“Stranger Things” Season 5 had a record-breaking debut on Netflix.
In its first five days of streaming, the season achieved 59.6 million views. That’s the best premiere-week viewership an English-language Netflix series has ever achieved, and the third-best overall, coming behind only Seasons 2 and 3 of the Korean sci-fi series “Squid Game.”
This also marks a massive increase from the already sizable premiere viewership of “Stranger Things” Season 4. In 2022, the series opened with 287 million hours watched — back then, Netflix ranked viewership by stream time instead of views — which translates to about 22 million views. Therefore, Season 5’s debut represents an increase of about 171%, though it should be noted that that Season 5 had five days to rack up views, while the Season 4 tally was counted over three days.
Despite that the season just premiered, this is already the second viewership record brought about by Season 5. Last week, as anticipation built around the new release, all four previous seasons of “Stranger Things” made the Netflix Top 10 — the first time any series has had four different seasons on the chart. Nov. 24-30 marked the first time a series had five different seasons on the chart: Season 5 was No. 1, followed by Season 1 at No. 3 with 8.9 million views, Season 4 at No. 5 with 6.1 million views, Season 2 at No. 6 with 5.6 million views and Season 3 at No. 8 with 4.6 million views.
Netflix only released the first four episodes of Season 5 last week; another three episodes debut on Christmas Day with the series finale following on New Year’s Eve. So it can be expected that “Stranger Things” will remain on the chart for weeks if not months to come, and Season 5 can almost certainly be expected to end up on Netflix’s list of its most popular English-language TV titles of all time, where Season 4 ranks as No. 3 with 140.7 million views in its first 91 days.
Also of note on the Netflix Top 10 this week was Kevin Hart’s special “Acting My Age” debuting at No. 2 with 9.2 million views and the “Jingle Bell Heist” debuting at No. 1 on the movies chart with 19.3 million views.
See the Netflix Top 10 for Nov. 24-30 below, beginning with English-language TV and movies and followed by non-English-language shows and movies.
