Stranger Issues 4, the latest season of the hit present, simply turned the second Netflix present ever to surpass a billion hours seen. For the reason that first installment of the season dropped on Might twenty seventh, viewers have spent a cumulative 1.15 billion hours watching the season’s 9 episodes, together with 301 million hours simply this previous weekend. That makes Stranger Issues 4 the second most-watched Netflix season ever, after Squid Recreation in 2021. It was in Netflix’s Prime 10 in 93 totally different nations this weekend, the corporate says. The present is so standard proper now that it’s boosting the older seasons, too: all 4 Stranger Issues seasons have been in Netflix’s six most-watched reveals over the weekend, with solely The Umbrella Academy capable of sustain.
Netflix’s viewership measurement system is notoriously bizarre and complicated. The service tracks how a lot a present is seen within the first 28 days after its launch, however these numbers fluctuate broadly based mostly on how the episodes are launched, how lengthy they’re, and a bunch of different elements.
If something, you could possibly argue that Stranger Issues’ success simply underscores how big Squid Recreation actually was: Stranger Issues 4 is hours longer than Squid Recreation and had a months-long advertising technique behind it, and Squid Recreation nonetheless trumped it with 1.65 billion hours seen. Stranger Issues may nonetheless catch it, although; Netflix’s numbers will now not rely the primary batch of episodes, however the latest two nonetheless have a couple of weeks to select up viewer hours. These episodes are lengthy, too — like, long-movie lengthy — which supplies the present an excellent higher shot on the high spot. (Like I stated, the measurement is complicated.)
So that you shouldn’t learn an excessive amount of into the specifics apart from to say with nice confidence that the present season of Stranger Issues could be very standard. It’s additionally excellent, and units the present up for an enormous conclusion subsequent season. And it’s the sort of enduring franchise that Netflix has been determined to construct lately, so you need to anticipate the corporate to maintain pulling out all of the stops to make folks care about what occurs in Hawkins, Indiana.
So you’ll be able to solely assume that Stranger Issues 5 goes to be big.