The end of Stranger Things pushed the show into the pantheon of Netflix series, at least in terms of viewing totals.
With 31.3 million views worldwide (calculated as total viewing hours divided by running time) for the week of Dec. 29-Jan. 4, season five of Stranger Things joins the streamer’s 10 most watched English-language series ever. The final season stands at 105.7 million views, good for ninth place on the all time list (as measured over a show’s first 13 weeks of release).
Netflix users spent 325.6 million hours watching season five last week — not counting those who went to movie theaters to watch the final episode on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. The finale made an estimated $20 million to $25 million in revenue for theater chains over those two days.
The 31.3 million views for Stranger Things 5 on Netflix is actually a small dip from the previous week, when episodes five through seven of the season debuted. That’s due to the formula for calculating views — Netflix divides total hours watched by the run time of every episode of a season available that week. The finale increased season five’s run time by almost 26 percent, so although total viewing time went up by 14 percent week to week (from 284.8 million hours), that wasn’t enough to offset the increase in total run time.
Stranger Things 5 will also have a lot of time to climb Netflix’s all-time rankings. For those charts, the streamer counts viewing of a split season for 91 days after part of the season releases. In the case of Stranger Things, the first four episodes of season five (which premiered Nov. 26) will have their viewing tallied through Feb. 24. The meter for part two, released Dec. 25, will keep running through March 25, and views for the series finale will count through March 31.
As of publication time, Stranger Things 5 is just 300,000 views behind Bridgerton season three on the English-language top 10 all time and within 14 million views of fourth place (Wednesday season two with 119.3 million views).
