of release, with Stranger Things 5 Vol. 1 views not counted past Feb. 24, Vol. 2 past March 25 and the finale past March 31.
Making things even more convoluted, Netflix’s reported weekly views during each window of availability are calculated over the number of live episodes during that window: four from Nov. 26 through Dec. 24, seven from Dec. 25 through the evening of Dec. 31 and eight beyond that.
The most popular list calls for the entire viewing of a season to be divided by its full runtime. Because of the complex split season methodology, there is no way to verify the views Netflix puts up for Stranger Things 5 on the Most Popular list where Stranger Things 4 — another split-season entry — is currently at No.3.
A very simplistic calculation based on publicly released viewership information, which assumes four episodes for the first four weeks that include Stranger Things 5, seven for Week 5 and eight for Week 6, delivers an in-the-ballpark but inflated by overcounting season average of 119M views to date. Additionally, more than 1.1M fans watched the series finale of the Duffer Brothers hit series in theaters on Dec. 31 – Jan. 1.
Stranger Things 5, which topped the weekly Top 10 English TV list with 31.5M views, was once again joined by Season 1 at No. 3 (7.6 million views), Season 2 at No. 5 (5.5 million), Season 3 to No. 7 (5 million), and Season 4 to No. 8 (4.8 million), making this the sixth record-setting week that the series has had all its seasons on the list.
Elsewhere on the English TV Top 10, the latest Harlan Coben limited mystery series Run Away opened at No. 2 with 12.7 million views, Emily in Paris Season 5 was at No. 4 (7.4M) as the comedy earned a Season 6 renewal, and Ricky Gervais’s latest special, Mortality, debuted at No. 6 with 5.1 million views.
On the film side, Korean disaster movie The Great Flood again topped the non-English film list with 11.1 million views and, three weeks into its release, it also entered the Most Popular non-English film list at No. 7 with 72.1 million views.
